Going into Someone’s Home

To anyone who has been reading my last few articles, my tendency to highlight memory as the technical operation of the conscience and the mode in which we recognize God is hopefully apparent.  If it is not, I fear I haven’t been clear enough in what I’ve been trying to convey.  Obviously, the memory I’ve been talking about isn’t so much like the memory I call forth when I’m trying to tell my wife what I did at work last week: that is memory of specific incidents that have happened in the past.  No, this memory I’ve been trying to talk about has to do with a primal memory - a memory at the core of our being, which both makes us who we are and which causes us to create our surrounding environment in a specific way.  In other words, we “remember” God because of the orientation towards Him He has already put into our hearts, and we create societies based around the specific ways we have been introduced to Him.  Because we live within the culture of our own time, which is simultaneously created by and creates us, human culture is an intrinsic part of the mission of the Church.

“Culture,” writes JPII in an address given in Poland, “is an unceasing experience and testimony that flies in the face of existential despair.”  It is the creation of humans, and in turn creates humanity, since humans are always formed by their surrounding environment.  It is the primal memory of every civilization which tells its people who they are and where they came from.  At the risk of sounding a little cheesy, think back to all those Disney movies kids watch (and which I am guilty of enjoying every now and again).  In many of them, there’s a journey of self-discovery which the protagonist embarks on, usually involving some question like, “who am I?  Where did I come from, so that I might better understand who I am now?”  Now, I am not trying to hold up Disney movies as some deep, theologically useful media.  However, the secular recognition of culture as spanning the gap between the subject’s particular desires and tastes and the history of where he came from is useful in establishing the reality of culture’s memorative qualities for the person.

The mission of the Church is about speaking the language of those who are hearing.  If the message of Christ is heard in an unreasonable or unbelievable way, then it is literally against reason for those who hear it to then believe or understand it.  We must hand on the unchanging truth about Christ to an ever-changing landscape and to new generations.  And, in order to learn the “language of the human heart,” we must therefore also know each culture.