E&W 4-14-13

Sacred Story

Encouragements & Wisdom: April 14, 2013

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Encouragements and Wisdom: April 14, 2013 (PDF).

E & W reflections are additional helps for your Sacred Story prayer journey. Reflect on them at the beginning of the week or outside of your fifteen-minute prayer windows.

Memory

In his majestic Book X of The Confessions, St. Augustine affirms that everything we have ever done is held in our memory. Augustine uses the classical understanding that memories are held in our five senses: vision, touch, smell, taste and hearing. The Latin word veritas is commonly translated as our English word “truth.” But one of the Greek words commonly used for the Latin veritas is aletheia. It means that which is “unconcealed” or perhaps, that which is unforgotten. Yet we experience, like Augustine, that our remembering can be quite faulty. So how can we discern what is true in things unforgotten?

Perhaps we can again look to Augustine, who concludes that God is not in our memory as a piece of data. God is there by an act of making Himself known to our human nature. As God willed human nature to be a fusion of body and spirit, God also wills that we be capable of experiencing and perceiving the Divinity within us. So even in our imperfect remembering, it will be God who will enable us to sort out the true from the false in those memories. And it is God who reveals the truth to us that compels us to make our own confession of faith.
 
 

Oh God, we ask you to enlighten the eyes of our minds, so that we can discern the true from the false in our great storehouse of memories. We pray that we can find you and your Son, Jesus, in our human experience. Help us to do this so that all our thoughts, words and deeds reveal your Creation, Presence, Memory, Mercy and Eternity.

Sing praise to the LORD, you his faithful ones,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger lasts but a moment;
a lifetime, his good will.
At nightfall, weeping enters in,
but with the dawn, rejoicing.

(Psalm 30: 11-12)

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