Forgetting Whose We Areby David Keck

...Such orthodoxy, embracing both authentic worship and authentic teaching, supplies neither facile answers nor merely rote formularies, but pro-vides "that which most illuminates my sense of my mother's inextinguishable personhood, my own sinfulness, and God's creative and redemptive love but also that which best strengthens my desire and capacity to be faithful to her and to God...

...Jesus Christ is the church's memory, the one who fills and fulfills its liturgi-cal anamnesis...

...In Keek's parsing of the "grammar of soul," not who we are, but whose we are becomes the ulti-mate point of reference...

...Indeed, those who appear most marginalized are ac-corded by Christ the place of honor in God's own story...

...But in questions of life and death caregivers realize there is scant time to be fastidious...

...And caregivers, in the patient atten-tiveness of their service, often display a poet's touch that surpasses the power of words...

...For Alzheimer's patients and their families the traditional notion of the church as the body of Christ transcends metaphor...

...Faithful Christian prayer and practice is our attunement to God's own memory, effected as much with our bodies as with our minds...

...Keck echoes the canonical tradition in this crucial con-viction: "God is found primarily on the Cross...

...In this reading the reality of church comes into fuller relief, not as a merely voluntary association of autonomous individuals, but as the very sacrament of relationship: communion with God and with one another in Christ...

...He offers nothing less than "an Alzheimer's hermeneutic on the love of God": a perspective upon the Christian faith tradition from the vantage of an ex-perience of almost overwhelming tra-gedy...

...Church is our incorporation into a deeper truth, the vehicle of our vicarious memory, the witness to a hope that sustains...

...We remember be-cause God has first remembered us...

...Finally, in face of Alzheimer's assault upon the continuity and connectedness of narrative, Keck, with almost Au-gustinian boldness, traces a Christolo-gical reading of history...

...Christ is the church's substance and treasure and his paschal mystery reveals the structure of true selfhood...

...By contrast, Keck seeks to recover an older tradition's notion of "soul," that substratum of self-hood whereby we are held by God, whatever our conscious experience and cognitive capability...

...Alz-heimer's patients often manifest a heightened sense of beauty...

...What emerges is a less autonomous, more relational sense of selfhood...

...Therefore the church testifies, in the light of Christ, that "caregiving lies at the heart of history, because agapic love lies at the heart of proper human relationships...

...But it is the scandal of a selfhood first dissolved upon the Cross, before being raised to new and transformed life...

...He is the sure promise of things hoped for and the reality of things unseen...

...His central consideration of "method as memory" acknowledges the disintegra-tion of memory and hence of personal identity that marks Alzheimer's and make it so radical a challenge to faith and theology...

...Here the self is viewed almost exclu-sively from the vantage of consciousness and cognitive knowledge, the very di-mensions of selfhood most assaulted by Alzheimer's dementia...

...and our calling, as disciples, is "to become matured in the mystery of the Cross...

...Rarely does one encounter theologi-cal insight so happily wed to pastoral experience, reflections on the sublime cheek-by-jowl with references to "wip-ing fannies...

...His inclusive Christo-centrism expands into a sensitive medi-tation upon beauty and the "canonical imagination" that is open to receive with gratitude whatever intimations of God's glory can be discerned in the art and poetry of diverse cultures...

...At the same time he confess-es and raises to new prominence the in-tegrative power of the church's memory founded upon and daily rehearsing the saving acts of God...

...It is all this because, like John the Baptist, it constantly points be-yond itself to the one whose memory it bears, the true and faithful witness who is the foundation of its hope...

...An Alzheimer's hermeneutic, paradoxically, illuminates our common condition: humanity's deep need, God's amazing grace...

...Robert P. Imbelli In a recent review in these pages, Luke Timothy John-son lamented the absence, in so much contemporary theology, of "the robust and even pas-sionate willingness to speak in direct and first-person discourse...

...Impelled by his mother's affliction with Alzheimer's disease and its de-structive toll upon patient and caregivers alike, Keck, son of New Testament scholar Leander Keck and a historian in his own right, has written a profound-ly poignant but, ultimately, hopeful book...

...Keek's hermeneutic thus heralds a significant shift away from modern the-ology's preoccupation with the self, its vaunted "turn to the subject," originat-ing with Descartes and Kant and often resulting in a dualism of mind and body...

...We are truly constituted by our relations: most fundamentally by our relation to the God whose we are, but also to all the oth-ers with whom we share life and love...

...In the Incarnation, God, for our salvation, refuses to be fas-tidious...

...Considerations of "method" that end-lessly consume much contemporary the-ology play a more modest role for Keck as prelude to his substantive discussions...

...Yet one finishes this courageous work with a renewed sense of the rare beauty of everyday life, the undeniable darkness of death in its many forms, and the unique and scarcely comprehensi-ble promise of resurrection...

...Music can communicate even when words fail...

...Amazingly, though taking its orien-tation from the dire straits of Alzheim-er's disease, Keek's book is neither grim nor constricted...

...In telling and retelling the story of Christ, the church confesses that his is the comprehensive story that recapitulates, gathers into ful-fillment, all human stories...

...In his death and Resur-rection he has embraced all the darkness of our sin and sorrow and opened to it the promise of eternal light and life...

...Fundamental for Keck is the impor-tance of orthodoxy and canon, the root-ing of Christian imagination and praxis in the soil of Scripture and tradition: "aligning one's own life and memories with the life and memories of the church...

...David Keek's book is an encouraging exception to the dis-mal situation which Johnson describes- an exception all the more remarkable in that its focus is a disease that severely tests faith's language and content...

...its hesitancy "to embrace...

...the language of faith as some-thing more than another hypothesis" (December 20,1996...