Anamnesis

Four-or more-syllable words are intimidating, like this one: anamnesis. But to lovers of words, this one means far more than remembering, recalling to mind. Or a psychological term indicating a return of lost memories. Wordsworth’s poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, describes anamnesis without ever mentioning the word. Because it isn’t necessary.

Ipse Dixit.

The poem’s majesty, power, and hope gushed into my psyche. Over and over, I pondered words that seemed to contain the answer to everything. I did not know the word anamnesis, but reading the poet’s words brought incalculable solace and a certitude that obliterated doubt.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

                      Hath had elsewhere its setting,

                         And cometh from afar:

                      Not in entire forgetfulness,

                      And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

                      From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

                      Upon the growing Boy….

On the Strange Symmetry of Beauty and Death

Why?

Because deeply in my psyche, more accurately, the soul I didn’t think I had, knew the truth of the poet’s claims. My radical atheism was shaken to its core by this poem.

We Catholics know anamesis at each Mass.

Anamnesis. The liturgical celebration always refers to God’s
saving interventions in history. “The economy of Revelation is realized by deeds and words which are intrinsically bound up with each
other. . . . [T]he words for their part proclaim the works and bring to
light the mystery they contain.”22 In the Liturgy of the Word the Holy
Spirit “recalls” to the assembly all that Christ has done for us. In
keeping with the nature of liturgical actions and the ritual traditions
of the churches, the celebration “makes a remembrance” of the marvelous works of God in an anamnesis which may be more or less
developed. The Holy Spirit who thus awakens the memory of the
Church then inspires thanksgiving and praise (doxology)

Catechism of the Catholic Church

Perils of ignoring it

The perils of ignoring anamnesis cannot be overstated. A University of Texas at Austin professor in government, philosophy, and religious studies, J. Budziszewski, was an atheist for much of his life. But he converted to Catholicism. I ‘met’ the author through reading his meditations on the revenge of conscience: a most arresting phrase. And the title of a 1998 article by Budziszewski, which he later published in a book of the same title.

As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation “intergenerational intimacy”: that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term “sodomy”: that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word “fornication” at all: that’s forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is “unwarranted” for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. 

Hold Fast to Patience With a Silent Mind

The professor has written another book: Pandemic of Lunacy.. It’s short, around 200 pages, with twenty-five pages of references. I thought nothing more could shock me. But Budziszewski’s graphic description of his students’ bafflement following his lectures on natural law and virtue is not just painful but horrifying.

How can you teach about a common good when there is no such thing?

Why are we speaking about a human trait of character when character’s been proven to be fictional?

Each individual determines morality: judging another’s behavior as immoral is intolerant.

When asked why they thought these things, the student replied that her psychology professor taught her, or that he had learned it from his philosophy professor.

The law is written in our hearts

But repeated sinful behaviors harden our hearts, silencing that inner voice of conscience that whispers, “No!!! Do not do this!

Worse, guilt and fear can combine in a purely poisonous way.

Tradition has almost no meaning in a period born from revolutions, a period that has repudiated as useless the past and its heritage. Modern man looks to the present and the future, he says, not to the past, as the Church does, and is bound to do; the continuance of such an institution in our time is obscurantism, immobilism. The modern mind is constrained to declare flatly that positive and natural sciences, technical and industrial developments…a repugnance for metaphysical reality and mistrust of logical certainty, all these have rendered the Church obsolete. It is impossible, one hears people say, for a modern person to understand the Church.

The Mind of Paul VI

The anti- Church and anti-Christ rhetoric enslaves us individually and collectively. And yet, for those of us who hunger for truth, the yearning grows, and our souls beg for sight. Finally, we see the doorway to truth is Christ crucified.

The law came in so that the trespass would increase; but where sin increased, grace increased all the more,

In these last weeks of Lent, let us beg for healing from our pride, which distances us from Our Lord.

Considering the last blistering words coming straight from Jesus’ mouth on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, we might want to take a second look at our spiritual condition, perhaps decades, ages, after we received the light of Christ at our Baptism. I am referring of course to these words:

“If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see’, so your sin remains.”

Since Christ, as we so readily claim, is present at our assembly, these searing words are directed also at us.

We have been told repeatedly that Baptism is not a date lost in time but a life-long journey and growth from darkness to light, from sin to loving service, from vain toil to grace, from death to life. Focusing on this aspect of having a new outlook, a new vision of the world in the light of Christ, St. Paul would say: “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:8) Jesus Leads Us Through the Darkness of Life’s Maze