An ancient Greek myth tells how Zeus, the father of the gods, slept with Mnemosyne (Memory) on nine consecutive nights, and she then gave birth to the nine Muses, who are the patronesses of all the creative arts. They were Clio (muse of history), Euterpe (music), Thalia (comedy), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (lyric poetry), Polyhymnia (choral poetry), Calliope (epic poetry), and Urania (astronomy). The myth has often been understood as an explanation of the mystery of creativity. It is out of the union of energy or power (represented by Zeus) and memory, that creative achievement flows. Power on its own can all too easily be misdirected, or wasted on re-inventing what has already been done. Memory alone may achieve nothing, if it only leaves us dwelling on the past. But join the two together, and you get a true, unique work of art.
November is a month for memory, a month to remember the past and those who have gone before us. It begins with the Church’s twin festivals of All Saints and All Souls. These are now often celebrated on the same Sunday, but traditionally All Saints commemorated the great heroes of the Christian faith, who had been dubbed ‘Saint’, while All Souls commemorated on the following day the ‘ordinary’ believers who had lived and died in faithful obscurity. According to New Testament usage these are all one and the same anyway, because the word ‘saint’ really means ‘a person who is holy, because he or she belongs to God’. Then comes Remembrance Sunday, an occasion for remembering the cost of war, and all those who have laid down their lives in wartime, in the service of others. Then we move on to the beginning of the season of Advent, which is a remembering of the hopes and promises which led up to the coming of Jesus.
Sometimes all this remembering, all this looking back to past glories and sorrows, can just leave us feeling depressed. But the Bible is clear that the purpose of remembering is to make what is remembered real, and living, and powerful in the present time. It is to strengthen us for the demands of the present moment, and to prepare us to face the future. As in the old Greek myth, the combination of memory and the energy or strength or effort we join to it, can bring something to birth that is wonderfully, creatively new.
So, for example, when we remember loved ones who have died, it is not to make us wallow in regret or self-pity. Rather, our thankfulness for all the good we have received, can help us to face the future with more confidence, to become (or carry on being) the people our loved ones would want us to be, and to enjoy the useful and productive lives they would want us to have. When we remember the horrors of war, and all the lives unnaturally and prematurely cut off - something that is continuing right up to today - it can stir us to fresh efforts to build a world of peace and justice, in which violent conflict becomes a thing of the past.
Above all, when we remember all that the Bible tells us of God’s plans to send a Saviour into the world, and how they were fulfilled in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, it can move us to make, or to re-make, the greatest decision we could ever make about our lives. That is, the decision that we ourselves will follow Jesus, and become a part of the great Story of what God wants to do with the world. The most imaginative and creative thing we can do with our lives is to decide not to be passengers or spectators, but to sign up for full involvement on the Way, the Jesus movement that is about doing what Jesus did, and working together with God to accomplish his great work.
Published in the Marston Times, November 2009