Forgetting Whose We Are: Alzheimer's Disease and the Love of God.

In a recent review in these pages, Luke Timothy Johnson lamented the absence, in so much contemporary theology, of "the robust and even passionate willingness to speak in direct and first-person discourse"; its hesitancy "to embrace...the language of faith as something more than another hypothesis" (December 20, 1996). David Keck's book is an encouraging exception to the dismal situation which Johnson describes - an exception all the more remarkable in that its focus is a disease that severely tests faith's language and content.

Impelled by his mother's affliction with Alzheimer's disease and its destructive toll upon patient and caregivers alike, Keck, son of New Testament scholar Leander Keck and a historian in his own right, has written a profoundly poignant but, ultimately, hopeful book. He offers nothing less than "an Alzheimer's hermeneutic on the love of God": a perspective upon the Christian faith tradition from the vantage of an experience of almost overwhelming tragedy. Yet one finishes this courageous work with a renewed sense of the rare beauty of everyday life, the undeniable darkness of death in its many forms, and the unique and scarcely comprehensible promise of resurrection.

Fundamental for Keck is the importance of orthodoxy and canon, the rooting of Christian imagination and praxis in the soil of Scripture and tradition: "aligning one's own life and memories with the life and memories of the church." Such orthodoxy, embracing both authentic worship and authentic teaching, supplies neither facile answers nor merely rote formularies, but provides "that which most illuminates my sense of my mother's inextinguishable personhood, my own sinfulness, and God's creative and redemptive love but also that which best strengthens my desire and capacity to be faithful to her and to God."

Considerations of "method" that endlessly consume much contemporary theology play a more modest role for Keck as prelude to his substantive discussions. His central consideration of "method as memory" acknowledges the disintegration of memory and hence of personal identity that marks Alzheimer's and make it so radical a challenge to faith and theology. At the same time he confesses and raises to new prominence the integra five power of the church's memory founded upon and daily rehearsing the saving acts of God. We remember because God has first remembered us. Faithful Christian prayer and practice is our attunement to God's own memory, effected as much with our bodies as with our minds.

Keck's hermeneutic thus heralds a significant shift away from modern theology's preoccupation with the self, its vaunted "turn to the subject," originating with Descartes and Kant and often resulting in a dualism of mind and body. Here the self is viewed almost exclusively from the vantage of consciousness and cognitive knowledge, the very dimensions of selfhood most assaulted by Alzheimer's dementia. By contrast, Keck seeks to recover an older tradition's notion of "soul," that substratum of self-hood whereby we are held by God, whatever our conscious experience and cognitive capability. In Keck's parsing of the "grammar of soul," not who we are, but whose we are becomes the ultimate point of reference.

What emerges is a less autonomous, more relational sense of selfhood. We are truly constituted by our relations: most fundamentally by our relation to the God whose we are, but also to all the others with whom we share life and love. In this reading the reality of church comes into fuller relief, not as a merely voluntary association of autonomous individuals, but as the very sacrament of relationship: communion with God and with one another in Christ.

For Alzheimer's patients and their families the traditional notion of the church as the body of Christ transcends metaphor. Church is our incorporation into a deeper truth, the vehicle of our vicarious memory, the witness to a hope that sustains. It is all this because, like John the Baptist, it constantly points beyond itself to the one whose memory it bears, the true and faithful witness who is the foundation of its hope.

Jesus Christ is the church's memory, the one who fills and fulfills its liturgical anamnesis. In his death and Resurrection he has embraced all the darkness of our sin and sorrow and opened to it the promise of eternal light and life. He is the sure promise of things hoped for and the reality of things unseen. Christ is the church's substance and treasure and his paschal mystery reveals the structure of true selfhood. But it is the scandal of a selfhood first dissolved upon the Cross, before being raised to new and transformed life. Keck echoes the canonical tradition in this crucial conviction: "God is found primarily on the Cross"; and our calling, as disciples, is "to become matured in the mystery of the Cross."

Amazingly, though taking its orientation from the dire straits of Alzheimer's disease, Keck's book is neither grim nor constricted. His inclusive Christocentrism expands into a sensitive meditation upon beauty and the "canonical imagination" that is open to receive with gratitude whatever intimations of God's glory can be discerned in the art and poetry of diverse cultures. Alzheimer's patients often manifest a heightened sense of beauty. Music can communicate even when words fail. And caregivers, in the patient attentiveness of their service, often display a poet's touch that surpasses the power of words.

Finally, in face of Alzheimer's assault upon the continuity and connectedness of narrative, Keck, with almost Augustinian boldness, traces a Christological reading of history. In telling and retelling the story of Christ, the church confesses that his is the comprehensive story that recapitulates, gathers into fulfillment, all human stories. Indeed, those who appear most marginalized are accorded by Christ the place of honor in God's own story. Therefore the church testifies, in the light of Christ, that "caregiving lies at the heart of history, because agapic love lies at the heart of proper human relationships." An Alzheimer's hermeneutic, paradoxically, illuminates our common condition: humanity's deep need, God's amazing grace.

Rarely does one encounter theological insight so happily wed to pastoral experience, reflections on the sublime cheek-by-jowl with references to "wiping fannies." But in questions of life and death caregivers realize there is scant time to be fastidious. In the Incarnation, God, for our salvation, refuses to be fastidious.

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, teaches theology at Boston College.