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.
