Precious Memories

The topic of my meditation a few days ago was living in the present. Nothing new there! What it went on to say however was that being in the present didn’t mean forgetting the precious memories we have of the past or giving up our dreams for the future, only that we don’t dwell on them.

We all have precious memories that define who we are today . Memories, that we might have shared with others - or not, that mark a pivotal point in how we understand and relate to the world. Often they are little things that would seem trivial or of little consequence to others, but they live on in our memory years, even decades after the event. If someone was to write a story about our life, who we really are, and how we got to this point, these memories would have to be part of it. A number of them would probably involve ‘thin places’ , those places where the everyday world and the spiritual world intersect for just a moment, those moments when you feel especially close to what Paul Tillich calls ‘the ground of all being’.

And I wonder if that isn’t just what the gospel writers did when they were writing 4, 5, 6 and more decades after the death of Jesus. Their writings are based on what they had heard and read about this man. Could they in fact be including some of their own precious moments, things that had spoken to them from what they had heard and read? I wonder? It makes reading the gospels a lot more personal if what is in them also tells us something about the writer, just as our ’precious moments’ tell us something abut ourselves.

The story of the loaves and fishes was obviously a ‘precious moment’, as it appears in all three of the synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. While there are minor variations such as to when it occurred in Jesus’ ministry , how big the crowd was, etc., it is obviously the same story. What was it about this story that it was picked by three of the gospel writers as a ‘precious moment’?? Was it that there was enough for all, with some left over, even against all logical reasoning? I know that one of my ‘precious moments’ involves exactly that; when for no apparent or logical reason there was enough and more to meet the need.

It is an interesting exercise to take those ‘precious moments’ in our lives and see if there is a ‘precious moment’ in the story of the Gospels that links up to it. Try it sometime and you might be amazed at the insight it will give you not only into the gospels but also into your own life experiences.

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