Sights, smells and memories

Sights, smells and memories.

I was cutting up a large orange for one of the grandchildren. As I did so making four quarters the memory of half time oranges came flooding back. All those football matches for the school team and oranges at half time. Just cutting one open and suddenly I was there. Winning or losing, gashes on the shins, energy consumed in a healthy way, coach trips to all the various schools we played against in Lincolnshire. The cutting and the smell took me back over 48 years ago.

In trying to help reduce our cholesterol we are eating more porridge for breakfast. As I tuck into a bowl I’m suddenly back on Iona where every morning started with a bowl of warming and sustaining porridge. Conversations with diverse people, long walks in solitude, groups taken to gain new insights. The smell, the taste, the stirring and I’m no longer in my home but hundreds of miles away on a very tiny but special island.

Walking into the garden early morning there is smell of freshness that reminds me of mornings at campsites. With it comes the reliving of holidays with the girls as youngsters, body boarding on the waves, barbecues with marshmallows at the end, and the sense of freedom not needing all the possessions we clutter our lives with. Its like you cannot just smell the air you almost taste it.

Our memory is an amazing thing. That capacity to bring into the present things that happened many years ago. To relive it as if it’s happening now. Of course its a retelling which can have a bias even if we don’t care to admit it. We put a spin on it and kind of reimagine it. Yet it is part of our story which one day will come to an end and with it the memories will disappear. Though some stories continue, daughters telling their children of their camping holidays, and in the telling the memory is relived with no doubt a bit of spin.

When bread is broken and wine is poured at a communion service we relive, re-enact a memory of others. With it a story is told which informs us and influences us. It becomes part of our story and new memories are created around it which informs what this breaking bread means for us now. 

If we can understand how a story is told, adapted over time, why do so many struggle to allow the scriptures to have that same vitality. Listening to some American Christians and some in the churches in the UK they want in their literalist reading of scripture to impose their will upon it. ‘The story’ and stories told in the Old Testament and New Testament can if allowed have a vitality which can speak to our own situations. The way the various writers allowed God to allow them to reimagine God down the centuries, means it can still teach us about faith. The focus of the Bible is not the bible however, and herein lies the trap. Literalists make the Bible the focus of worship and miss the point that it always points away from itself to that which we call God. It positively encourages us to reimagine God so we can speak of God today, and that becomes part of the biblical story too. It might not appear on the pages, but it is part of the story we tell as the memory is retold, relived and reimagined.

Once I’m dead my memories of playing football will disappear though there are some photos to show I did. But our corporate, community memory of that we call God, continues from generation to generation.

God

its great 

that we don’t have you taped

otherwise

you wouldn’t be God

and where would the fun be in that?

The years pass

I know more about you

but in fact 

know less.

My circle of knowing enlarges

but my circumference of unknowing grows.

But it is exciting

that you chose 

to invite everyone 

into the Trinity.

That you are to be discovered

in the relationship

in the in-between.

the place where 

Love flows from one to the other.

While my memories 

may end one day

your memory of me

does not

and in some way

not neat and tidy

I will become 

part of you

the one

who gave me life.

© Mark Goodhand.18th July 2024