PURIFICATION OF MEMORY We are a people of memory.

Central to our Christian identity is the memory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; as Church we understand our authenticity as historically derived and see ourselves as guardians of a sacred tradition we dare not forget. Nonetheless, it is no naive accident that John of the Cross writes at such length on the purification of memory in the third book of the Ascent of Mount Carmel (1-15) and throughout the second book of the Dark Night. Nor is it any wonder that this is such a misunderstood and even dangerous part of his teaching considering his counsel both to draw the memory away from its props and boundaries and to forget both wrongs suffered and good experienced. Let me sketch the basic dynamics in this process of purification. In the deeper reaches of a contemplative life, a kind of unraveling or loss of memory occurs which can be more or less conscious. Then ones usual way of harboring memories is incapacitated. 7 A persons past becomes inaccessible as a basis for finding meaning. The experience seems to be not so much an emptying of memory, as John describes it, as an unraveling or de-linking of it. A person continues to have memories of the past, she may be bombarded with them, but they are somehow uncoupled from the self. Their significance is altered. Memories do not mean what one thought they did. In a mysterious way there is a cutting off of both past and memory that is inimical to ones personhood. The capacity one loses is the ability to re-member; that is, to member again, bringing past elements together, forward to the present, reconstructed into a newly relevant whole. When memory is de-constructed in the dark night, the past can no longer weave its thread of meaning through the persons lived experience into the future. Past, present and future do not fit together. What one remembers, how one remembers, how long one remembers is called into question. The past can seem a mockery or an illusion; the psychological and intellectual structures that have supported or held us together over a lifetime, the beacons by which we have set our course, the certainties on which we have built our lives are seriously undermined or taken away not only in prayer, but also in and by life, and a profound disorientation results. This is keenly felt as a loss of authenticity, truthfulness and even identity.