Memories Are The Miracle You Are Looking For
Why Remembering Is More Real Than the Moment
Every December, our house turns into a kind of liturgy.
My wife hands me the Christmas boxes from the loft with a reverence that borders on priestly. This is her annual re-ordination into the quiet vocation of making our home coruscate with the lights and glimmer of Christmas. The tree goes up first, of course, but the real ritual begins only when she unwraps the ornaments one by one, pausing over each to welcome them back—as if, in her hands, an invocation takes place and they are transubstantiated into the real presence of others.
Out come the decorations our children made when their hands were still tiny. Out come gifts from friends who are now beyond our reach—some separated by distance, others by passing into eternity—yet they return to us faithfully every year as we open those boxes. Here is the bauble from the saint who became a second mother to her; here is the crystal star from that special Christmastime holiday we still talk about.
She pours a glass of wine, puts on the latest predictably sentimental Hallmarkeque Christmas film, and lets the soft absurdity of its plot wash over her. And when I walk into the room, I often find her in tears—not of sorrow, but of reunion. For in this simple ritual, she is gathered back to so much: to our children as they were, to friendships that shaped us, to the parents whose love formed her. Our whole story—dating, marriage, decades of life—is now mapped onto a fake tree in our lounge.
And this year, with our grandson tottering into the season, she is already shaping memories not yet fully formed—new ornaments from his favourite cartoons, ready for his small hands to hang. Even he, without knowing it, is entering our remembering.
What astonishes me every year is how viscerally she remembers—and how, in remembering, she is re-membered: put back together, stitched across the years, gathered again to the people who have made her life what it is.
And then we are re-membered, as she sends us photos of her progress, culminating in the final revealing of the shimmering Christmas tree. We are gathered up again as a family, rejoined across space and time by the quiet procession of WhatsApp images—the tree appearing like a small annunciation on our screens—until the day we will sit together in our pyjamas beneath its Christmas morning light.
And in this small domestic liturgy, something profound is revealed—something about the very reality of life, creation itself, and our place within it.
The Ache of Impermanence
The most precious moments of our lives do not remain with us as possessions. They move away from us. They slip behind us into the past. We cannot hold them by force; we can only hold them by re-membering them.
That ache you feel at Christmas—the sudden tightness in the throat when a child’s decoration appears in your hand, the person not present that you miss, the loved one passed away and beyond arriving in person again—is not merely nostalgia. It is the human condition breaking through. All that is beautiful is temporal. All that forms us eventually becomes memory. And unless we choose to remember, it simply dissolves into time.
We feel this most sharply in December because Christmas is, in its essence, a season of re-membering:
We remember childhood wonder,
We remember those who are gone,
We remember who we used to be,
We remember the world as we once hoped it might become,
We remember the sad and broken moments of our past and the present
And in remembering, we are confronted by a universal truth: everything must be remembered, or it is lost.
The philosopher and novelist David Eagleman famously said, “You die twice: once when your heart stops, and again the last time someone says your name.”
There is something hauntingly true here. Human life is fragile enough that even existence depends on memory.
And yet—this is not the whole story. For there is a God who remembers us.
The Cosmic Revelation Hidden in Our Remembering
We think remembering is something the mind does. But remembering is something the soul does first. It is not just psychological; it is spiritual. It is one of the truest and most faithful acts a human being can perform.
All of creation is upheld by the God who remembers. The biblical Hebrew word for this—zakar—does not mean mere mental recall. It means to call into the present with faithfulness, to hold someone within covenantal love.
God remembers Noah, and the waters recede. God remembers Israel and brings them out of Egypt. God remembers Hannah, and life comes forth. God remembers His covenant and acts.
The whole story of Scripture hangs on the God who remembers.
And at the centre of it stands a dying thief whispering, “Jesus, remember me.” Christ remembers him into life: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
A dying man held by the dying God—and carried into eternity.
Our remembering, then, is a participation in God’s remembering. It is sacramental. When we remember, we join the divine movement by which God gathers all things into Christ. This is why the Eucharist is commanded to us as remembrance: “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Not because Jesus fears being forgotten, but because in remembering Him, we are remembered by Him. We are re-membered—put back together, reintegrated, healed—through participation in His life, His story, His body.
And this is why Christian remembering is never mere recall. To remember is the opposite of being dismembered. It is the gathering of what has fallen apart, the stitching together of what time has torn, the rejoining of what sorrow has separated.
When we remember Christ, we are not looking back at a distant event; we are letting ourselves be re-membered—joined again to Him who died and rose to gather all things into Himself. In remembering Him, we are remembered by Him—and nothing in us is lost. In Him, we are never forgotten.
Christmas: The Season of Being Remembered
Advent is, at its core, a season of holy remembering. In Advent, we practise the sacred art of remembering so that we are not dismembered by the pace, loss, and fragmentation of our age. We remember Christ’s first coming to recognise Him now, and we re-member His future coming so that our lives might lean forward in expectation.
Advent is not nostalgia but preparation—an opening of the soul so that Christ may re-member us into His life once more.
We decorate our homes with memory because we are creatures who become ourselves through remembering. But at Christmas, something even more astonishing occurs: we discover that God remembers us.
He remembers us in our frailty. He remembers us in our sin. He remembers us when the world forgets us. He remembers us when grief strips our names from others’ lips. He remembers us when we scarcely remember ourselves.
Our worship is not sentimentality; it is participation in His remembering. Every carol, every candle, every prayer is a joining of our fragile memory to His eternal memory.
One day, when Christ returns, we will not simply be recalled—we will be re-membered in the fullest sense: made whole, gathered, restored, stitched back together with all the saints into the new creation. Nothing lost. Nothing wasted. No second death.
So this Christmas, see the Gospel shimmering between the branches and be remembered as you remember.