The Virtue of Recollection
Rev. Douglas Olds
March 2022
Recollection as virtue is the contemplative reflecting back on God’s actions in our—and through Scripture, Israel’s--life and witness in order to look forward in anticipation to what he will do (Ps. 71:15-18; Ps. 135:13). To look back is a righteous path to move forward.[1] Reformation over “nostalgia.”
Recollection
lives fully with the knowledge that the past—even the painful past—is never
completely erased. Mindfully accessing and regularly re-evaluating our memories
of spiritual descents and ascents is the foundation for the Holy Spirit to
re-create and resurrect our faith anew--to establish our identity in Christ and
to define our direction in that identity.[2]
Recollection as a spiritual discipline may put in opposition gratitude and
despair while addressing the latter by the exercise of lament and exhortation leading
toward its culmination in adoration. Recollection is patience applied to
troublesome and confusing memories of the past, reinterpreting them along
theological lines. Recollection of the past prepares us to cooperate with
bettering our future.
To
recollect in the Spirit of God is to know yourself as you truly are—as you were
created to be. Recollection is the foundation of the necessity for
repentance—repentance established in our memories and by our griefs and indignations
toward our selves transformed into the perspective and experience of
forgiveness. Recollection is thus a looping process of descents (indignations of
and remorse for sins) and ascents (experience with divine excellences), with
the latter assuredly the final word. This is the redemptive, gospel character of recollection.
Memories
that are irretrievable to our recollection are vouchsafed in God, to be
recalled in God’s time and for God’s purposes. Recollection is contrasted with
nostalgia’s ghosts of youth--the wistful desire to come home to a
sentimentalized past which involves at least a partial, deliberate forgetting
of tragic and unjust realities that involve no repentance. Nostalgia is
experience stretched, framed, and left hanging on a wall. It may frame our
deadening resentments in the building and adornment of walls. Nostalgia finds
safety in static memory rather than in the pilgrimage of getting up anew.
Recollection is the challenge to comfortable memory of false predictability that tempts Abraham and his
progeny of the faith to lassitude. Recollection invokes God’s repeated command to
Abraham, ק֥וּם לֵךְ֙ (qûm
lek,“arise and go forward” of Gen. 28:2, cf. 12:1 et al.). Recollection makes
memory motile and dynamic, infusing life into carnal sentiment that seeks material comfort in returning to the past.
As a virtue, recollection requires the recognition of the contest of sin (death) and grace (life)—social agon and relational shalom—in past events, even if one was not aware of those spiritual dimensions at the time. Recollection fills in the negligence of nostalgia. Building upon divine revelation, recollection of individual and collective experience may become, through training, a reliable source of information about particularized and personal truth. Recollection updates, guards, and applies memory by encompassing into it the autobiographical experience of God’s presence and one’s unfolding awareness of how we have been shaped by both God’s eternal love and temporal contingencies (Ps. 143:5). In this grounding in personal memory, recollection augments and grows out of tradition that is its practicing community.
Recollection
is rooted in Eucharistic adoration: “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:25;
Luke 22:19). Recollection goes beyond tradition sacramentally to transform rootless,
unrepentant space into rooted, forgiven place. Recollection refuses the
suppression of memory by nostalgia, false sentiment, or cultural diversion into
agon. Recollection subordinates and incorporates epistemology (in)to
ontology: “In the beginning, [we recall that] God created…God created them …”
Recollection is the recognition of the history God has written and is writing
upon our hearts and minds.
[1] The cultivation of the virtue of recollection
is a turning back to God. To recollect is processive
taxis (τάξις: orientation and arranging push and pull (LSJ 1996, 1756) of
memory that is God’s call to us to consider his presence after a perception of
absence. In recalled experience(s) repentance and recollection reorient us to an
outlook of hope.
THEY say that Hope is happiness;
But
genuine Love must prize the past,
And Memory wakes the thoughts that bless:
They
rose the first—they set the last
(-Lord Byron)
[2] In
descents, the baptized episodically engage monsters in the waters (Ps. 104:
25-26) as a feature of their incarnation in the Lord.
