Memoria Futuri: Living our Faith Forward

Jeff McLeod - Memoria futuri

\"Jeff

What a year it has been!  And now, as the Year of Faith draws to a close, our inclination is to wonder how our efforts will fare. This occurs in our personal life as well. Knowing we are spiritually transformed by faith, the question arises, what can we do, individually and collectively, to animate or energize this faith going forward?

Faith – From the General to the Particular

An unfamiliar phrase, memoria futuri  (“memory of the future”), appears in the encyclical Lumen Fidei. There it refers to the hope of Abraham whose dreams for the future are founded on the concrete reality of the covenant God has made with him. He can to some extent envision history, both his own and that of his descendants.

Memoria futuri is our responsibility to “think out” the mystery of faith, to flesh it out into the future with all of future’s jagged edges, twists and turns, joys and sorrows.

Many of us have a difficult time with the transition from ideal to actuality, from the general to the particular, from present to future. Our books and movies insist on dropping the curtain at the moment of attainment. The prize fighter wins the championship. The boy and girl fall in love. The credits roll. While this is good dramatic form, it is terrible existential form. What happens after the prize fighter wins the championship?  What happens after the boy and girl fall in love and get married?  Do the characters remain frozen in time, fossilized as “The Prize Fighter” and the “Epic Couple?”

We tend to think that heroes might be better off frozen in their epic state. We are comforted in fact by the image. It is happier for us to hold our situation in the abstract, and to prevent it from being articulated into the messiness of the real world, than to work it out into the future. This is more than just a metaphor.  It is indeed a hideous reality that many of our celebrities go through a macabre charade in which they attempt to preserve their faces and their bodies through surgery and chemical treatments, as if re-living a certain moment in time infinitely rather than accepting the humility of aging.

What is wrong with us?

Granted, there are all kinds of psychological reasons for preferring ourselves to be preserved just so, but a fossilized life is a kind of death; and worse than that, it is a form of annihilation, a ceasing-to-be.  Soren Kierkegaard describes this tragic syndrome in one of his psychological investigations called Repetition, where he analyzes the inability of a certain young man to live out the newly found love between him and his girlfriend. Tragically, the boy could not get past the mere idea of falling in love. The boy’s fatal self-deception was that “he did not still love her, because he only longed for her.” He did not have the fortitude to take the step from poet to man.

\"Søren Søren Kierkegaard,
existentialist philosopher

In the very act of falling in love without the required capacity for projecting this love creatively and concretely into the future (memoria futuri ), this particular boy effectively poeticized himself out of existence. “His mistake was that he stood at the end instead of the beginning, but such a mistake is and remains a person’s downfall.” The thrill of not possessing her gave him a perverse satisfaction, whereas had he found the capacity to love her into the future, his marriage would have grown like a mustard plant into a new and never-before articulated object of beauty. He wanted it to remain a seed.

What he should have done, had the boy achieved a degree of self-possession and maturity, was to actively and consciously accept the gift and make it new every day for the rest of his life. Not in mere repetition, mechanical and effortless, without sacrifice, and without inwardness, but precisely in dedicating his full attention, will, and intellect toward every small act of kindness and consideration for his wife every day. When the county fair comes along, he loves his wife in some particular way involving the county fair. Maybe he introduces her to an exhibit she would like. When a child is born, he loves his wife through his care and attention to the child. In sickness, he is present, attentive, and kind, right up to the time of her death. Our Hollywood movies, with some notable exceptions, in general don’t talk about such things, because they require courage which is in short supply. The people who live these heroic lives are rarely honored publicly, rarely thanked, but the Church recognizes them as fulfilling the call to sanctity.

Faith – Don’t Be Merely Hearers of the Word

Similarly, as we close out the year of faith, are we to remain “Men and Women of Faith,” frozen in an ideal moment, spending our days reflecting on “faith in the abstract” without the capacity to see the world in a fresh and personal way through the eyes of faith? God wants the world to be seen though those eyes, and he wants it to be transformed by the power of that vision. It is why we are here.

I have recently come to appreciate more deeply the admonition found in the Epistle of James,

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” (James 1:22).

