Yesterday I turned a stair and was suddenly back in the world of childhood, amid the comfortable certainties of my grandmother's house and time. It was nothing but a trick of light and the accident of a whitewashed wall, but the effect was startling. It underlined for me the relative nature of time and the importance of memory. When we forget, we lose part of ourselves: the forlornness of those who suffer from amnesia and those who love them is largely compounded of this sense of lost identity.

In our celebration of the liturgy we often refer to liturgical anamnesis, the sacred remembrance of events in God's dealings with us, his people. So often the events seem distant in time or have been almost argued out of existence by scripture scholars and historians, but they are what give us our spiritual identity, our sense of belonging. Our liturgical remembrance is always biblical in origin and closely linked to our understanding of Tradition. Jean-Marie Tillyard expressed this very succinctly when he wrote:

Memory in the biblical sense of the term is not simply storage of the sediment of the past. It is also the humus from which life never stops borrowing. As the memory of the Church, Tradition represents the permanence of a Word which is always alive, always enriched, and yet radically the same, where the Church never ceases to nourish its faith.

(Church of Churches: the Ecclesiology of Communion, 1992)

It is worth thinking about the memory of the Church in these terms.