The taste and smell of a madeleine cake dipped in tea.

We all have memories we’d rather forget—wounds that sting when touched, regrets that still echo, mistakes we’d pay dearly to undo. And every so often, a story or film captures that longing perfectly. A character walks into a clinic or signs a consent form or swallows a pill, and just like that, the painful memory is gone. It’s the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where a couple, desperate to un-love each other, erases the past. It’s in Severance, where workers split their minds in two—one for work, one for life—so the burdens of one world can’t spill into the other. Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House takes it even further: you can upload your entire memory and choose when, or whether, to look back at all.

These stories raise a question most of us carry quietly: wouldn’t it be easier if we could forget? Wouldn’t we be freer, lighter, more at peace if we could excise the hard parts—the guilt, the sorrow, the failure?

But each of these stories arrives at the same unsettling answer. When we sever ourselves from memory, we also sever ourselves from meaning. When we forget the pain, we risk forgetting the healing. And that’s not freedom. It’s disfigurement.

Faith has always taken memory seriously. The Psalms are full of remembering—not sentimentally, but honestly, painfully. “I remember God, and I moan,” the psalmist says (Psalm 77:3). The Exodus is remembered at every Passover—not because it’s easy, but because it tells the truth. In our own tradition, we break bread “in remembrance” of Jesus—not to recall a fond feeling, but to hold in our bodies a story that still aches and still saves. In Scripture, memory is a sacrament.

And not just personal memory. Karen Russell’s newest novel, The Antidote, invites us to consider what happens when an entire town tries to forget something it cannot bear to remember. Her Dust Bowl parable imagines a place that stuffs its secrets into cracks in the earth and pretends they never existed. But nothing hidden stays buried. Memory reemerges. History refuses to lie still. And the community’s healing only begins when the silenced voices are finally named and heard.

In that way, her novel isn’t just a fantasy. It’s a theological reflection. It reminds us that the past isn’t past. That the things we bury—individually, collectively—still shape the air we breathe.

We live in a culture that’s constantly negotiating its relationship to the past. Statues topple. Apologies are issued. History is rewritten or whitewashed or weaponized. And the Church is not immune. We have our own repressions. Our own moments we’d rather not revisit. But the gospel does not permit selective amnesia. It leads us, again and again, to the cross—a place where pain is neither forgotten nor glorified, but held in divine love. A place where wounds are not edited out, but touched and transformed.

To erase a memory might bring temporary relief. But to remember truthfully—especially when it hurts—opens the door to grace. That’s the difference between denial and redemption.

And perhaps the hardest part is this: sometimes God feels absent in the remembering. We recall the mistake, the loss, the injustice—and we do not feel divine comfort. We feel alone. The silence can be heavy. But even there, Scripture bears witness. Job cries out to a hidden God. The psalmist begs, “Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus, on the cross, asks the same.

So what if God is not absent from our memory, but hidden within it—waiting to be found not in erasure, but in reckoning?

To remember is not to wallow. It is to attend. To make space for grief and truth. To refuse to call healing what has not yet healed. To believe that God can meet us, not only in joy, but in sorrow. Not only in light, but in shadow.

In the end, we do not find freedom by forgetting. We find it by remembering rightly. The early Church used the language of “anamnesis”—not just recalling the past, but drawing it into the present so that it might be transfigured. We do that every Sunday. We remember a broken body and poured-out blood. And in doing so, we declare that what happened still matters. That it still heals. That God is not done.

So no, I don’t wish for the gift of forgetting. I want the grace of holy memory. Not the kind that crushes, but the kind that redeems. The kind that keeps wounds visible—not as shame, but as witness. The kind that makes us honest and brave and just. The kind that names the past and still dares to hope.

Because hope, too, is a kind of memory—stretched forward, not backward. It remembers what God has done and trusts what God will do. Even if we tremble. Even if we can’t quite feel it yet.

Holy memory is what lets us live in truth. And only truth, however painful, can set us free.