Alzheimer’s Challenge—the Initial Reality

On my way to work this morning I heard this read on the “Car Talk” radio show—a typically terrific rerun of several years’ ago featuring the late Tom Magliozzi and his brother Ray. They titled the piece “AAADD [age activated attention deficit disorder]: The Warning Signs”. The irony is that Tom died in November of 2014 at age 77 of issues associated with Alzheimer’s Disease. They may have known even at the time that Tom was already showing signs of this dread brain disease and decided to laugh about it, and let us laugh, while they / we still could. 

I decide to wash the car; I start toward the garage and notice the mail on the table. OK, I'm going to wash the car, but first I'm going to go through the mail. I lay the car keys down on the desk, discard the junk mail and I notice the trash can is full.

OK, I'll just put the bills on my desk and take the trash can out, but since I'm going to be near the mailbox anyway, I'll pay these few bills first. Now, where is my check book?

OOPS, there's only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk. Oh, there's the coke I was drinking. I'm going to look for those checks. But first I need to put my coke further away from the computer, or maybe I'll pop it into the fridge to keep it cold for a while.

I head towards the kitchen and my flowers catch my eye; they need some water. I set the coke on the counter and ooh, oh! There are my glasses. I was looking for them all morning! I'd better put them away first. I fill the container with water and head for the flower pots —aaaaagh! Someone left the TV remote in the kitchen. We will never think to look in the kitchen tonight when we want to watch television so I'd better put it back in the family room where it belongs.

I splash some water into the pots and onto the floor. I throw the remote onto a soft cushion on the sofa and I head back down the hall trying to figure out what it was I was going to do.

END OF DAY: The car isn't washed, the bills are unpaid, the coke is sitting on the kitchen counter, the flowers are half watered, the check book still only has one check in it and I can't seem to find my car keys! When I try to figure out how come nothing got done today, I'm baffled because I KNOW I WAS BUSY ALL DAY LONG!!!

I realize this is a serious condition and I'll get help, BUT FIRST, I think I'll check my e-mail. Please send this to everyone you know because I DON'T REMEMBER WHO I'VE SENT THIS TO! But please don't send it back to me or I might send it to you again!!!!!!!!

The Way of the Dog

I like dogs—or at least certain breeds of dogs.  On reflection, maybe I don’t like dogs so much as I like the response I have always gotten from certain breeds of dogs: immediately friendly, desirous to please, inquisitive, generally come to people rather than try to run away,  loyal to their master, quick to forgive, obedient,  expressively happy.  Memories of Labrador retrievers I have owned or been around come to mind.  But even Labs have their faults.

 As soon as you give them a bath their first desire is, in C. S. Lewis’ words, “to race off to reacquire their comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.”

 

The way of the person is, too often, much the same.  Ever since the Fall, men who get too far away—or too long away—from their Master find it easier and easier to get dirty.  To mix the metaphor slightly, dogs, people, sheep tend to get dirty, tend to too easily hearken to other masters, tend to get lost.  Not that they want to get dirty or get lost—but it happens, especially when they are around other alien (to their spirits) influences too long.

People were sent to this earth to become ‘added upon’—added upon by experience, by knowledge, by passing the tests of being faithful to the light they were endowed with at birth, by accumulating the ‘oil’ for their lamps that would one day be needful—oil of acts of kindness, of resisting harmful temptations, of using their gifts in the service of others, of faithfulness.
  

But in the process of living, all creatures ( ture=loved, creat= creation) get dirty.  They were not sent to this earth to get more and more befouled and farther and farther from their Master, but to become more and more like Him.  One way or another they need to become clean once again—if not just for judgment, and for a happy homecoming, then for reassignment.
 

He calls us back to Him by his love, his light, the attraction of the Plan He has for us.  But the way of the dog, or of the man is to not easily surrender to the Master’s invitations to return to Him as long as all seems to be going well—but in reality is going wrong.  If gentleness and meekness, and love unfeigned do not effect a return, the Master will use other means of persuasion.  Lewis, as always, puts it best:

            We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down . . . food will admit that we can ignore even pleasure.  But pain insists upon being attended to.  God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains (physical or emotional) :  it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  

Spirit Memories

What I write about today—or variants of the concept—goes by many names.  Call them echoes from the past, call them déjà vu (French for ‘already seen’), call them ‘the numinous’ (Rudolph Otto, German Protestant theologian), a ‘racial memory’ (Carl Jung, psychoanalyst), ‘reverence for life’ (Albert Schweitzer), ‘spirit memories’ (Plato), or ‘up-dwellings of the subconscious’ or intuition, not knowing what else to call it, by the generality of psychologists.  Others call it a sense of holiness. The most well-known popular writer in our time, C. S. Lewis, gives a convincing explication of the phenomena. Read him.

The point is that there is a ‘light’ in man that is stirred up at times to recognize, resonate, recall, recover and maybe reunite with divine realities.  I believe that there are pre-mortal experiences, generally hidden under mortal amnesia, that are indelible but can be sometimes consciously called-up—or, as a gift come un-bidden—that testifies of a human harmony with our past—indeed, as a partial evidence of a ‘past’ and a link to our future.

The words of Jehovah and the prophets in scripture, whether written, spoken, or directly presented within by this inner voice is yet more convincing and invites us to not only a deeper harmony and understanding of our premortal past, but also invites us and informs us how to prepare for an exciting and desirable postmortal future. 

Where ‘spirit memories’ come into play is that faith in the promises of God, whether in His son Jesus Christ or in this postmortal future, is built upon evidence.  Faith or trust in the Divine is not a blind leap but is built upon knowledge.  Knowledge of our earlier memories can be instrumental in the growth of our faith.  These ‘spirit memories’ add to our store of knowledge—another drop in the bucket.

   

The poet William Wordsworth, in words that are often quoted by us in our faith says:

            Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting / The soul that rises with us, our life’s star / Hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar/ Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness / But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

These spirit memories, these recollections or unaccountable reverberations from the past, these ‘trailing clouds of glory’ which can help to build a positive future, come in many ways—from a strain of music, from a phrase or sentiment that you hear expressed, from the sight of a person you have never seen but may indeed have seen from your deep past, from right-track feelings or a sense of the foreordained happening to you, perhaps from dreams, or other flashes or drives, or tears-in-the-eyes happenings; the tools in God’s toolbox may not be just the hammer and the saw.

In our age of skepticism, because we are afraid of being deluded, we are suspect of our subconscious and of charlatans and we may be prone to reject these things out-of-hand.  But maybe all we need to do is to ‘clean the lampshade’ and more light can come into our lives.  Then we can see clearly.  After all, “Man is that he might have joy,” and joy is associated with light.

Don’t be afraid of becoming enlightened.