A Thanksgiving Gift from Tod Bolsinger

Tod Bolsinger quotes from a book by a grad of MIT who lived with the deliberately primitive Anabaptists to understand what technology has wrought among us. Tod quotes a passage in which the author, Eric Brende, a Roman Catholic, describes the singing of the Anabaptists. In it, the worshipers, remembered many things; that is, they were mysteriously re-membered with all the people and events of faith history, such as what we Lutherans believe happens when we receive Holy Communion.

Several lines that Bolsinger sites from Brende's book particularly struck me:

Yet what the singers remembered was no less important than what they forgot: themselves. This music reached for something higher.

It seems to me that one key to thankfulness and really, to happiness, which is always reached indirectly rather than by a rough singularity of purpose, is to forget ourselves. It's also how we experience God's presence in our lives.

That, I suppose, is another paradox of faith in Christ: We experience God when we both remember and forget.