Part of the spiritual care work that I do is with people who have dementia. Different stages, different diagnoses, different ways that people are living with changes in memory and language.
Since getting more deeply into this work, I have been wondering, from a theological perspective, what memory means when we can no longer remember in the way we used to—or in the way the world expects us to.
We tend to think of memory as something each person is supposed to keep for themselves: names, dates, “their” story, the answer to a direct question. When those things become difficult to retrieve, we often talk about them as though they have been lost.
But what if they are not lost at all? What if they are simply showing up somewhere else? What if memory can live in a song, a gesture, a familiar face, a movement, a feeling of safety? And what if we are being invited not only to help fill in the gaps, but to become attentive to the ways memory is still making itself known—even when it looks different than it did before?
This question becomes especially interesting when we look at Scripture, because the Bible has quite a lot to say about remembering.
In fact, God is insistent that we remember.
“Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you,” Deuteronomy says. “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 8:2, 11).
“Remember this day,” Moses tells the Israelites after they leave Egypt (Exodus 13:3).
“Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this” (Deuteronomy 24:18).
That last one is especially interesting. The command to remember is immediately connected to how the people are supposed to live. God calls the people to remember what it was like to be vulnerable, to have been strangers and enslaved people themselves. That memory is meant to shape how they see others who are vulnerable now. Because they remember who they once were, they are commanded to care for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow.
Remembering in Scripture is not simply about retrieving information.
Remembering does something.
It changes how we see, how we live, and how we treat one another.
I love the story from Joshua, where the Israelites cross the Jordan and take twelve stones from the river and place them on the other side. This is done so that when future generations ask, “What do these stones mean?” the people can tell the story of what God has done (Joshua 4:6–7).
The Israelites are not simply told to make sure every individual person remembers forever.
They are building a community that remembers.
The stones witness.
The stories remind.
The rituals connect them and knit them together.
The people remember for one another.
And this is where dementia presents such interesting theological questions.
What happens when someone cannot remember?
What happens when the command that appears again and again in Scripture—to remember—becomes something a person can no longer do in the way they once could?
If remembering is simply a matter of holding information in our own minds, then dementia creates a painful contradiction. God commands us to remember, but some people can no longer remember in the ways that command seems to require.
But perhaps dementia invites us to look at remembering differently—to focus not on what a person can no longer do, but what this experience might reveal to us about God and about the kind of people God has created us to be: people who remember together, who carry one another’s stories, and who make room for memory to take forms we may not always recognize.
Because, if we are honest, Scripture is full of forgetful people.
The command to remember exists because God’s people are remarkably good at forgetting.
“They soon forgot God’s works,” the psalmist says (Psalm 106:13). Deuteronomy speaks of the people forgetting the God who gave them birth (Deuteronomy 32:18).
Again and again, the biblical story is not a story of people who remember perfectly.
It is a story of people who forget—and a God who keeps remembering.
What if the command to remember is less about our individual capacity to remember and more about the character of God and the type of community that God is creating?
God remembers.
God remembers the covenant. God remembers the people who cry out. God remembers those whose stories have been ignored or erased. God remembers the beloved.
God sees.
God turns toward.
God does not stop knowing us when we stop being able to tell our own story.
And this is something that dementia is reminding me about God: God is not dependent upon our ability to remember God in order for God to remember us.
And because this is who God is, then perhaps dementia also reveals something about the community God is creating in and through the church.
Because remembering has never been something we were meant to do alone.
The church itself is a community of memory. We remember in Scripture and sacrament, through song and ritual, through photographs and stories and the names we speak aloud on All Saints’ Day. We remember baptisms. We remember promises. We remember those who have died.
Remembering together is a crucial part of how God has created us. It’s part of what it means to be human—to belong to one another, to carry what another cannot carry alone, especially because we are all, in one way or another, a forgetful people.
There are moments in dementia care when a person cannot tell me the name of a song, but when I begin to sing, they join me. Moments when someone may not be able to explain why something feels familiar, but their body responds with recognition. A person might not be able to tell me that they feel safe, but their shoulders soften when I enter the room. A face, a melody, a gesture, a prayer, the cadence of a familiar voice—these can sometimes reach places that a direct question cannot.
When I pay attention, it seems to me that the memory has not disappeared. It simply no longer lives where I first expect to find it.
What do we miss by privileging the memories people can articulate? Because I believe there are other forms of remembering, too.
And perhaps dementia asks something of those of us who are still able to remember in the ways the world values.
Not simply, “How can we get this person to remember?”
But, “How can we remember with them?”
How can we carry the story when someone else can no longer carry all of it?
How can we recognize and notice what is still present instead of only grieving what is absent?
How can we resist the temptation to equate memory with personhood—to assume that when someone can no longer remember the way they once did, they have somehow become less fully themselves, or even less fully human?
And how might we learn to look for the person who is still there, rather than seeing only the things that dementia has changed?
This does not mean pretending that dementia is not difficult. It is. There is profound grief in changes to memory, language, relationships, independence, and identity. Families grieve. Caregivers grieve. People living with dementia grieve. There are losses that should not be minimized or spiritualized away.
The Christian hope is not that we will always be able to remember everything.
We have always been a forgetful people.
The command to remember was never a demand for perfect memory, but an invitation to return the deeper truth that we are remembered.
Remembered by God.
Remembered by one another.
Held within a story larger than our own ability to tell it.
Leave a Reply