To Remember Moments Lost
- Nicholas Fournie
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
By Nicholas Fournie
The human world is driven by story. We have the unique ability to enter other people’s lives through word and image. In doing so, we condense the vastness of a life into highlights, and those highlights have a way of gripping our hearts. This is as true of the story of Jesus of Nazareth as it is for each of us.
I felt that familiar sensation of a life flashing before my eyes, as I compiled the Cynthia Bourgeault Digital Archive over these past months. I scanned and organized documents from throughout the life and ministry of the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault, collapsing minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years into folders of highlights that I could experience, condensed yet vivid. The images of TCS’s early days spoke of a different time, and yet here I was, holding them in the present, looking at a moment lost forever.
When we witness a life flash before our eyes, through archives, movies, stories, we lose the age, wisdom, beauty, and depth that each of those moments carved into the one who lived them. The same is true of our own memories. As we live in the infinite present, we are the product of every past moment that has shaped us. Yet when memory reaches back to moments, people, and places that are lost, it collapses everything in between. In that collapse, we often feel loss, whether the memory is happy or sad. We feel grief because we have loved and lost, and because memory is our most direct access to something that will never “be” again. In this way, engaging memory is a kind of memento mori ("remember you must die"). To remember is to be reminded that everything we think we have will one day cease to be.
Being asked to write a reflection on the spiritual relationship to memory this month has been especially pertinent. As I sit down to write on my father’s birthday, a day overshadowed by his last, I remember our family sitting around the table in the palliative care ward, singing “Happy Birthday” as each person slowly broke down into tears, trying to avoid eye contact; the moment was too real to bear. He left this Earth just three weeks later.
Over the years, this season has become a time rich with memories, and as I grow older, to remember is increasingly synonymous with grief. As I reflected on memory, knowing this written piece and this important anniversary were to converge, I noticed that my grief at his loss seems to have grown over the years, not shrunk, as most would assume. The more distant he becomes in time, the more lost he feels in my heart. Perhaps that is not a sign of failure, but of enduring love.
Growing up immersed in Eastern religion and philosophy, it was all about “cultivating the present.” Being unattached to things, such as loss, was a virtue I was vehemently (and unsuccessfully) cultivating. Yet, the Christian narrative, with all its joy and sorrow, has taught me that while an equanimous awareness of the present moment matters, experiencing the fullness of human emotion, including grief, is Divine. When Jesus knew his crucifixion was imminent, he didn’t surrender with an emotionless, philosophical perspective of impermanence; he turned to those he loved and said, "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me" (Matthew 26:38).
I first encountered Gurdjieff as a boy, not through his ideas, but through his music. There was one piece in particular, "Song of a Fisherwoman," that touched me deeply. I didn’t yet know he was a mystic; I only knew that the music seemed to hold a kind of mourning I couldn’t name.
When I later discovered that this music came from a spiritual teacher, I was all the more interested, but I could never quite place him. One thing he taught, though, stayed with me: the concept of “self-remembering.” In my own memory, self-remembering is less a technique than an orientation: not clinging to a story about myself, but remembering myself as more vast than any single thought, feeling, or moment. In this sense, self-remembering becomes the practice of not identifying with the self, but of resting in a wider awareness that includes it, an awareness that, in the Christian tradition, we might name the "I AM."
Working with Cynthia Bourgeault’s archive has brought this tension into sharp relief. On one hand, there is memory: the photographs, the letters, the recordings; highlights of a life that can evoke joy and grief in equal measure in the onlooker. On the other, there is self-remembering: the quiet, present-moment awareness that refuses to reduce her personage to any one story, even a sacred one.
Perhaps the balance we are called to is not to choose between memory and self-remembering, but to hold them together. Jesus became fully human and felt the fullness of human emotion: grief, sorrow, love, abandonment. But he was not stuck in it. He also knew that this was not the full story. In Gethsemane, he entered the depths of human suffering, yet he did so within a larger trust: "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want" (Mark 14:36).
In the same way, our memories of our fathers, our teachers, our communities, can be places of profound grief and profound love. They can flash before our eyes, collapsing years into moments, and in that collapsing we feel loss. And yet, in the midst of that loss, we can also remember ourselves as more than our grief: as beings held in something vaster, something that does not erase the pain, but gives it a home. To remember, then, is not only to look back. It is also to remember who we are, here and now, in the presence of all that we have loved and lost, and to know, beneath every story, the simple, steadying truth: I AM.
Nicholas Fournie
As Communications Coordinator for TCS, Nicholas stewards the organization’s digital presence and supports projects that expand access to contemplative resources. His background spans non-profit communications, digital strategy, and theological study with a grounded understanding of the Western contemplative tradition.
Nicholas’ path has been shaped by a wide-ranging spiritual journey, from early exposure to Buddhism to explorations in Gaudiya Vaisnavism and Eastern Christianity, eventually leading him to the Western Wisdom tradition. Alongside his professional work, he writes and creates spaces for reflection at the intersection of inner life and everyday experience. He is particularly drawn to questions of meaning, identity, and integrity in modern life, offering a relational approach rooted in honesty, attention, and the slow work of becoming.
To connect with Nicholas about this reflection, please comment below
Comments