Awaken
Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot... but he'll remember with advantages
In my first weeks working at the nursing home, I tasked myself with getting to know our residents well enough that I could answer their questions about their own lives when, in troubled moments, they sought to grasp at a memory or a truth.
One morning, as I administered his morning shave, I saw a resident’s hand twitching towards his dresser. I lifted the razor from his neck and he lurched forward to grab the picture of his son. There was a sticky note attached (as there wereto many things in that room).
It simply said “Crispin”.
I smiled at the name - in my mind it was attached to a world far more charming and gentle than my own - and muttered a line half-remembered “And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by”.
The man responded.
“…from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered.”
He went back to the start of Henry V’s Agincourt speech and we tagged each other in and out as we fumbled our way through the whole thing. There was a whole world of beauty stored beyond the door of that sticky note, and taking advantage of his own lucidity, he proceeded to tell me all he could about his son.
For a few minutes, he was Awake.
Later, when I brought him his lunch, he looked across the room at the picture, associating me with it in some unrecallable way, and walked over to it.
He lifted his glasses so he could read the note. “Oh”, he said, “Crispin.”
There is something particularly cruel about dementia. I watched men and women hold the faces of loved ones trickle out of their minds - that love never diminishing any more than a man’s thirst diminishes as water leaks out through his cupped hands - there was now just a confusing absence upon which to focus their love, that thirst.
This peculiar cruelty is compounded by an oddly myopic image of the hope Christians have after death. The biblical promise of Rest has been diluted by the somewhat anaemic modern vision of “rest” as an abundance of inactivity. If “rest” is only a bed, little wonder that “eternity” is merely a cloud, a harp and some bittersweet memories… and nowt to mark the end of it. Like children sent unwillingly to bed with the begrudging concession that it is, presumably, good for them in some inscrutable way, so too will many of us accept a bleak vision of the New Creation as an aerial wasteland. A billowy desert whose populace indulges in the most spectacularly banal activities - accepted on the understanding that perhaps it is wise to enjoy such austerity… maybe we’ll like it by then…
Yet it is simply not conceivable that being brought into the presence of the King of Life could bring anything less than the fullness of life that our whole being cries out for. The New Creation will be a place where memories are not simply ‘stewed in’ but in which they are made.
There is, in our future, a time when we will fondly recall a memory - a joke or a dinner or an accomplishment - and that memory will be of something that itself happened in Zion. We are not ‘restored’ like a museum artefact - to be preserved behind a sign - we are restored to a True humanity.
Yet, for those who can trace their mental or physical frustrations and anguish to childhood, even the language of ‘restoration’ may be of little comfort - to what will we be restored? The best we ever were? It’s not the case with our battle with sin - our souls aren’t restored to our ‘best day’, why would it be so with our minds or bodies?
”Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”
1 Corinthians 15:49
My dear sister in Christ with chronic pain, my beloved brother with crippling anxiety…you who are embattled with endometriosis or arthritis or cancer. Or even to you (we) who seemingly can’t go on a walk with friends without rolling an ankle or laugh at a joke without painful hiccups. You (we) who wheeze on the staircase. To those whose body is a constant frustration, or to you who fear the day your body will no longer be the athletic haven it now is: God will not rob you of your body; he will make it new.
God will not restore your bodily stats to the best you ever got to back in Summer ‘07; he will restore us to the original created order - What “is sown in weakness” is “raised in power”.
The risen Lord Jesus who appeared in the locked room did not, I suspect, walk through the brickwork as a ghost might mist its way through a wall.
No, that risen body, the most physical thing the earth has ever held, surely travelled through bricks and mortar as you and I may walk through water - its superlative solidity so unarguable, so obvious that the brickwork would rather act as if it were a liquid than face the humiliation of claiming to be hard against such an opponent.
We will be bodily raised. In death and resurrection we do not descend into the shadows, we rise out of them.
The face of the solid spirit - he was one of those that wore a robe - made me want to dance, it was so jocund, so established in its youthfulness.”
The Great Divorce
There is a Face we will one day look upon whose gaze will restore us so completely (restore us not merely to our mortal ‘peak’, but to the very precipice of God’s intention in his design) that, having once seen that Face, we shall never forget another. Minds, bodies and souls restored to the Creator’s standard.
I wrote the following out and framed it for my parents the day that one of their best friends had died after years of struggling with dementia. (They are from the appendices of Lord of the Rings, and will one day form the basis of my sleeve tattoo, should my wife relent on the matter.)
What comes next is more than a remembering.
