by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given November 23, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Last Sunday a man approached me and wanted to talk about the subject of this week’s sermon—memory. He is in his 80s, in pretty good health, and his life is still active. But since he suffered a couple minor strokes he said that for him, memory is not an easy subject. The strokes took much of his short-term memory, and that loss has been hard. Not remembering the conversation he had just a few minutes ago. Not remembering the next project he needs to finish. He has tried to find ways to remind himself of things, but that doesn’t always work. It is easier to remember things from many years ago than things that happened just a short time ago.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation this week. Memory, I’ve realized, is something that I take for granted. But that is not something I can do. When people talk about their fears when it comes to aging, it is often the fear of losing their memory that is first on the list. Physical ailments are one thing. Losing your memory is another. I remember once going to visit a man with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. His wife had invited me to go with her as she visited him. I remember how much she tried to get him to respond to her, kissing him, calling out his name, asking him questions, only to be met with a blank stare. It was only when she held a glass of water up to his face that he responded by drinking. She lovingly gave him a drink, tears filling her eyes. Watching this couple that had been married for many years, it was a heart-breaking scene.

Memory is foundational to who we are. It is integral to our sense of self and the way we see ourselves in the world. It is the way that we understand our history and the experiences that have brought us to the present. It is part of how we go from day to day and from one chapter of life to another. It is what connects us to the people we have loved who are no longer with us. It holds those experiences that shape us. Memory allows us to integrate what has been with the present.

We each have the memories we carry in our lives. Those memories are also connected with the memories we share as a culture. Yesterday was the 40^th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. People who were alive during that time can usually tell you where they were when it happened. I was not much more than a year old at the time, but the images, through television, are with me. And I’m fascinated to watch Kennedy’s image over time. Time has brought forward a lot of unflattering information about Kennedy, and yet the images largely remain. The images of Camelot and the Kennedy mystique still remain for most people.

In our own lives, too, memories fill us. And what we remember is not always predictable. How any given thing is remembered is due to how we experience it and the interpretation that we give to it. In the case of the Kennedy story, it was Jacqueline Kennedy who told an interviewer shortly after the assassination about how she and her husband would listen to the story of Camelot. That was how it became connected to the Kennedys and has remained connected ever since.

The memories we carry—in the larger culture and in our own lives—are not static. They are not fixed records of what was said or video images of the scene.  But memory is a living thing, and over time, what we remember and exactly how we remember it continues to change. We each see things through our particular set of lenses, through our own unique set of experiences and expectations and beliefs. Our outlook on life is certainly part of what influences the way that we remember things over time. For each of us, it is different. This is how Howard Thurman, famed African-American theologian, wrote about it:

“There are some people who use their memories to store away all the unpleasant things they experience. Every slight they have received … is neatly labeled with the offender’s name and put away. … When some later contact with the person is made, they run through their files, lift out the old offense, and dress it up to be paraded in the new encounter. The habit grows, until at last their storehouse is full of unpleasant things which send their poisonous fumes all through the corridors of the mind, filling them with resentment, hate, and suspicion.

“There are others who use their memories to store away the pleasant things of experience. Such memories become a vast storehouse to which, at a minute’s notice, they turn to restore their faith and reestablish their confidence in life at difficult and trying times.”

He concludes, “The next time you feel that life is mean or completely evil, and that there is no good in it for you or anyone else, try this: make a list of some of the beautiful things you have seen, the breathlessly kind things people have done for you without obligation, the gracious moments that have turned up in the week’s encounters.”

What is it that we remember and what is it that we forget? Our recollections are as unique as the individuals that we are. I expect most of us have had the experience of talking with someone about an event in the past. It might be that one person remembers it in great detail and the other has no memory of it at all. It might be that one person remembers it in one way and the other has a very different perspective. I know from the experience of preaching a sermon that two people can come through the line with very different recollections of something that was said. We’ve all heard about how unreliable eyewitness accounts to something can be. Two people can have very different interpretations about what happened. Sometimes it is hard to imagine how they could have been in the same place at the same time witnessing the same events.

And with any given traumatic event, different people respond differently. Think about the people who survived on the concentration camps. The ones who were optimistic and had hope were more likely to survive. The ones who had given up did not. In a wide-ranging study of Roman Catholic nuns it was discovered that the nuns who live with a more positive outlook were likely to live longer than women with less positive outlooks.

Whether we tend to be optimistic or pessimistic, to any given experience we bring all the experiences that we have had before that moment into the present. We have the experiences that we are conscious of and probably some that we are not aware of on the surface. We each see through the particular lens that we have come to have through life.

And how we live with memory can vary just as much. Memories can, at times, hold onto us. They are what seem to hold us in place and will not let us go. They are the ways that we hold onto old hurts. They can keep us from truly living in the present. We just can’t seem to move past them and move forward. We get stuck and we can’t find our way out. Moving beyond them may seem almost impossible.

But it is also easy to toss them off as things of the past and forget where it is we have been. But we do this at our peril. We lose the opportunity to learn what any given event might have to teach us. It is important to know not just where we are going but also where we have been. To know how the mistakes of the past might well repeat themselves for today. In forgetting our past, we might be missing something very important in the present and also the future.

And it is not just in our own lives that it is important to remember our history. In knowing the history of our country and the world, we are able to understand how what is happening is connected to what has happened before. In understanding the times in the past when hatred has been perpetuated, when understanding when a cycle of violence led to more and more violence, we can better understand and also stand up when those things happen in our present history. If we forget that history, then we are doomed to repeat it in the future.

Memory, of course, doesn’t always feel like a gift. It can be the very reminder of  those things we want to forget. It can bring pain. It can remind us of loss. It can remind us of ways that we have hurt others. It can remind us of ways that we have been hurt. If we can just leave those memories buried, we have a better chance of not having to deal with the pain that might also come. 

