Such are the popular, and often funny, associations we have with the word "amnesia." But in his book, Dr. Sacks describes the much sadder case of Jimmie, who suffers from amnesia brought on by years of heavy drinking. Jimmie's amnesia is so severe he must live in a nursing home, which happens to be run by an order of nuns. Dr. Sacks meets him there in 1975, when Jimmie is fifty years old, but Jimmie believes it's 1945 and says he hasn't turned twenty yet. Jimmie has absolutely no memory of the thirty years between 1945 and 1975, and he is incapable of creating or retaining new memories.

At one point, Dr. Sacks confronts Jimmie with his own reflection in a mirror, and Jimmie reacts with horror: "Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?" Two minutes later, Jimmie greets Dr. Sacks as if they're meeting for the first time. Episodes such as this one lead the good doctor to wonder whether Jimmie has a soul. Dr. Sacks writes:

"One tended to speak of him, instinctively, as a spiritual casualty-- a 'lost soul': was it possible that he had really been 'de-souled' by a disease? 'Do you think he has a soul?' I once asked the Sisters. They were outraged by my question, but could see why I asked it. 'Watch Jimmie in chapel, they said, 'and judge for yourself.'

I did, and I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue, and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit with the spirit of the Mass. Fully, intensely, quietly, in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no [amnesia] then, nor did it seem possible or imaginable that there should be; for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism-- that of meaningless sequences and memory traces-- but was absorbed in an act, an act of his whole being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity, a continuity and unity so seamless it could not permit any break.

Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual attention and act. The Sisters were right-- he did find his soul here."

Who knew that in the Eucharist we would find the cure for amnesia? But that's exactly what the Eucharist is. Paul writes to the Corinthians "For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.' For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."

When Paul wrote these words of Christ to the Corinthians, he used the Greek language. As a rule, I try not to bring Greek words into my sermons, because they either bog down the sermon or make the preacher look like a know-it-all-or both. But since you already know that I'm a know-it-all, I just can't resist telling you that the word for "remember" in Greek is "anamnesia," the exact opposite of amnesia. We could call remembrance "un-amnesia." So when I read Dr. Sacks' account of Jimmie's encounter with the Eucharist, I had to wonder whether Dr. Sacks realized that "Do this in remembrance of me" was "Do this in un-amnesia of me."

If we think of the Eucharist as the cure for amnesia, however, we are led inexorably to ask: What does our remembrance of Christ in the Eucharist actually do? Well, first off, memory makes the thing remembered present. When we remember Christ, we ask for his presence among us. "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am also," Jesus said, and to be gathered together in Christ's name is to remember Christ. I am reminded of the Gospel story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They do not recognize Jesus, they do not remember Jesus, until he breaks bread with them. Until they participate in the Eucharist of the Risen Lord, they are amnesiacs. But Christ's Presence in the breaking of the bread cures them through un-amnesia, remembrance. When Christ says "there I am also," he means he is present not merely in mind and heart, but in reality. So too, Christ has a "Real Presence" in the Church when we gather together in Christ's name, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Now this would be a lecture on psychology and not a homily if I were to offer up the view that our remembrance of Christ only makes Christ metaphorically present, "as if" he were here when we remember him. For we have all had, perhaps, moments of sentimental reminiscence, when we remember fondly how a loved one used to be: we see Grandpa's old recliner and remember vividly, if only for a moment, all the heroic stories he would tell about the war, or we step back into our second grade classroom and remember what a strict disciplinarian Mrs. Obenaus was, and for a moment we can even feel her pulling painfully at our earlobes! Reminiscence, however, is not the same as remembrance.

