On Memory
Sermon audio:
Brother Larry preached this sermon at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel on May 26, 2019.
Hear then wisdom from the gospel according to John, the fourteenth chapter, the twenty-third through the twenty-ninth verses. Let us be attentive.
Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me. ‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. (NRSV).
Hear then also wisdom from the 論語 Lunyu, The Analects, the third chapter, sections nine, fourteen, and nineteen. Let us be attentive.
子曰:「夏禮,吾能言之,杞不足徵也;殷禮,吾能言之,宋不足徵也。文獻不足故也,足則吾 能徵之矣。」 子曰:「周監於二代,郁郁乎文哉!吾從周。」 定公問:「君使臣,臣事君,如之何?」孔子對曰:「君使臣以禮,臣事君以忠。」
The Master said, “As for the rites of the Xia Dynasty, I can speak of them, but there is little remaining in the state of Qii to document them. As for the rites of the Shang Dynasty, I can speak of them, but there is little remaining in the state of Song to document them. This is because there is not much in the way of culture or moral worthies left in either state. If there were something there, then I would be able to document them.”
The Master said, “The Zhou gazes down upon the two dynasties that preceded it. How brilliant in culture it is! I follow the Zhou.”
Duke Ding asked, “How should a lord employ his ministers? How should a minister serve his lord?” Confucius replied, “A lord should employ his ministers with ritual, and ministers should serve their lord with dutifulness.”
(Confucius. Analects. trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. 20, 23, 25).
Wisdom. Peace be with all. Amen.
Remember the following:
- Goat
- Four
- Purple
- Wheel
- Triangle
- K
- Sodium
- Velocity
- Glass
- Humane
There will be a test.
For something so fundamental to human life, memory is disconcertingly unreliable and unstable. Without a reasonably good memory, every facet of our lives becomes unmanageable. Each and every morning we must remember how to move our muscles to get out of bed, what order and in which direction to put on our clothes, in which vessel to pour our caffeinated beverage of choice, and how to grasp a utensil, use it to pick up food, and bring it to our mouth. We must be able to recognize and recall the various people in our lives, whether they are family, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances, and appropriate ways of speaking and interacting with each. In order to get where we are going, we must remember how to pay our fare on the T, how to drive a car, or how to put one foot in front of the other so as to walk. The richness, texture, and potency of life supervene upon patterns and processes remembered so as to be enacted.
Now, computer memory encodes information by breaking it down into patterned sequences of binary options and storing it in cells that assume a physical state representing either one or zero. If you were to check on any given cell, its state can be determined definitively one way or the other. Human memory does not seem to work quite this way. When we go to check on our memories, they often appear vague, unclear, or uncertain. Worse, the very memories we feel most confident of, upon further reflection, could not have been possible.
I am one hundred percent certain that I left my housekeys in my pants pocket. When I check my pants pocket, they are not there. Perhaps another pair of pants. Wait, maybe it was last week that I left my keys in my pants pocket. Where else might I have left them? No, not on the mantle, not on the kitchen counter, not on the dining room table. Now wait a minute, how could they have ended up on the floor in the living room? Someone else must have moved them.
Memory is fragile. Memory is tenuous. Memory is fallible. As one recently defended dissertation put it, memory is not so much in the indicative mood of how things are or were as in the subjunctive mood of how they could, should, or would be or have been. We humans tend to experience the world as it is and remember it as we would like it to be.
As important as memory is, it is unsurprising that we humans have come up with a number of coping mechanisms to counteract the faultiness of our recollections. Members of the choir will recall, (or perhaps not), the mnemonic device of “every good boy deserves fudge” to remember the notes that fall on the lines of the treble staff, and the notes in the spaces spell “face.” The most sophisticated system humans have developed to aid memory is writing. From shopping lists to historical events to transformative ideas, if you want to be sure to remember it, be sure to write it down.
Some writings are particularly important and so we set them apart. They are sacred. This is what sacred means, to be set apart. Sacred texts, or scriptures, tend to recall historical events or transformative ideas more often than shopping lists, although those long genealogies in Genesis and Matthew are good reminders that this is hardly a strict dichotomy. Even in scripture, however, what is recorded depends at least on the memory of the transpired event or thought idea that it records. Moreover, the movement from memory to written recording often injects yet further degrees of subjunctivity, rounding corners and smoothing edges as it were. By the end, the written record, even of sacred text, often obscures more than it reveals, and yet it becomes the common inheritance of memory of generations and civilizations.
Indeed, scriptural memory contains some of the most bizarre forms of memory. Not only can the past be remembered as a prediction of the future, as in much of the prophetic literature, but so too can the future be remembered as a promise. We hear this in the fourteenth chapter of the gospel of John: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” Notably, in John, part of what is promised is a new and renewed and better memory, even than scripture itself can provide: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
So too, Jesus recalls something he said previously: “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’” Strangely, there is no recording of Jesus having said precisely that. It would appear he is summarizing what he said in verses three and four of the fourteenth chapter: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Summary too is a subjunctive way of remembering, and this whole passage is a summary of what preceded it in chapters thirteen and fourteen.
