Home, God’s Living Memory (Wisdom of Solomon 2; Revelation 1)

‘For wisdom is a loving spirit; and will not acquit a blasphemer of his words: for God is witness of his reins, and a true beholder of his heart, and a hearer of his tongue. For the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world: and that which containeth all things hath knowledge of the voice… Therefore he that speaketh unrighteous things cannot be hid: neither shall vengeance, when it is punisheth, pass by him. For inquisition shall be made into the counsels of the ungodly: and the sound of his words shall come unto the Lord for the manifestation of his wicked deeds.’
 
There is so much talk about the need of ‘home’, being at home in our lives, today. Writers (the observers and chroniclers of their lives) are particularly sensitive to leaving their original ‘homeland’ behind, and trying to re-establish a rooted identity in their new surroundings.
 
The Christian experience adds something vital to this discussion. Regardless what our understanding of ‘home’ is, what our actual experience about it is, we relate to this home in a special way. Namely, there is a lasting, living imprint of our ephemeral earthly existence - that has been stored in the memory of the world. Actually, we remain present in God’s memory.
 
Christian existential wisdom goes even further. If we are not marked by a genuine yearning for our True Home (God), we will be marked by the forces of fragmentation. This yearning is, paradoxically, our lasting experience of a ‘home’. Without this yearning, we are exposed naked in the shower of arrows of forgetting. Love is our everlasting memory.
 
‘Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father…Behold, he cometh with coulds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him… I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last… Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore., Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.’
 
The Book of Revelation can be read as a vision of God’s Living Memory. This memory judges and makes us alive or leaves us in our spiritual death. ‘Fear not’, it says, you have kept alive the sense of ‘Home’ through the yearning of your faith.
 
This yearning for home, actually, is a good definition of the very special form of prayer, the Eucharistic Adoration. Besides its meaning in Sacramental tradition (The Resurrected Lord personally present under the sign of bread, in the consecrated host), the ‘silence’ of adoring Christ is the most significant meaning. The ‘silent interaction’ between the soul and Jesus is our archetypal confession. We yearn for a home. This desire for permanence is stronger than all the forces of fragmentation and uprooting with which we are necessarily marked in this ‘global’ world coming from nowhere and going nowhere.
 
27.11.2017