Anamnesis - Remember Who You Are
Brothers Aramis and Porthos know my fondness for Distributist ideas and ideals. But on this Memorial Day in the United States, and elsewhere around the world, it is easy to forget the connection between our agrarian heritage -- our biblical mandate of good stewardship of the Earth and every person's closeness to the need to grow food, whether we recognize it or not.
We laud the work of such farmers as the Yeoman Farmer, whose blog provides a well needed wonderful dose of wisdom, faith, and reality. (Go and read!)
But this Memorial Day, may I humbly implore you to carve a scant fifteen minutes from your (all too) busy schedule to watch this video by Matthew Kraus.
Make it part of your devotional time today. It may change your life.
2 comments:
Anamnesis in ecclesial Greek is the great remembrance of salvation history during the Mass. But in common Greek, it is simple "calling to mind, recalling," for any who might quibble with the sub-title.
Ath,
I liked the movie; a bit like "An Inconvenient Truth" wouldn't you say, except there is no politician with charts & arrows behind the message and it is much shorter.
As you might know, I am re-visiting Bailie's "Theology of the Body" tape series and in it he talks a bit about the fact that we shouldn’t fear a frontal attack of Christian creeds, but rather our benign neglect. Throughout my 20 some years of experience in participating and running leadership programs I have been amazed at how people can be so energized and motivated, caught up in a ‘positive’ spirit, and yet due to the fact that we cannot bring in our faith, we simply dismiss (or neglect) the entire subject of one’s faith. And so when the group came to matters addressing “life” issues, where one made critical decisions, we found that almost all participants made decisions based on political or economical reasoning and NOT by faith or their religion. The programs are really nothing more than a teaching tool and/or indoctrination, as one could view the programs, of the participants on how to enhance their skills at making decisions based in the political and economical mindset – a re-enforcement of the suppression our religiousness as human beings.
Unlike the Yeoman Farmer who broadcasts his Catholic faith loud and clear, most of the stories coming from the perspective that “small is better than big” – “back to basics” – organic vs. processed - get handcuffed by media restraints, or embarrassed to bring up faith, or the people treat their religion as trivial or secondary factors to their personhood and overall “mission” in life. In this particular short film where we have a couple of college professor types evolving into organic farmers I think it is safe to assume that they would consider their religiousness as secondary, but again that may be unfair.
All this may be unfair, but I wonder if you were to do a little film of a group on Muslim small farmer/s could you do it without including their religion? Maybe you could, I don’t know, but what I do know is how we all seem to get caught up in the political/economic mode of thought and neglect our faith. How do we overcome this benign neglect that is so easy to fall into?
Post a Comment