In scripture, the modes of time are conflated and shot through with the possibility that is the purview of the subjunctive mood. We see this as well in the Analects as Confucius remembers the glories of past dynasties. He reveres the glories of the Xia and Shang dynasties even as he laments that they are largely forgotten even in his own day, five hundred years before the common era, let alone now. “As for the rites of the Xia Dynasty, I can speak of them, but there is little remaining in the state of Qi to document them. As for the rites of the Shang Dynasty, I can speak of them, but there is little remaining in the state of Song to document them.” Notably, the documentation Confucius desires is not written text but lived practice: “This is because there is not much in the way of culture or moral worthies left in either state. If there were something there, then I would be able to document them.”
Thankfully, the best of both the Xia and Shang dynasties is embodied in the more recent Zhou dynasty, so all is not lost. “The Zhou gazes down upon the two dynasties that preceded it. How brilliant in culture it is! I follow the Zhou.” This, then, is where things get really interesting. Confucius purports to value the memory of the past because of its capacity to inform the present so as to reform the socio-political order of his day even as it is crumbling around him. If they could only go back to how things were, everything would be better. Do you hear the subjunctives there, could and would? Well, if they know enough about how things were, then in principle they can go back to them.
Such a conservative appropriation of the glorious past as medication for the less than glorious present is hardly unique. What is unique is that this conservative advocacy is a masquerade for Confucius to radically reshape the socio-political project of China. The governance of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties was hereditary, but Confucius retells their stories such that the effectiveness of their rule was due not to inherited authority but virtuous leadership. Thus, leaders in the hierarchy should relate to one another virtuously rather than violently: “A lord should employ his ministers with ritual, and ministers should serve their lord with dutifulness.” Confucius found great possibility for the future in the memory of the past, so long as we remember rightly, which in this case requires remembering wrongly in an historical sense.
What it means to remember rightly is deeply fraught for us. Consider especially the vagaries of memory brought on by violence and trauma. The memories of victims and witnesses are often far from perfect, and yet the shifting landscape of memory and its disjuncture too often become legal excuses for questioning whether anything at all actually happened. Justice requires that we acknowledge that failures of memory are not necessarily indications of an intent to deceive, just as a perfectly consistent narrative may be nothing more than an elaborate farce. The variations in memory recorded in scripture, whether of the Davidic kingship in Kings and Chronicles or of the life of Jesus in the four gospels, testify to the consistency of truth precisely amidst the variability of memory.
I have had the privilege, over the past two years as a fellow in the Institute for Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at the Pardee School of Global Studies here at Boston University, to learn with and from the institute’s director, Professor Timothy Longman. Professor Longman conducted his dissertation research in Rwanda prior to the genocide there in 1994, and then returned after as the director of the Rwandan field office of Human Rights Watch. In his most recent book, Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda, he notes that “The narrative that has gained wide circulation is that, despite all odds, Rwanda is being successfully rebuilt. The victim group in the genocide has chosen to reject revenge and embrace forgiveness and reconciliation and, as a result Rwanda has become peaceful and prosperous” (314). Unfortunately, this version of the story is largely an example of remembering wrongly. Instead, Professor Longman says, “the government has not been able to dictate a collective memory and create a unified national Rwandan identity. The inconsistencies between the official narrative and people’s lived experience have left ‘average citizens cynical and alienated.’ As the review of their impact will demonstrate, the extensive transitional justice initiatives implemented in Rwanda have actually exacerbated social divisions and increased tensions. Rwanda stands as a warning about the limitations – or even the dangers – of transitional justice” (134). As he quotes one survivor saying, “We pretend to live together” (324). (Timothy Longman. Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Memory is fickle and frail. Memory is potent and resilient. Memory is fickle and frail and potent and resilient all at the same time. As a result, remembering rightly can only ever partially be about remembering what was as it was. Remembering rightly must always also mean remembering what was as it makes the future possible. Memory is and must always be subjunctive.
On this Memorial Day weekend, we pause to remember. The holiday is intended especially for remembering those who died while serving in the United States armed forces. Our tendency is to remember them as heroes, and surely the heroic acts, for example, of those who endured and survived as prisoners of war, deserve to be remembered so. We would, however, this Memorial Day weekend, do well to remember more. We remember those who perished but too often forget those who returned, especially those who return permanently scarred, in body, mind, and spirit. We remember that they fought well, but forget that the reasons given that they should fight at all were rooted in irreality. We remember those who serve honorably but would prefer to gloss over dishonorable conduct and end up justifying conferring pardons on war criminals.
The loss of memory at the social level, as Confucius recognized, is the loss of culture and morality. The loss of memory at the personal level is the loss of world and even of self. Both are tragic. Both are painful. Part and parcel of the tragedy and pain is that we can never go back. Memory does not work that way. As Jesus reminds us in the gospel of John, we always need a spirit to lead us forward. Memory is of the past but toward the future. We remember rightly when we remember the past for the sake of the future.
Now, let’s see how we did. Do you remember the list I gave you at the beginning of the sermon? How many do you remember?
- Goat
- Four
- Orange
- Wheel
- Triangle
- K
- Sodium
- Velocity
- Metal
- Humane
Well, how did you do? Not so good, huh? Then thanks be to God that we remember rightly when we remember the past for the sake of the future. Wisdom is not memory. Justice is not memory. Truth is not memory. Peace is not memory. Memory is for the sake of wisdom and justice and truth and peace. Amen.
