Tuesday, March 29, 2022

 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. It is the ex post integration of God into our memories, a recognition after the fact that God was with us intimately, dispensing grace, all along.



[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. 


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