Remember and Imagine

Once, my youngest niece, who at the time was perhaps 6 years old, told me she could remember being born. A mutually ponderous pause followed. Then she said, "Well, I used to remember."

At the time we were watching a documentary about the development of a human being in the womb.

Those moments emerged from, were coaxed out of, their slumber by an image from The Silmarillion, a collection of writings by J.R.R. Tolkien, known by most as author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Polished and published some years after his death by his son Christopher, the tales told in The Silmarillion constitute a lifetime of Tolkien's rearview visions of the earthly world that preceded all the history that humanity says it knows on the basis of writings, art, and other retained or rediscovered remnants. They are, in Christopher's words, "the central stock of that great imaginative enterprise from which The Lord of the Rings was derived" (quote from https://www.tolkienestate.com/writing/christopher-tolkien-the-silmarillion).

Such "ages" before "history" MUST have existed! We would not be here otherwise. But we, like Tolkien, can only imagine (not deny or dismiss) them.

I believed my niece when she said she used to remember being born. I believe I too used to remember being born, and even perhaps the months before I was born, even though I can't remember that I used to remember them.

I believe these things because most days I can only remember that I used to remember, if only for a moment, what I dreamed just before I woke up. I believe these things because a handful or two or four of dreams have remained with me for decades since I awoke from them. I believe that the dreams I can no longer remember have shaped me just as much as those I can recall. I am also certain that the human and planetary history I (and others) can only imagine has shaped me as much as the decades of my own life on this planet, just as the “age” in which I participate, individually and collectively, will shape the ages to come, regardless of whether or not concrete evidence of our lives and our cultures remains when the present age ends.

From dust, to dust.

On this year's Ash Wednesday night, when I couldn't say what I was intending to do for Lent, after sharing how in previous Lenten seasons my own "best laid plans" yielded to/were transcended by something unexpected and unimagined, a friend challenged me with this assignment: see what Lent has to say to you each day.

These recollections, fragments, scribblings are some of what Lent has said to me so far, in these early, wintry days.