My father suffered from dementia toward the end of his life. I watched it happen — slowly, tenderly, and painfully. He would forget what happened yesterday, but could tell you, in vivid detail, a story from forty years ago. Short-term memory goes first. The present slips away. And I remember sitting beside him, thinking: this is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever witnessed.

I tell you that story today because I want to talk about forgetting. And not just the kind that comes with age or illness — but the kind that seems to be a fundamental condition of the human soul.

When we hear the story of two disciples walking the road to Emmaus, I need you to notice something remarkable: these are not strangers to Jesus. These are followers. And yet they walk away from Jerusalem in grief and confusion, unable to recognize the Risen Lord walking right beside them. Why? Because they forgot.

Earlier in Luke chapter 24, the women at the tomb — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James — had to be reminded by two blazing angels: “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”

Remember.

It keeps coming up. And Jesus, walking to Emmaus, says it with a kind of holy exasperation: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!”

He is not being cruel.

He is being pastoral.

He is doing what he always does: walking with the forgetful, the confused, the brokenhearted and helping them remember.

But I want to suggest to you that we are not just dealing with two forgetful disciples in this story on a dusty road. We are dealing with a collective dementia, a cultural, civilizational forgetting of who we are and what we are called to become.

Rumi, a great mystic poet, wrote of this ache with devastating beauty. He described the human soul as a reed cut from its reed bed, crying out for what it has lost, not because it is broken, but because it remembers, somewhere deep, where it came from.

He wrote of love’s longing as a fire that burns away everything that is not essential, until what remains is the truth of who you are.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.”

— Rumi

That field Rumi speaks of — that is where we began. Children of one God, brothers and sisters under one sky. And we have forgotten it. We have forgotten the Holocaust. We have forgotten the millions who died because we forgot the commandment to love our neighbor. We have forgotten what is written on the very doorstep of this nation: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus, a jewish woman, wrote those words as an echo of Matthew 25 — “when I was thirsty, when I was hungry, when I was a stranger.” If we claim to be a Christian nation and behave as we do now, we are not just forgetting a poem. We are forgetting the Lord himself. We are forgetting our identity.

Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that every human being carries within them a natural orientation toward the good, toward truth, toward God — what he called the natural law written on the heart. Aquinas believed that we do not reason our way into knowing that we should love our neighbor. We remember it. Yes, We remember it!

It is already there, inscribed in the very nature of what it means to be human. Sin, for Aquinas, is not so much rebellion as it is a kind of forgetting. Sin is a turning away from what we already, at the deepest level, know.

Father Richard Rohr puts it this way: that the spiritual life is not about climbing to some new height, but about returning to the ground of who we already are: “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

That is what Jesus does on the road to Emmaus. He does not hand those two disciples a theological argument. He walks with them. He listens. He breaks bread. He lets the truth catch up with them from the inside, not the outside. And their hearts burn within them not because they learned something new, but because they finally remembered what they already knew.

So what does this mean for us? It means we are called to two things simultaneously, and both matter.

First, we are called to speak. When leaders or anyone deliberately deny the truth — when the poem on the Statue of Liberty is treated as an inconvenience rather than a calling — we must name it. We must call out the intentional forgetting with the same clarity that Jesus called his disciples foolish. Not from anger. From love. From the grief of someone who remembers what was forgotten.

But second — and this is the harder thing — we are called to walk with. Because there are many people, like my father, who genuinely do not remember. Who have been so formed by fear, by noise, by the relentless pace of the world, that they have lost the thread back to their own humanity. These people do not need our condemnation. They need someone to walk beside them, to break bread with them, to stay patient and present until something in them begins to stir.

That is ministry. That is what the angels did at the tomb. That is what Jesus did on the road. That is what the angels did again at the Ascension, when they looked at the disciples staring into the clouds and essentially said: “Stop gazing upward. Get on with your lives. Walk with each other.”

Be the Reminder

The world around us is suffering from a kind of spiritual amnesia. It has forgotten that we are all children of one God, made for love, made for each other. Our calling is not to have all the answers. Our calling is to be the reminder.

When you sit with someone in grief, you are reminding them they are not alone. When you welcome the stranger, you are reminding the world of what it forgot. When you break bread with someone whose politics infuriate you and find the image of God still there — you are doing exactly what Jesus did on that dusty road to Emmaus.

You are not just helping them remember. You are helping yourself remember too.

“Were not our hearts burning within us

while he talked with us on the road,

while he opened the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32.

May your heart burn again this week.

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