the sacred journey

[Excerpt] by Frederick Buechner 1982

memory is more than a looking back to a time that is not longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still.
the people we loved. the people who loved us. the people who, for good or ill, taught us things.

dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us – and through them we come to understand ourselves – in new ways too.

who knows what ‘the communion of saints’ means, but surely it means more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but said in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us.

they have their own business to get on with now, I assume – ‘increasing in knowledge and love of thee’ says the book of common prayer, and moving ‘from strength to strength,’ which sounds like business enough for anybody – and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as they journey ahead towards whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours.

that is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. if they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.