Memories hold unique places in a person’s life.
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Love, hate, happy days and hope-filled ones, pride, fear, sorrow and elation are all accompanying emotions with memories. The memories of failures, poor choices, violence, drunkenness, sexual promiscuities with their unhelpful mental companions of shame, regret, anger, guilt, depressions and disappointments are hardly a joyful mix.
There was a time when childish naivety was a respected virtue, when a child’s life was not cluttered with matters more adult and they were left to adventure, invent and imagine. It was a time when girls were girls, boys were boys, parents were mums and dads, and sex was something associated with maturity and marriage.
It was a time for a child when the most disappointing memories were as simple as a small bottles of sun-warmed milk you were forced to drink at morning tea and perhaps the bully who would push you around for your lunch, not knife you for drugs.
Memories! I am not so foolish as to think that the old days were only good. That would be ridiculous.
They were simpler times when lessons were taught about “stranger danger” but with caution so as to not let fear steal a child’s confidence. It was a time before the stranger danger could be on your child’s phone, friending them on a book called “Face” which isn’t a book at all.
It was a time when meals were served at the table and when parents were present. A time when involvement in your child’s life was more important than indulging your own. A time when family conversation trumped that of opinionated television personalities. A time when grandparents were meant to be special and connected, when the value placed on a life was a reflection of the value we placed on community.
Memories! I am not so foolish as to think that the old days were only good. That would be ridiculous. But what will be the memories of today’s children beyond the days of our entertained and pleasured individualism? A sexual revolution of confusion? A time when marriage definition was determined by a vote in a time when the stats around the western world suggest that heterosexuals and homosexuals are not even committed to the success of what they are voting for? A time when the old, the sick and infirmed are economically expendable, where life becomes cheap and their burden on the living made light by their “assisted deaths”?
I recognise that this moment of comment is quite dark. Perhaps it carries a lament expressing concern that we are forgetting the lessons of the past and the treasury of truth they contain for better things.
The person who reads the Bible will constantly be confronted with the challenges of remembrance. The Bible calls people to consider the lessons of past generations and the interactions of God with those generations. The most dangerous response to remembrance in Bible times and now is not to care.
Wherever Australia advances fair, the memories of our decisions today must find their place and critique within the memories of all that has gone before and with that, finally bend beneath the critique of God on us all.