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Storing up Images of Delight: The Power of Memorisation

Writer's picture: Angelique KnaupAngelique Knaup

Updated: Jul 12, 2024

"Memory is the cabinet of 

imagination, the treasury 

of reason, the registry of 

conscience, the counsel-

chamber of thought." 

—Attributed to St. Basil the Great—


I belong to a little group that meets weekly and reads through various spiritual discipline books. We learn a passage of scripture every week and recite it to the group—it's not a test but a celebration of the treasure we have stored.¹ The practice of learning scripture is powerful. These scriptures have calmed our minds when we have been anxious, doubtful, sad or experiencing uncertain moments. They are treasures we will cherish.


Matteo Ricci was a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit missionary to China. He was not just a missionary but also a scholar and a master of memory. He would ask random people at the emperor's table to recite a Chinese poem. After hearing it once, Matteo would be able to recite it backwards perfectly! He was a master of memory, and this skill won him great favour in the highest courts of China--all so that he could spread the good news of Christ.


Legends say that Ricci's technique used memory and imagination. In his mind's eye, a 'memory palace' was constructed. This 'memory palace' is a mental construct where Ricci stored the things he memorised in various rooms and spaces. When he needed a memory, he would visualise himself returning to the room and picking it up from its stored space. Oh, to live in a palace filled with scripture, music, poetry, literature, and art—constantly feasting on Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.


Charlotte Mason also valued memorisation and imagination. We see this practised in her methods of copy-work (which includes spelling), narration, picture study, geography, and the memorisation of literature, Shakespeare, folksongs, hymns, scripture, and poetry (did I miss something?). In this way, our children's memories are stored 'with images of delight', and ours can be too!


 

Here is an ode to memory and imagination that I wrote for the Common Place Quarterly.


Brown Girl Dreaming

Do you remember...?

someone’s always asking and 

someone always does.” p. 292


In Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson shares her childhood memories of growing up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s. Her 'memoir in verse’ sings of the volatile era of the civil rights movement in the different worlds of Ohio and Greenville. It sets the imagination ablaze with its poetry, the intimacy of family and warmth of friends, places called home, the desire to write, and the love of story.


How can I explain to anyone that stories

are like air to me,

I breathe them in and let them out

over and over again.” p. 247


Ms. Woodson’s tale made me recall vignettes from my childhood in the 1970s in Salisbury, Rhodesia. (Inspired by her, I have interwoven some memories in verse).


English breakfasts on the verandah.

A rusty, motionless car, 

home to mud cakes and hidden treasures.

The loofah creeper overlooking our vegetable patch.

A promise of coveted red shoes in exchange for

going to school and leaving my younger siblings behind.

Early morning dew covering the meadow,

my thighs crawling from the cold,  

flame lilies lighting the way.


Every Saturday morning, we run downstairs

to the television. Just as the theme song

from The Big Blue Marble begins, the four of us sing along:


The earth’s a big blue marble when you see it from out there.


Then the camera is zooming in on that marble,

the blue becoming 

water, then land, then children in Africa and Texas 

and China

and Spain and sometimes, New York City! The world 

close enough to touch now and children from all over 

right in our living room! Telling us their stories.” p. 315

(This is a memory I share with Ms. Woodson)


Charlotte Mason writes,”[M]uch that we have learned and experienced is not only retained in the storehouse of memory, but is our available capital, we can reproduce, recollect upon demand. This memory which may be drawn upon by the act of recollection is our most valuable endowment.” V. 1, pp. 154-155

 

Ms. Mason and Ms. Woodson remind us that our memories —learned and experienced—are a storehouse containing a valuable legacy. But, of course, we will not always decide what we experience and learn. However, we have a choice of the books we read, the poems and songs we learn, the liturgies we follow (e.g. prayer and scripture reading; communion; sabbath rest, solitude and fellowship with believers, etc.), and to what we give our attention.


I grew up in a country that is no longer.

I remember the war drills we practised at school,

the tales whispered while playing Chinese jump rope, 

of underground bunkers, grenades and ghosts.

But there were also the visits to the library.

Days and nights spent in-between the leaves of 

Danny the Champion of the World,

Little House on the Prairie,

Alice in Wonderland,

Greek Mythology and so many more.

Stories that enchanted me and granted me

a “deeper insight into reality” ²

A fascination with African Violets,

and all things herbal.

Ramblings in the Inyanga hills in the northeast.

The hard-fought-for independence we gained in 1980.

We were now Zimbabwean

and lived in the breadbasket of Africa,

where children were born free.


Remembering is the gathering-together of the self in the light of consciousness, which in us tends to be a piecemeal process, but in God is complete and ‘instantaneous.’ For us, therefore, the training of memory is essential if we are to discover and enlarge our human identity in the image of God. It is an essential foundation for any education worthy of the name.” pp. 51-52

Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott


 

¹ Simply Charlotte Mason has a great Scripture Memory System that I am using.

² Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education has an insightful chapter on Remembering.


[Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson.]

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Alveary Grove is based in Southern Africa.

We are proudly from Africa and for Africa!

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