For there is something about the Eucharist that makes Christ's presence in and among us more than metaphorical, more than sentimental, more than merely psychological. And this something is the Holy Spirit. In Eucharistic Prayer II, which we are using tonight, after we remember Christ's words, his "do this in remembrance of me," the Celebrant prays: "And we most humbly beseech thee, O merciful Father, to hear us, and with thy Word and Holy Spirit, to bless and sanctify these gifts of bread and wine, that they may be unto us the Body and Blood of thy dearly-beloved Son Jesus Christ." We invoke the Holy Spirit, in essence, to show us what the bread and wine of the Eucharist truly are, so that recognizing Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit may also cause us to remember ourselves as the Body of Christ, the Church. We remember Christ's Body broken for us in the Eucharist so that the Holy Spirit may, through that broken Body, re-member, reconstitute us, as the Body of Christ present in the world.

In short, when we receive the Body of Christ, we become the Body of Christ. This is not a psychological truth or a metaphorical truth, but a truth of God's Presence in, among, and through us. We are mysteriously brought into the life and work of Christ by being re-membered as his Body. And this truth transcends the petty debates over whether we should have a "substatiationist" or "memorialist" point of view of the Eucharist. If you are familiar with these arguments, fine. If you aren't, you are blesséd. The point is, these sophisticated debates are worthless, a pile of straw, when we stop arguing about the mystery and actually begin to participate in it.

Queen Elizabeth I recognized this truth in the middle of the debate between catholic-minded Anglicans and ultra-protestant Anglicans in the 1650's and 60's-a debate that threatened to split or even permanently decimate the English Church. When The Book of Common Prayer was being revised, the traditionalists wanted the words "The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life" to be said to the communicant as he or she received the bread, because this sentence would emphasize the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But the protestant party wanted new words, "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving," because it emphasized the memorial aspect of the Eucharist. Torn between these two views, it seemed as if Queen Elizabeth would have to make a decision for one and not the other. But then, I believe, the Holy Spirit intervened. For rather than choosing between the two, Elizabeth ordered that both sentences be said to the communicant, thereby making it possible for both parties to worship side-by-side in one community. In Rite I to this day, if the priest can remember it all, the communicants hear "The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving." Thus, while it takes longer to hear the words of administration than it does to eat the bread, both theological views are united in the act of communion. Queen Elizabeth penned a brief poem that reflects her view of the Eucharist in these words:

'Twas God the Word that spake it,
He took the Bread and brake it;
And what the Word did make it,
That I believe, and take it.

Like Elizabeth, I believe we should not be worried about what kind of Presence Christ has in the Eucharist and in the Church, but that Christ is Present in the Eucharist and the Church. Whether you prefer to listen to the first part of the words of administration or the second part matters not a whit if you are prepared through the remembrance of Christ's Body to be re-membered by Christ's Body into Christ's Body. As St. Augustine liked to proclaim at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer: "Behold what you are. Become what you behold."

Elizabeth reminds us of something about the Eucharist in her poem which most Theologians forget: that the Eucharist is not a thing but an act. As the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann has put it, "Remembrance is an act of love. God remembers us and His remembrance, His love, is the foundation of the world. In Christ, we remember. We become again beings open to love, and we remember. The Eucharist is the sacrament of cosmic remembrance: it is indeed a restoration of love as the very life of the world."

Amnesia is a terrible thing not because it erases the past, but because it does not hold out any possibility of a future, or even a present. We experience memory in the present. And this experience of present memory enables us to have a future, to build a future, as well as to learn from our past. Without memory, community is impossible, but in the Eucharist, our memory of Christ is a memory not merely of past events, but of the promise of a future for the community of the Church. For when we remember Christ's death, we also remember his resurrection. And when we remember his resurrection, we also remember his coming again in glory, and are thereby equipped to do the work he has given us to do in this present age, now and in the future.

We have gathered here this evening to remember the night before Jesus was betrayed, the night on which he instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, the night in which he gave his disciples the example of love as service when he said "the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves." We are here to remember, and to prepare for still further remembering. What strange amnesiacs we are, who need to be reminded to remember! But we have the cure for our amnesia in the Eucharist, in the Real Presence of the Body of Christ, which makes us a part of his Body. The remembrance, or un-amnesia, of the Body of Christ, is the cure for amnesia. This Maundy Thursday, remember to take your medicine.