[3/9] Novena of Grace: "Memory"

I

n the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius of Loyola invites retreatants to engage the three powers of the soul: memory, understanding, and will in a series of contemplations that are both imaginative and spiritually intense: the fall of the angels, the sin of our first parents, and the condemnation of a single person for one mortal sin.

On the third day of our novena we focus on memory. La memoria in Spanish is used 13 times in the Autograph and it is the first of three to be engaged in meditation in which St Ignatius asks in each of the types of sins we just mentioned "to recall to memory." In the Confessions, St Augustine searches for God in his memory. “These actions are inward, in the vast hall of my memory. There sky, land, and sea are available to me...” (Confessions).

Memory evokes sacred remembrance and gives the soul access to the story of sin and salvation. St Ignatius believed that when the three powers work together in prayer, the soul is truly opened to transformation. Contrition, then, is not something we fabricate; it is a grace that arises naturally when memory, understanding, and will are drawn into the presence of God.

Fr Ramon Bautista SJ offers a pastoral reflection on how contemplation engages the power of memory. “A beautiful fruit of contemplation,” he says, “is that it creates precious memories. Memories don’t just happen; we need to make them. In the 30-day retreat, especially from Week Two onward, retreatants make four to five contemplations a day. Over time, this steady rhythm does more than inspire insight—it imprints graced memories. Years and even decades later retreatants still remember specific contemplations, not as mental recollections alone, but as living memories of encountering the Lord."

In the Confessions, St Augustine devotes the first half of Book 10 to a description of the contents of his memory. He compares memory to a stomach—an organ that digests experience. St Augustine writes: “Memory appears to me like a stomach, but memory is in the mind, whereas the stomach is in the body. When we put food in the stomach, if it is not digested, it is thrown up. Similarly, things that enter memory and are not digested are forgotten.”

For St Augustine, “The power of memory is great, very great..." He described it as a vast inner palace or house, filled with images, impressions, and memories—some easily accessible, others hidden and in need of searching. But this house of memory was not just a repository of the past; it was the very place where the self is formed and where the soul becomes conscious of itself. It is said that you are the sum of your experiences. However, who you are is what you can remember.

Yet, St Augustine also acknowledged the limits of memory. He admitted he could not fully understand himself. Parts of us remain unknown—hidden desires, unresolved contradictions, long-forgotten wounds. As Nietzsche would later observe, “We necessarily remain strangers, even to ourselves.” But rather than despair, St Augustine turned this mystery into an invitation: to approach memory with humility, as a place where God is already present.

For example, a person may suddenly recall a moment from childhood—a look of disappointment from a parent, a harsh word from a teacher—that they had not thought about in years. Yet in prayer, this memory surfaces with surprising emotional weight. The pain was never fully understood or healed. But now, within the safety of God's presence, that memory becomes not just a recollection, but a place of encounter. The wound remembered becomes a space where grace can finally enter. In this way, memory becomes more than a record of the past; it becomes a living space where God speaks to us. A friend summed up his 30-day retreat in a single line that barely scratches the surface of a graced encounter: "If I can only tell you how he looked at me with so much love."

No wonder some people—those we’ve known in our lives—seem to live inside memory. They find meaning by looking back, by recognizing how grace has threaded itself through their story. In a world that constantly pulls us outward, memory invites us inward—to reflect, to recollect, and to rediscover the God who has been with us all along.

Like the first gift of liberty in the Suscipe prayer, memory too is a gift—"natural endowment"—we are invited to return to God. “Take, Lord, and receive… my memory.” To surrender our house of memory is to allow God to build it, heal it, and to tarry there forever.

Like St Augustine, he went deep into his memory in search of God—and discovered that God had been there all along. “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within, and I was in the external world and sought you there.”

The external world, for all its beauty, can distract us from the deeper interior reality. St Augustine reminds us that finding God in all things is not done outside of us. In the house of memory we find all things in God. And it can become the very place of remembrance where we are found by God. Fr JM Manzano SJ

Grace to Beg For: "Lord, grant me the grace of sacred memory—to remember Your light in the midst of darkness, to recall Your promises when hope grows dim, and to let the memory of Your faithfulness anchor me in You."

Do you feel the world is broken?
We do.
Do you feel the shadows deepen?
We do.

These lines echo not just our present sorrow but our collective memory of a world that was, and a world we long to be made new. But even in the dark, the memory of light remains. Memory is what keeps the hope alive—that the Lion of Judah who conquered the grave has already written the end of the story. “Jesus, help me to remember You—when the world forgets, when I forget, when grief clouds my vision. Let the memory of Your victory carry me through every shadow.”

Suscipe and Anima Christi