Over the weeks of this Lenten season, I’ve tried to do some reflection on successive chapters of Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness.  The book begins with the call to “remember that we are dust,” which fits perfectly with Ash Wednesday as the beginning of the season.  From there, Varden moves through a selection of other calls to remember: remember you were a slave in Egypt, remember Lot’s wife, and celebrate the Lord’s supper as a way to remember.  Varden’s fifth “remembrance recollection” starts off the morning of the resurrection, when the angels at Jesus’ empty tomb tell the women to remember:

⁵ And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?⁶ He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷ that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” (Luke 24:5-7 ESV)

Varden asserts: The proclamation of life’s victory over death is followed immediately by a summons to remember.  The same happens later to the two disciples who unknowingly meet the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus when He basically retells them the Biblical Story through the interpretive lens of His life and mission.  Varden again:

The first mission of the nascent Church was to engage in a prodigious exercise of remembrance.  We can follow it step by step in the Acts and Epistles.  The Hebrew Bible was re-read from start to finish, scoured for sign’s of Jesus’ gospel.  A newness of perspective ensued as the disciples, still rubbing their eyes, reached certainty that Christ had risen from the dead.  It cast its radiance on ancient things, too.  The Easter proclamation brought about a hermeneutic shift that affected knowledge at every level.  Nothing was the same.  Al things had to be recalled, reconsidered, reinterpreted.

Varden chooses a line from the Gospel of John for the title of this chapter: the Counsellor Will Call Everything to Mind.  Why?  Because “to perform this remembrance is to being to live life in the Spirit.”

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This chapter includes one of my overall favorite moments in what I’ve read of Varden so far.  It comes as a quote and a paraphrase from Irenaeus via the Catholic catechism concerning God’s revelation of Himself to humanity:

St. Irenaeus repeatedly speaks of this divine pedagogy using the image of God and man becoming accustomed to one another: ‘the Word of God dwelt in man and became the Son of man in order to accustom man to perceive God and to accustom God to dwell in man, according to the Father’s pleasure.’

Or more simply put, this is Irenaeus’s “notion of God and man getting used to each other.”

I don’t totally track with God having to “get used to us,” but I understand the overall sentiment.  It’s a great summary of the Biblical Story: of a God who wants to dwell with the creation that rebels against Him continually, and yet He will not relent.  And the Holy Spirit, who will “call everything to mind” is key for us as we live in the fifth act of God’s Story.  Perhaps more than any other chapter in Varden’s book, this chapter moves us into the here and now of our day everyday.