"A Room Called Remember"

I've been doing a lot of remembering lately. We've experienced several illnesses and deaths in our extended family the last several months. These events always conjure up memories, some good and some not so good ... but all important in some way or another.

Frederick Buechner writes about the importance of remembering in his book "A Room Called Remember."

He writes that it's good "from time to time--to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to the long journeys of our lives with all their twistings and turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember--the room where with patience, charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived."

Those "remembrances" form the foundation of who we have become and in many cases why we have become this particular person. The people we have met, interacted with, loved ... they have immeasurably impacted and shaped us. Many times without our realizing it.

As I have been doing some "remembering" these past few weeks, I can't help but feel blessed, grateful. As Buechner says, it's during our trips to the room called Remember where "the dead are alive again" and "where we are most alive ourselves."