Not long ago, I was asked to offer the table grace at a family birthday celebration.  As you might expect, I intended the prayer to include a blessing for the person having the birthday.  I managed to do that, but it was a challenge, because during the prayer I couldn’t come up with the birthday celebrant’s name.  The name I blanked on was not a stranger, not an acquaintance, not a co-worker from decades long past, but a close family member seated right across the table.  Scary, especially for a juvenile senior citizen like me.

As the presidential election season begins to heat up and we brace ourselves for this contest between geriatric candidates, a lot of us will be thinking about the ways age and mileage wear down mental acuity.  Lost keys and phones, forgotten dates and names, standing at the bottom of the basement steps wondering what it was we came down to fetch, these are little reminders that we are not as mentally quick or agile as we were.  At each instance we wonder, is this mental lapse insignificant or a sign of something more ominous?

I forget names and nouns routinely.  ‘My friend’ and ‘thingamajig’ are more common in my vocabulary than I wish they were.  Still, it’s not the holes in my memory that trouble me, it’s the memories I can’t dislodge that rob me of sleep and steal my peace of mind.

Those of you who have led more successful moral lives, who have navigated your relationships without inflicting undue harm, may not be able to relate, but the rest of us know the stickiness of memories of failure, cowardice, betrayal, abandonment, and harm that we have inflicted, willfully or not.  These are the 3 AM memories that seem never to lose their vivid detail.

I don’t know how to exorcise these memories.  I know that diversion, denial, and drink have very limited long-term effectiveness in erasing them.  The memories themselves pronounce judgement against me and I know I am guilty as charged.

My only comfort in the face of my memories of failure is forgetfulness.

The forgetfulness I cling to is not my own, but God’s willful forgetfulness. 

The prophet Isaiah is given this word from God to the guilty-as-sin people of Israel: “I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.”  (Isaiah 43:25)

God, who alone has an undistorted picture of our thoughts and actions, who alone has the right to judge and hold against us all our faults and failings, has decided to forget.  God buries them in the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19) and removes our transgressions from us ‘as far as the east is from the west’ (Psalm 103:12).

God is not a kindly old man with a faulty memory.  God is love.  In love, God forgets what is forgiven.

Prayer: God grant me a failing memory like yours.  Help me forget my sins and the sins against me.  Replace the memory of them with a fresh awareness of your forgiveness and grace.