By Nancy Gordon, director, CLH Center for Spirituality and Aging

In Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia, Anne Davis Basting ponders our expectations of memory and our fear of its loss. She points to our age-phobic culture that doesn’t like to think about either death or meaninglessness and the difficulty we have when we encounter Alzheimer’s disease, because it brings up thoughts of both. She points to our societal narratives around memory loss associated with dementia—where the theme is the tragedy of the fall from love and beauty, success and identity to a place of tragic separation from and loss of the self.

While the scientific community focuses on a cure for the disease, she calls us to “change our attitudes and our care practices.” This is a call that all faith communities need to hear. As more and more people live longer and longer lives, we will have more and more persons among us in the early, middle and late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We can label the presence of the Alzheimer’s disease in our midst as a “tragedy” and not step beyond our fears. Or we can see an opportunity to be more fully a faith community responding with grace and intentionality to the needs in our midst.

Faith communities have particular resources to respond to the call to “change our attitudes and our care practices” in relating to those with Alzheimer’s disease. We have the theological affirmation that each and every one of us is created in God’s image—and we carry that image for our entire life. Loss of memory and intellectual capacity does not erase God’s image within us, nor does it negate our personhood. While our hyper-cognitive culture tends to equate loss of memory and mind power with loss of the self, we are more than our minds, and the affirmation of carrying God’s image in our being reminds us of that.

And while all of us forget things both large and small, we were created by a God who doesn’t forget, and who most particularly, does not forget his people. Scripture is full of stories of God’s remembering—from Noah floating in the ark, to the children of Israel in Egypt, to the return of the exiles to Israel. And when God remembers, God acts in ways that are salvific and redemptive. God’s remembering is not an intellectual exercise but is action on behalf of his people, action that is full of grace and mercy.

From a Christian perspective, part of the call for faith communities to “change our attitudes and our care practices” is to live into the call of being Christ’s body in the world, and as his body, remembering those with Alzheimer’s as God remembers—with concrete actions. Part of this remembering is finding creative ways to include those with Alzheimer’s disease and their caretakers in the life of the congregation. Isolation and loneliness are common for those with the disease and for those who care for them. Remembering them as God remembers—in concrete ways, actually re-members them, re-joins them to the body.

Can I encourage you to practice remembering as God remembers—concretely, in ways that are redemptive, and in actions filled with mercy and grace—and focus such remembering on those in your midst who can no longer remember because of Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias? What kind of ministries of care and presence might result because we are seeking to remember as God remembers? And what might we learn about belonging to God and being remembered by him in this process?