Highlights
The challenge of memory is addressed.
What it might mean to have an identity conferred by God.
We are invited the possibility of finding ourselves in a larger story.
Meet my sister Lindy.
A new depth of hope is introduced.
We are welcomed to the impossible.
Guided Reflection
If possible, use headphones.
Cited Quotations
This dynamic of being able to yield unconditionally to God’s future is what John of the Cross calls hope, a hope that exists without the signature of our life and works, a hope independent of us and our accomplishments (spiritual gifts or ordinary human achievements), a hope that can even embrace and work for a future without us. This theological hope is completely free from the past, fully liberated from our need to recognize ourselves in the future, to survive, to be someone. When we are laid flat by the deconstruction/silencing of our memory, it is hope that is very gradually taking over the operation of the memory/imagination, hollowing out a place for the “power of the future,” for the coming of the Impossible. For hope to extend itself this far by perpetual expectation into the realm of the Invisible and Incomprehensible, its movement will have to be purified of all forms of self-preservation, all efforts to preserve one’s selfhood as it is.
Connie Fitzgerald
[The hope that we might move] from a radical individualism to a genuine synergistic community [knowing] that we are inseparably and physically connected to every living being in the universe. Yet the future of the entire earth community is riding on whether we can find a way beyond the limits of our present evolutionary trajectory.
Connie Fitzgerald
Reflection Questions
Can you see some of the places in these stories that are dominated or even tainted by painful or even traumatic memories…?
Can you get enough distance to see the extent to which these stories are self-limiting…?
Are you personally acquainted with the Dark Night of the Spirit…?
Have you tasted a deeper identity in God drawn from the vertical…?
Do you find yourself desiring to be drawn into a larger story that your individual life…?
Has this relativized or changed your smaller identities…? In what ways…?