Take my memory

Image by @ozseyrek at Unsplash

The Suscipe

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 1491-1556

I was instructed to pray the Suscipe while on silent retreat under the direction of David Gross, of blessed memory, at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. This morning I prayed it with the zoom Morning Devotions crew at St. Andrew’s and it revealed something reassuring to me as we seek to care for an aging parent with cognitive decline:

Take, Lord,… my memory….

I am comforted by the thought of offering our powers of memory back to God. Perhaps Papa is experiencing the shifts in his memory as a release of the intellectual gifts he has been given. Papa is not upset or rattled when he cannot remember- he kindly asks one of us (usually Nana, and multiple times an hour) to be his memory.

The Suscipe is a very intimate prayer— with an intense, internal focus. As we contemplate care options, I’m going to open it up to include Papa, and pray it in the third person.

Take, Lord, and receive all of Carl’s liberty,
his memory, his understanding,
and his entire will,
All he has and calls his own.

You have given all to him.
To you, Lord, he returns it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give Carl only your love and your grace,
that is enough for him.