"A better place by far to linger in the night season"

Wycliffe College

     "Even my mother and father may, and in death probably will, forget me (Isa. 49:15; Ps. 27:10). I feel this every day. Perhaps my children have their own version of this sorry sentiment of being abandoned to the solitude of memory. And so I lie awake at night, grasping at what those who gave me life have let go of and left for me to fathom and fix, the impossible task of sleeplessness and of the sleepless ages. Yet I am remembering the wrong things. God responds to Israel: 'Yet will I not forget thee' (Isa. 49:15). A better place by far to linger in the night season. There is, by definition, no guard, no incapacity, no limit set against a memory such as this."

     Ephraim Radner, "The back page:  What to remember," First things no. 350 (February 2025):  71 (72-71).  Opening paragraph:  "I had thought of calling this piece 'Against Memory.' Hyperbolic, perhaps, but I had my reasons. I’ve started regularly waking up in the middle of the night, often for hours at a time. I’m told it’s common for people my age. I start mulling things over. Not just from yesterday, but from all my yesterdays, my life and the people in it. The night is dark, and thoughts tend to go in one direction: failures, disappointments, fears. Things I wish I could forget, and whose disappearance would cost no one but only gain some measure of peace."

"no longer is death terrifying"

     "That death has been dissolved, and the cross has become victory over it, and it is no longer strong but is itself truly dead, no mean proof but an evident surety is that it is despised by all Christ's disciples, and everyone tramples on it, and no longer fears it, but with the sign of the cross and faith in Christ tread it under foot as something dead.  Of old, before the divine sojourn of the Savior, all used to weep for those dying as if they were perishing.  But since the Savior's raising of the body, no longer is death fearsome [(οὐκέτι . . . φοβερός)], but all believers in Christ tread on it as nothing, and would rather choose to die than deny their faith in Christ."

 St. Athanasius, De incarnatione 27, trans. Behr (St. Athanasius the Great On the incarnation:  Greek original and English translation, Popular patristics series 44a (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2011), 108-109).