#316: Communities of Remembrance

EXCERPT:
We like to think that faith illumines life, but sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes a life experience teaches a lesson that illuminates the nature of our faith.

Just over two years ago I began searching for classmates for a reunion. I am not actually a "reunion person": I’d never been to a single high school, college, or grad school reunion despite annual invitations dating back to 1966.

But this was different. I was looking for the five dozen people who had spent their junior year of college with me in Paris.

Understand, we came from three dozen colleges from 20 states, we had never met before and we split up at year's end. Some classmates fell in love, some got married, some even stayed married, but our class only existed for about 10 months, with little back-story and even less aftermath. We had nothing else in common, before or since.

To this day I am not sure why I started my search. Partly, it was curiosity about the rest of people's lives. Partly I hoped I would get another chance to return to Paris. Mostly I wanted to find out how our time together was remembered by others.

I had long assumed my experience was unique. I had lived alone in a neighborhood far from other students; I had lacked the funds to travel with them or join them at restaurants, theater, or concerts. Much of the time I found myself "stuck in Paris”(!)--alone, cold, and more or less penniless. To survive I had to learn French faster than I had learned anything before, and sink roots in the city by cultivating any French person I could meet. Compared to my classmates, I spent less time sightseeing and traveling and more time hanging out with locals.

Over the years I tended to think that difference was a key to the impact that year had on my life. People will tell you that my obsession with all things Parisian (and most things French) is chronic and possibly incurable. The truth is I never got over the year, but I assumed the others had moved on, just as most tourists do once they return home and start thinking of new destinations. The others had stayed and studied for a year, but I had lived in Paris—I had made myself at home—and so I knew firsthand that Hemingway was right:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.


The others, I told myself, had been more like long-term tourists than short-term Parisians. Their time there, I assumed, could not have had the same lasting impact.

I was dead wrong.

As a result, my search became a series of surprises...

We were strangers before and after: all we had in common was Paris at the age of 20. But that is turned out to be enough, even after 40 years of separation, to turn us into something else.

We longtime strangers have been made a community by sharing our common need to remember. Despite our separate lives and varied histories, one shared moment from the past bonds us. And that sense of one-ness is palpable and real—we have become what I think of as a "community of remembrance."

The lesson in this: When you stop to think of it, is this not very much like what being Church means? Are we not also a “community of remembrance”? Is not our own solidarity rooted in a shared memory—the memory of a man whose disciples we are? Is not our central act a ritual where we gather to celebrate precisely because he said: “Do this in memory of me?