Memory & liturgy

I think I missed this discussion in seminary, or I didn't get it - because somewhere way back in my mind there is the "memory" that we did cover this in a Sacramental Theology class. But I love this! It's from Great Lent, by Alexander Schmemann. (Italics are his)

"What then is the meaning of the liturgical today by which the Church inaugurates all her celebrations? In what sense are past events celebrated today?

"One can say without exaggeration that the whole life of the Church is one continuous commemoration and remembrance. At the end of each service we refer to the saints "whose memory we celebrate," but behind all memories, the Church is the remembrance of Christ. From a purely natural point of view, memory is an ambiguous faculty. Thus to remember someone whom we love and whom we lost means two things. On the one hand memory is much more than mere knowledge of the past. When I remember my late father, I see him; he is present in my memory not as a sum total of all that I know about him but in all his living reality. Yet, on the other hand, it is this very presence that makes me feel acutely that he is no longer here, that never again in this world and in this life shall I touch this hand which I so vividly see in my memory. Memory is thus the most wonderful and at the same time the most tragic of all human faculties, for nothing reveals better the broken nature of our life, the impossibility for man truly to keep, truly to possess anything in this world. Memory reveals to us that "time and death reign on earth." But it is precisely because of this uniquely human function of memory that Christianity is also centered on it, for it consists primarily in remembering one Man, one Event, one Night, in the depth and darkness of which we were told: "... do this in remembrance of me." And lo, the miracle takes place! We remember Him and He is here - not as a nostalgic image of the past, not as a sad "never more," but with such intensity of presence that the Church can eternally repeat what the disciples said after Emmaus: "... did not our hearts burn within us?" (Luke 24:32).

"Natural memory is first of all a "presence of the absent," so that the more he whom we remember is present, the more acute is the pain of his absence. But in Christ, memory has become again the power to fill the time broken by sin and death, by hatred and forgetfulness. And it is this new memory as power over time and its brokenness which is at the heart of the liturgical celbration, of the liturgical today..." (pp. 81-82)