This space has lingered blank a while, but it's time has returned.
I recently completed, by superb audio book, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I picked it up purely because Ira Glass told me to, and if anything, I am surprised that I had never before crossed its path. Its distinctly religious character is doubtless evident from its title, but I was still surprised when only a few minutes in the narrator proclaims his connection and affinity for the Episcopal Church. It's not every novel that begins in such a way. It manages to be a highly fascinating religious apology from a non-religious writer, simultaneously deep (the ambiguities of religious life and symbols) and also slightly wooden (surely the miraculous must precede faith!).
Reading it in this time and place, what leaps from the page, or rather mp3 file, is a whole mess of still-poignant observations about being faithful in an unjust world--a topic perhaps for another time--and the question about how we come to faith. (In point of fact, with the free interview that came with the book, Irving and the interviewer seem to think that what leaps forth is the frustrated homosexual relationship, so your own experience may vary.). I've always been unduly fond of the Phillips Brooks response about how we come to faith--he replied that it had to do with his aunt--but the book revolves around the question of the miraculous, and in particular, how our practices do or do not remember in us the miraculous past, be it Jesus' birth or a friendship from our childhood.
Is "remembering" the purpose of ritual, of practice, of meditation, of prayer, of Eucharist? Surely these things have a memory-function that is involved, a-calling-to-mind of a more numinous reality. Perhaps they even transport us to those miraculous events--mangers, crosses, or even pilgrimage sites we visited long ago. Perhaps they "remember into the future" as I heard an SSJE brother argue last year.
But it seems to me that as powerful a role as memory plays in shaping our religious practice, the more powerful orientation must come from imagination, from hoping that God is present when we cannot see God, from believing that God will act in our future. And even though memory is not so separate from imagination, our ritual opens us up to what we cannot put together from fragments of memory, what cannot be assembled from past actions. Somehow, I think, our religious practice must always leave in it a powerful vacancy for what we do not yet have.
