The Christian Life Is a Memory of Who Will Come

1st Sunday of Advent

The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner

The Christian life begins with a memory and becomes a continual act of recognizing that what has happened in the past is absolutely present in — is absolutely a part of — our lives today. 

There is a wonderful moment in St. Augustine’s Confessions when the great saint realizes that the memory is the most powerful force of the human mind. Augustine realizes that his entire life is a recapitulation — a reenactment — of the story of salvation history. He sees in his own fall into sin as a young man the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; he sees in his own desire for freedom from slavery and in his years of restless wandering the story of the people of Israel on their journey to the promised land. Augustine knows that his own moment of conversion is as real and as powerful as any of those moments in the Gospel when Christ cleanses a soul of its old ways and restores a person to new life. What Augustine comes to understand is that without a memory of the story of salvation history, he would be incapable of making sense of his own life. Augustine discovers that the only way for him to truly know himself — the only way for him to understand who he is and of what he is capable — depends entirely upon his ability to remember everything that came before him. Augustine recognizes that there is no way forward in the Christian life without a living memory of all that has come before. 

And then there is more. For Augustine also discovers that his conversion itself is an act of memory. The reality of conversion causes Augustine to look back differently on his life; Augustine sees now in his memories the spirit of God working on his life over the course years to slowly but surely to prepare him for that moment when he will take up St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and in those words of scripture finally receives the peace and the joy for which he so long desired. St. Augustine realizes that the present moment never made sense to him — Augustine finds that clarity and understanding in our lives only come with time and the grace to retrieve a memory from our past and see it in a new light. And St. Augustine insists that when we retrieve such a memory from the past, the past itself becomes a vital, real, and tangible element of the present moment. In other words, St. Augustine is convinced that memory breaks down the boundary walls of time.

I wanted to spend some time with St. Augustine today because I believe it is one of the better ways that we can answer an important question: what are we all doing here? What are we doing when we come to Mass? And we can ask the same question in a more seasonal way: what is the purpose of Advent? Why do we celebrate Christmas the way that we do? 

And the answer that I want to give is that we when we come to Mass we are witnessing an event that happened in the past and watching it become a vital, real, and tangible element of the present moment. Christ’s final meal with his disciples and his passion and death itself — these events that occurred some 2,000 years ago — these events become real and present before us. The boundary walls of time are broken down and the real presence of Christ becomes manifest in our lives today. And the same goes for the season of Advent and Christmas: these weeks are given to us so that we might retrieve from the past a memory that is very much a vital element of our present lives. There is no part of the story of salvation history that is not played out again and again in our own lives. Advent is that time of preparation and expectation for us; weeks that the Church gives us so that we might remember that we ourselves stand in need of salvation; weeks that the Church gives us to seek out a savior for ourselves; weeks that the Church gives us to embrace the fact that we are possessed of a longing and a genuine desire to know God in our lives. 

The life of the Church makes sense only when we remember that memory stands at her very center. In fact, one of the very best ways to understand the Church is to see her as the connective tissue that binds together the past and the future into the present moment in which we find ourselves. The Church is Christ’s gift to us. Without her, the readings from scripture that we hear today makes no sense. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a future restoration for the Kingdom of Israel that only makes sense to us because the restoration he speaks of matters to us now, today, in our world. We stand in need of restoration. We stand in need of redemption. St. Paul wrote 2,000 years ago that salvation is nearer now than ever before, and his words are as true for us today as they were for the fledgling church in Rome. Christ is coming into our lives now, as Christ has come into the life of every Christian generation. Here is the meaning of our Gospel: at an hour we do not expect the Son of Man will come to us in the most unexpected of ways and in the most unexpected of moments. He will come into our lives now, today, because through the Church the past and future are bound together into the present moment. And so the savior who has come into the world and who will come again into the world comes now into our lives. And Advent is a season given to us by the Church so that we might prepare ourselves for the arrival of our savior. 

Toward the end of his Confessions, St. Augustine writes that: Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future. For these three do coexist somehow in the soul, for otherwise I could not see them. The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation.¹

I cannot think of a better way to capture or describe the Christian life — or the season of Advent. The Christian life is a present moment caught between memory and expectation. The weeks of Advent are given to us each year so that our expectation and our anticipation of a savior might lead us into the past; the weeks of Advent are given to us each year so that we might retrieve from the past a memory of how God has worked in history to bring salvation to his people; the weeks of Advent are given to us each year so that we might retrieve from the past a memory of how God has worked in the history of our own lives to bring salvation to us. And these memories are retrieved and given to us so that we might wait in joyful expectation for a savior who will come —and who is now coming —into the world. 

The Christian life begins with a memory, and becomes a continual act of recognizing that what has happened in the past is absolutely present in — is absolutely a part of — our lives today. And so St. Paul proclaims to us today that we must prepare ourselves for Christ: Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day before us this morning to prepare the way of the Lord. These words of St. Paul ought to cause us to remember, an act of remembering that causes us to wait in joyful expectation for the coming of a savior who enters into our lives now —a savior who always and forever is coming into the world. 

Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on November 26th/27th, 2022

1. Augustine, Confessions. Chapter 20.