FOR a second time this Christmas, Mary “treasures” her memory of an event. The resolution of a family crisis ultimately makes the memory happy; for relief washes away the imprint of anxiety.

Memories build up our sense of self; for we learn to see ourselves through the lens of past events. They also form us socially, in family and kinship groups, and our church family, and other communities to which we belong.

Memory and self are inseparable. The cruellest part of dementia, for carers and loved ones, is the loss of a shared pool of memory. This is partly something that we experience as observers of a loved one’s decline. They themselves diminish; their capacity to meet our gaze with attention and understanding dwindles. We also experience it internally, as their diminishing diminishes us: bits of us that are bonded to the one we love — and are losing — break off and are themselves lost.

There is a third element in our experience of memory loss and cognitive decline: how it affects us in terms of human empathy. We may doubt ourselves, as we struggle to make sense of offering love, devotion, and respect, as well as mundane physical care, to those who are disappearing before our eyes — sometimes in a gentle fading, sometimes amid hurtful frustration and paranoia.

Memory is a fabric, woven from the stuff of our unique experiences, and of those that we repeat regularly. Christmas belongs in both categories; for each Christmas is different, even if we try to recreate a perfect formula. As we grow older, the fabric becomes more complex in composition. If it were a garment, the label would surely say “Mixed fibres: wash with care.”

Every year works changes in our feelings about Christmas. Every birth and death, every adolescent blooming and elderly decline, in the year now passing, witnesses to the frailty and toughness of our humanity. Like Virgil’s “tears of things” (lacrimae rerum), the truths of human mortality press insistently upon our minds.

In this Gospel, the message is not hiding behind parable and mystery. It lies on the surface: a paradigm for family interactions. Parents do not understand their children. Because they have learned to read them so well in one way, they fail, time and again, to read them as the child moves on, grows up, becomes independent.

That process can be as traumatic as a bereavement for parents. Like God with Adam and Eve in the garden, they strive to keep their little ones in the paradise of childish innocence, even as those children scramble to leave it and go in search of new ways of being who they are.

But the fault runs in both directions. If this Gospel had only one lesson to offer, it would be this: even supposedly perfect parents and children misunderstand each other. How, then, can we expect always to get it right ourselves, either as parent or as child?

Part of becoming one’s own person is shutting out the voice and claims of parents: resisting the pressure to concede and conform. It is as if — having discovered that parents are not perfect, and do not know everything — the child behaves as if those parents are flawed to the point of utter failure, and know nothing about anything.

Parenthood is an education. It teaches us that we are not the centre of the universe. It makes carers of the cared-for. It puts us in a position where we observe the unfolding stages of life from childhood to adulthood, after having undergone that process ourselves. With understanding born of that observation, and from empathy, it becomes humbling indeed to realise what patience, what restraint, what sheer force of love our parents must have exercised when (for example) we were at our adolescent worst.

This Gospel comes from a stage in Jesus’s life some 12 years after his nativity. But Christmas can be a time when the combat between image and reality is locked in a Manichaean stalemate. Then this Gospel’s lesson about family life and love is most timely. The greatest lesson that we learn from being a parent to our own child is the same as we hope for in every child’s nurturing: that — even without being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5.48) — parent and child alike will find that the love that we know and the love that we give both teach us the truth of God.