\"Pope Pope Francis Year of Faith

What would we do tomorrow if we truly accepted with certainty what is revealed in the light of faith? We would avail ourselves of the Sacraments with greater attention and intelligence. We might strive for a more far-reaching examination of conscience in penance. Perhaps we would read the Scriptures and think deeply about them before Mass every Sunday. We would love our neighbor and help build the culture of encounter the Holy Father talks so earnestly about.

As the Holy Father taught, these insights and this transformation are related to what we Catholics mean by the theological gift of Hope. It is a confident possession of a promise made to us, and a willing commitment  to live out the details of that promise, come what may. Our certainty gives us the resilience and courage to face all obstacles, because we know that our efforts are ultimately justified by the seed of faith that has already been placed in us “in embryo” so to speak. This is in part what we mean when we say that “faith is the substance of things hoped for.”

Mr. Kierkegaard chose what he considered to be the perfect word for this idea of living one’s faith forward when he chose the Danish word for “repetition” as the title of his book, preferring it over the Greek term kinesis. I must disagree with the master. Maybe it is because I am a child of the modern technological age, but I love the idea of this acquired ability to live out our faith in every present moment, making it new in everything we do, as living a kinetic faith.

Shall we get to work?

© 2013 Jeff McLeod.  All rights reserved.

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5 thoughts on “Memoria Futuri: Living our Faith Forward”

  1. I love this. Thank you so much for writing it!

    We tend to think that heroes might be better off frozen in their epic state. We are comforted in fact by the image.

    Bernard Toutounji at Ignitum Today wrote something that relates very much to what you’ve written here: that we’re more bent on capturing moments– usually on our cameras– than living them. It’s only in living them that we are opened up to life in a more coherent fashion with all that we’ve been given. Another thing that springs to mind in terms of what you’ve written and the Toutounji piece is the Apple iPhone 5 ad– complete with iCloud– that insists on how “I have the right to be unlimited.” But is “unlimited” the same as immortal? Moreover, the images of our lives– usually the best snapshots— that we are bent on capturing rather obscure the Imago Dei.

    Maybe it is because I am a child of the modern technological age, but I love the idea of this acquired ability to live out our faith in every present moment, making it new in everything we do, as living a kinetic faith.

    Or maybe this is the logic of the Incarnation– God having entered history as a corporeal reality as well as Divinity at a specific time and a specific place– that the question of modern technology actually begs?

    Moreover, the acquired ability to live out our faith in every present moment, making it new in everything we do, is what makes it more concrete: in order that God accomplishes anything through us, the scope of which we don’t presume to know, there’s something about noticing what He’s accomplishing in us when we realize that we aren’t the people we used to be. We learn to see differently for having let Him teach us and enable us.

    Not in mere repetition, mechanical and effortless, without sacrifice, and without inwardness, but precisely in dedicating his full attention, will, and intellect toward every small act of kindness and consideration for his wife every day.

    I think you’ve also just described how to more effectively pray the Rosary, and how it is not “meaningless repetition” when prayed with all of one’s self, and when its rhythm ultimately forms the warp and woof of one’s life for what it enables.

    1. WSquared you are totally getting my thought.

      My piece is about the incarnation in its deepest, maybe “non-obvious” implications. This has been my obsession for many years, and yet somehow you heard it in my little meditation. I am grateful.

      I suppose I could come right out and write “hey this is about the incarnation” but then my piece would be like an army field manual. Good in its place but not what I want to do. I want to write meditations that might come back and hit the reader 2 years from now. I write ideas that are meant to marinate for a long time because that’s really all I know how to do.

      It means so much to me that you like this.

      And the Rosary as well: One has to be tactful and gracious in teaching that the Rosary is not a magical form of repetition, it involves inwardness. I pray the Rosary all the time, and I am always drawn inward. I think somebody could come and serve me scrambled eggs while I pray the Rosary and I wouldn’t notice them. The Rosary is the polar opposite of the “vain repetition” that our Protestant brothers and sisters warn against.

      Our Blessed Mother is so good to us. She too is our model of incarnated faith.

      Thank you so much for you thoughtful comments.

  2. Pingback: The Truth About the Homosexual Rights Movement - BigPulpit.com

    1. Diane, you are a master, I thank you so much for turning my hieroglyphic into a beautiful multimedia presentation.

      Thank you for your kind words too.

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