Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
I'm afraid I have three sermons to preach this morning, so I'll try to make them short.
First, today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter we hear one or another passage from John’s Gospel and the beautiful collect or prayer reminding us that Jesus is the Good Shepherd of God's people. Truthfully, however, I know little, if anything, about sheep or shepherds. I worked one summer on a dairy farm, but it turns out that cows are rather different than sheep. And many years ago, I spent several weeks in New Zealand where it is said that there are four million people and forty million sheep. That struck me as just about the right ratio. But beyond that I have nothing to say except that we all need to be guided and protected, and in Christ Jesus God is both that director and defender.
Second, today is Mother's Day…and I know a little bit more about mothers than I do about sheep or shepherds. In fact, we all know something about mothers and mothering and nurturing even if we are not mothers in the literal sense of the term. Some years ago, I was preaching on Mother's Day and the first lesson from the Acts of the Apostles was about the Ethiopian eunuch. Later that day I was talking to my sister and mentioned this and said how odd it was that we should have a reading about a eunuch on Mother's Day. She paused for a moment and then said: “He had a mother too.” We all have a mother, whether we knew her or not, whether she was a ‘good’ mother or not, whether we had her for only a few hours or for many decades. Some of us here today are in fact mothers, whether our offspring are living or departed this life. And we honor you today. Your mothering is an embodied symbol of the nurturing and sustaining love of God. It reminds us that God is as much mother as father, as Lady Julian of Norwich and others have taught us. So happy Mother's Day to you all who are mothers. And happy Mother's Day to those of us who are the offspring of a mother, which is all of us. However complex, we like that eunuch each had a mother, and we hold her now, living or departed, in our prayers.
My third sermon for this morning has to do with memory and memorization. Memory is a central feature of the spiritual life, at least as we have received it and practice it in the Western faith traditions. So much of the Jewish roots of our lineage revolve around remembering a history, factual or somewhat fanciful, and passing on that memory to those who come after us. It is a memory of creation and of waywardness, of enslavement and deliverance, of folly and wisdom, of getting lost and of being found again and again. In our Christian message we are reminded and urged to remember who we are and whose we are, never forgetting the great love of God who has brought us, and continues to bring us, to newness of life. Our very act of worship here this morning in this Eucharist is summarized at the pivotal point of our liturgy when we hear once again the words of our Lord: Do this in memory of me. Do this as a remembrance. Do not forget.
Memory is strange and complex and rarely straightforward. But it is necessary. It is one of our central faculties, as the medieval philosophers called it, one of the central capabilities that makes us human. Yes, we can distort our memories, we can even remember things that never happened, but this doesn't lessen the fact that memory is important. We know how tragic the loss of memory is to those afflicted with neurological disorders such as dementia. Perhaps it's not an accident that for decades it was the practice in this monastery for each brother, upon entering the Chapel in the morning, to kneel and pray the Suscipe, a prayer that begins: "Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my whole will. All that I am and all that I have, Thou hast given me; and I now give it back to Thee, to be disposed of according to Thy good pleasure.” Our memory, our understanding, our will-- along with our emotions and our entire embodied being—are great gifts of the Creator and need to be nurtured and guided and used.
And one of the ways that our memory can be nurtured is through memorization. In his book Why We Remember (NY: Random House, 2024) the neuroscientist Charan Ranganath makes the point that the mind is more than memorization. He says: “The human brain is not a memorization machine; it is a thinking machine.” True. But memorization is one of the tools that can help us to think in the broadest sense of that term to enter deeply into realities both scientific and spiritual, and to use our whole brain and our whole person.
I am thinking of memorizing today because of the psalm appointed for today which is the 23rd Psalm. Many of you probably know it verbatim. Somewhere along the way I memorized it in the King James Version: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul….” And because I have it memorized, it's available to me at a deep level which I can revisit and explore, as it were, new levels of meaning. There is a kind of muscular memory or embodied consciousness in memorized texts which reaches beyond reading or listening and beyond ordinary linear thinking or rationality. Perhaps it was for this reason, and not just because manuscripts were expensive and in short supply, that early monastics were expected to memorize at least the entire psalter, all 150 psalms.
There has been something of a revival of memorization. My old friend Jay Parini, a scholar and author and expert on Robert Frost recently published a book titled Robert Frost. Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart (Library of America, 2024). He notes: “….memorization makes a poem part of our inner lives. Once committed to memory a poem is available to us for recall at any time--and the occasions for remembering it will make themselves known to us. It isn't something we have to work at.” And last week the New York Times initiated a weeklong series of articles titled The Poetry Challenge which aimed to lead the reader into memorizing a poem by the early 20th century poet Edna Saint Vincent Mallay. I must confess I haven't had much success with memorizing either Robert Frost or the poem by Mallay, but I hasten to add that as an adolescent I did memorize a poem by her that began with these words: “Listen children, your father is dead.” I know that sounds grim, but it was an amazing poem. And it still lives in me. I’m sure every brother here can attest that the constant exposure to the Scriptures results eventually in a place where an image or phrase or passage from our sacred texts appears within us as if by magic and at just the right time. And as my friend Jay says, without our having to work at it.
So my third sermon this morning is simply an invitation to you and to me to develop our memory through memorization. Yes, it can be a poem by Robert Frost or TS Eliot. It can be a Psalm or the Beatitudes or some other passage of Scripture. All of you already know some of them beginning with the Lord's Prayer. It can even be doggerel. In addition to memorizing Milton’s “On his Blindness” and Poe’s “The Raven” (parts of it now sadly lost) and several soliloquies from Shakespeare, I glory in and enjoy reciting a poem from Mad Magazine circa 1957 that began: ‘I think that I shall never hear a poem as lovely as a beer.” I'll spare you the rest. See me later if you’d like to hear more.
“Remember your creator in the days of your youth,” says Ecclesiastes. “Do this in memory of me,” says our Lord. And above all, remember to call your mother today if she's still around. And, whether alive or departed, let's offer a prayer for her wherever she may be. Perhaps the Hail Mail?
Amen.
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