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Every year at the end of May, the United States observes Memorial Day, a civic holiday that pays honor to those men and women of the armed services who gave their lives in the service of our country. Ceremonies, parades, and speeches will be held in towns across our nation calling to mind our heroic dead.
Memorial Day is such an integral aspect of America’s civic life that we probably do not often step back and think about the rationale for what we do—why do we wish to remember the dead?
From a civic perspective, the public commemoration of those who have died in combat serves several salutary functions: it pays honor to the sacrifice of the dead, inspires citizens to live up to the noble examples set by their fallen heroes, and offers catharsis for those who have lost loved ones. In a more fundamental sense, however, we could say that the purpose of Memorial Day is to make the dead present.
The dead are, of course, physically absent. Yet, through the ritual of collective remembrance, they are symbolically summoned back into the life of the community. When we speak their names, march in their honor, and lower our flags, we perform acts of communal memory that defy the finality of death. The fallen soldier who might otherwise be forgotten in the fog of history is restored, for a day, to the company of the living—recalled not merely as a statistic or a casualty, but as a person whose choices and sacrifice are of profound value in shaping the world we live in today. In this way, Memorial Day is less an act of mourning than of restoration: a yearly insistence that the dead have not disappeared, but remain among us as a claim on our gratitude and our conscience.
For the Catholic, this should call to mind our own ritual “making present” we enact through the Eucharist. The act of remembering holds a special place in Catholicism. In fact, in a certain sense, we are a religion of remembrance. Every Mass is a memorial; “Do this in memory of me,” the priest says when he pronounces the holy words of consecration. The remembering we do in Mass, however, is of a very special sort. If human recollection were the only point of consideration, then what we would have in the liturgy would be essentially no different than merely secular holidays whose purpose is commemorative—such as Memorial Day.
Such is not the case, however, for biblical tradition attaches a deeper meaning to the liturgical memorial. The liturgy is not merely a passive act of remembering what Christ did; rather, it is a means by which the worshiper actively enters into the very saving acts of God he is commemorating. As a cultural event the liturgy is commemorative, but as a religious event it is mystical—it is a means of transcending the workaday world and touching the divine.
To understand this, we must introduce the concept of anamnesis. Anamnesis is a kind of sacred remembering; it is the mystical means by which the worshiper connects with the divine through the ritual actions of the feast. Anamnesis is why a liturgical feast is not merely an act of commemoration but one of worship.
Let us begin with an example from the Old Testament. At the institution of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Exodus 13, God tells the Israelites through Moses:
Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the Lord. Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days; no leavened bread shall be seen with you…And you shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ And it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth…You shall therefore keep this ordinance at its appointed time from year to year. (Ex. 13:6-10)
Most relevant to our discussion is verse 8, which says, “And you shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’” Every year at the celebration of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, century after century, the Israelite worshiper is to regard himself as the direct, personal object of God’s deliverance during the Exodus. He is not directed to say, “It is because of what the Lord did for my fathers when they came out of Egypt,” but rather, “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.”
Regardless of how far removed in time a particular Israelite is from the events of the Exodus, the sacred commemoration of those events gives him direct access to God’s deliverance—it ensures that the divine power which brought the Israelites out of Egypt does not remain a mere piece of historical data, but rather becomes of personal and vital importance in the spiritual consciousness of the individual worshiper. The works of God in history are, in a certain sense, “made present” through the sacred ritual of the feast.
We would be amiss if we regarded this “making present” as a mere subjective experience, as if it consisted in nothing other than giving the worshiper a lively but ultimately imaginative reconstruction of a past event in order to move his emotions. No, for the “making present” is an objective reality. It is not that the sacred feast helped the Israelite express gratitude for God’s salvation (although it is also this); rather, the celebration of the sacred feast actually made God’s salvation present to the worshiper in an objective sense. This is true of all sacred rituals of the Old and New Testament. The “making present” may have subjective ramifications, but these are grounded in an objective reality—the real presence of God’s saving power mediated through the ritual. This is what makes sacred remembering, anamnesis, different than mere recollection.
The connection of this idea with the Christian Eucharist should be evident, as the celebration of the sacred feast of the Eucharist makes present the sacrifice of Christ and allows us to enter into this sacred mystery, becoming recipients of all the graces merited by Jesus Christ on the cross. The Eucharist itself is a sacred remembering, a calling to mind of the ultimate salvific acts of God in the person of Christ which itself makes present those acts in the transubstantiated elements.
In the liturgies of the east and west, the name anamnesis has been applied to those parts of the Eucharistic liturgy which call to mind the memorial aspect of the rite. For example, in the modern Latin rite, the anamnesis of the Eucharistic canon begins with a recollection of the death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ:
Therefore, O Lord, as we celebrate the memorial of the blessed Passion, the Resurrection from the dead, and the glorious Ascension into heaven of Christ, your Son, our Lord…
This focus on sacred remembering should never be interpreted to infer that the Eucharist is only a remembrance, for the Eucharist contains the true and Body and Blood of Jesus Christ under the forms of bread and wine. For this reason, it ought never to be viewed as merely a memorial. Rather, understood through the context of salvation history, the Eucharist is the ultimate memorial, which both calls to mind the historical death of Christ and mediates the graces of His sacrifice in the present. The Eucharist also provides a kind of ritual continuity between the mystery of Transubstantiation and the feasts of Old Testament Israel. It both commemorates and makes present—or rather, makes present through sacred commemoration.
The Eucharist accomplishes mystically what Memorial Day points to symbolically—the presence of sacrifice through ceremonial remembrance. Each bears witness to a truth that human beings have always sensed: that the act of remembrance is never merely backward-looking, but carries the past forward into the present as a vital force. One does this symbolically, the other sacramentally—but both answer the same deep hunger to remain in communion with those whose sacrifice has made us who we are.
Photo by Nicolas Michot on Unsplash
