The Times They Are ‘A-Changin’
and Historical Memory
As you enter the time of Memoria, what you feel will be akin to memory’s prayer, the prayer of longing. Her way is that of remembrance, tinged with grief’s yearning for the end of what need not be. (From Memoria: The Way of the Marys)
Bob Dylan is one of our most famous sons here in Minnesota. In this week’s Sunday St. Paul Pioneer Press, I read that Bob Dylan’s parents were Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to Minnesota after WWI. In his 2004 memoir Dylan wrote of his grandmother, saying, “Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.”
The article continues, saying that Anna and Zigman Zimmerman fled antisemitic persecution in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today Ukraine. They were refugees, just like people today.”
The yearning for home, no matter where it is, or how far we get away from it, is in all of us in some way. It’s a human and divine yearning as I believe all of our true yearnings are. Imagination, memory, yearning . . . they’re all connected and connecting. They’re like tendrils within time, wisps in the winds of memory, and have their place in our hearts.
Early in A Course of Love Jesus suggests that many of us “wanted but the travelers’ guide and not the actual journey,” and says we may “still resist realizing that you got more than you bargained for.”
A door has been reached, a threshold crossed.
What your mind still would deny your heart cannot.
A tiny glimmering of memory has returned to you and will not leave you to the chaos you seem to prefer. It will keep calling you to acknowledge it and let it grow. It will tug at your heart in the most gentle of ways. Its whisper will be heard within your thoughts. Its melody will play within your mind. “Come back, come back,” it will say to you. “Come home, come home,” it will sing. You will know there is a place within yourself where you are missed and longed for and safe and loved. A little peace has been made room for in the house of your insanity.” C:10.31 and 32
The blessed awaiting of “what is to be,” no matter what we think that is, is part of coming home. A memory of home lives within us. In a marvelous few sentences early in the Course he speaks of heaven saying, “How could it not encompass everything and still be what it is: home to God’s beloved son and dwelling place of God Himself? It is because God is not separate from anything that you cannot be.” C:6.19
I still abide in the blessed awaiting of the printed “proof” of Memoria, the final step to having it become a physical book. I’ll let you know as soon as that happens.
The paperback version of Memoria the Way of the Marys.
is (still) Coming Soon. Click here to order the Kindle version.
Quotes from St. Paul Pioneer Press, “From Odessa to Minnesota” By Jay Gabler, Forum News Service