By Mary Morrell
Never forget what is worth remembering
“My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me. Hark, the cry of the daughter of my people from the length and breadth of the land: ‘Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?’”
~Jeremiah 8.18
Throughout the years living with an Irish father, I had the chance to hear many an Irish blessing. He was fond of using them for little lessons, and would often repeat, over a cup of hot tea and a warm piece of apple pie, “May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten.”
For my father, as a story-teller, even the simplest memories — like finding a robin’s nest in a plastic Chinese lantern — were worth storing for the future. Life, after all, was beautiful and worth remembering.
I listened to my father’s stories and his lessons and found that, over time, this particular Irish blessing began to take on new meaning for me, especially when I began to visit patients who were spending their dying days in a nursing home.
It was here that I learned the often repeated lesson that life can be as difficult as it is beautiful.
We learn, during our earthly journey, that there exist many crosses of various sizes, some heavier than others, and any one or more of them could be — will be — ours.
But there is one cross that is certainly among the heaviest of all — the belief that we are forgotten.
I learned it from personal experience, and I learned it again from a friend — aged, alone, infirm, fearful, lonely and a beautiful child of God. On a particularly bad day she called to talk and her words will never leave my heart: “This is not living,” she said. “And if it is, I would rather die.”
She was living a forgotten life — one that was acutely empty and painful. For her, as for anyone who suffers from such loneliness, the pain is made worse, not simply by the absence of human love but more so by what that represents. When we have been forgotten by family and friends alike it is not hard to believe that God has forgotten us, too.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote powerfully of that experience: “There is no human misery more strongly felt than the state of being forsaken by God. Nothing is so terrible as rejection by Him. It is a horror to live deserted by God and effaced from His mind.” His words bring to mind the pleading, pain-filled words of Christ as he hung dying on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
How often have we felt the need to speak the same words? How often and how deeply does the wound of loneliness rupture our hearts? In these moments of pain it is easy to believe that God has lost sight of what we believe to be our insignificant lives, but Heschel would not agree.
This deeply spiritual and prayerful man of God wrote of “Divine pathos,” the grief and suffering of God with God’s children and God’s creation when they are in pain. Anyone who has ever loved knows that this kind of suffering can only flow from love, for without love there can be no grief. The deeper the love, the more profound the grief.
It is comforting to believe that God knows our pain, feels our pain and holds our hearts and souls in the passionate embrace of divine love. It is from such an embrace that we are able to renew our strength and overcome our loneliness, if only long enough to be God “with flesh on” for people like my dear, lonely friend.
Even in the midst of our own pain, and sometimes because of it, we are all called to put God’s love into life because every life is worth remembering.
How well we do that is up to us, but “forgotten” should never be the last feeling to fill anyone’s heart.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law