But there is a reason for memory. There are reasons why they stay with us. Memory is a strange, mysterious thing. It can keep us connected to things we may not understand. It can keep us connected to people who are no longer with us. It can keep us connected to the times when we have hurt others and the times when we have been hurt ourselves.

And there are reasons that we hold the hurts from the past that inevitably are with us. We are the results of our histories, and each one of us is the combination of experiences that make us who we are. Through memory we are able to revisit the past and see it in a new light. Through memory we are able to connect our past and find our way forward. It is a living thing.

In my own life I have learned that with time we can come to see the events of our lives in different ways.

My father died suddenly when I was young and that event has been central in my life. He died just two weeks before my eighth birthday. His death was traumatic for me, and it threw my world into confusion. For many years, the memories I had of my father’s death—and also his life—were pretty scattered. I remember food being brought to our home by neighbors. I remember the people coming through the line at the funeral home visitation. I remember people telling me that it was good that I was there to take care of my mother now that my father had died.

Those expressions of sympathy, I’m sure, were meant to comfort. But for me they were part of a general confusion and anger that lived in me. I didn’t know what this new responsibility meant; I had a hard time understanding why he had died.

As I went through my teenage years life went on and the memories that I did have seemed to recede into the background. Memories of my father and the events of his death seemed far away. But in my 20s the memories started to come back. I started to think about his life and the events of his death more and more. For years I had not been able to remember what it was like to actually be with him as he died of a heart attack. But during this period I started to remember. I was there and I was scared and I didn’t know what to do. I was now able to remember all the fear and confusion of the time.

As I started to wrestle with all of this, I came to understand that I had grown up with a sense that I should have been able to handle his death better than I did. I should have been more prepared. It should not have made the impact on me that it seemed to have made. I should have done a better job with it.

Well one day during this time, I happened to be teaching first and second graders in Sunday School. We were talking about something, I’m not sure what, and all of a sudden as I saw the struggle in these 7- and 8-year-olds to understand some concept, I made the connection that this was how old I was when my father had died. In that moment I was able to see myself at this age. In that moment I was able to see my father’s death in a whole new context. In that moment I was able to let go of something that I had not been able to let go of before. With time and with some perspective the way we look at the past can change.

In a moment, the memory of that time looked very different. The pain and the hurt did not necessarily go away. But in being able to see that I was just a kid, I was able to see that whole experience and also my life in a very different way.

The gift of memory is that it allows us to take the past with us into the present and into the future. With time can come clarity and healing. With time can come perspective. Memory has a strange way of moving in us. The events of the past can take on new meaning and new dimensions. They help us to stay connected to the past, but also to be able to let go of it.

And memory, says poet May Sarton, makes kings and queens of us.

Just how does all this work? I’m not sure, other than to know that at least part of it comes down to grace. I have also come to know that when we are ready to deal with something there is a way that it presents itself for us to look at it. Memory provides us with the clay that we are able to sculpt our lives with. They take on new shapes and features. Memory is one of the tools that we have. It is memory that can help us make our lives whole.

Our memories can help us bring the past into the present and also to look to the future. What are the things we still have to forgive in others? What are the things we still have to forgive in ourselves? What are those old hurts we carry?

Memory is an important part of the work of the religious community. The community of faith is a container for memory. In being a community of memory and hope, we recognize that here we are with people in all the places of life. Those who are born, those who die, and all the places of life in between.

It is in memory that we find hope. Knowing that we are interconnected, living with an awareness of how we fit into the larger scheme of things, we come to know that our own joy and our own pain are connected to the joy and the pain that moves through the world. Knowing that our losses connect us with all those who have gone before. Knowing that the simple pleasures we celebrate are the same that people have celebrated through the generations.

In his novel Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry tells the story of Jayber Crow, barber in a town called Port William, Kentucky. He also serves as janitor at the church in town. These are his words:

“One day when I went up there to work, sleepiness overcame me and I lay down on the floor behind the back pew to take a nap. Waking or sleeping (I couldn’t tell which), I saw them as I had seen them from the back pew where I sat with Uncle Othy (who would not come in farther) while Aunt Cordie sang in the choir, and I saw them as I had seen them (from the back pew) on the Sunday before. I saw them in all the times past and present and to come, all somehow there in their own time and in all time and in no time: the cheerfully working and singing women, the men quiet or reluctant or shy, the weary, the troubled in spirit, the sick, the lame, the desperate, the dying, the little children tucked into the pews beside their elders, the young married couples full of visions, the old men with their dreams, the parents proud of their children, the grandparents with tears in their eyes, the pairs of young lovers attentive only to each other on the edge of the world, the grieving widows and widowers, the mothers and fathers of children newly dead, the proud, the humble, the attentive, the distracted—I saw them all. I saw the creases crisscrossed on the backs of the men’s necks, their work-thickened hands, the Sunday dresses faded with washing. They were just there. They said nothing and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me.”

It is in this season of thanksgiving that we might be reminded not only of the things that we are thankful for in the usual ways, but to also be mindful for the ways that our lives move, the way the spirit allows us to see things in a new light. The way we ourselves are able to move from that stuck place to a better place. The way we are able to give thanks for all that is our life. Roots hold me close, wings set me free. May all of us, in our present and in our past, in the memories we carry and in the memories we make, find ourselves always held in love.

PRAYER

Great spirit, help us to sing a song of thanksgiving. For the freedom we have, for the lives we have been given, for the many blessings that have come our way, help us to always be grateful, help us to always be mindful. May memory hold us and may it help us to find our way into the future with courage and with hope. As we have been given life from those who have gone before us, may we give to those who will come after us. Amen.

 BENEDICTION

As you leave this place give thanks for all that is your life. Go now this day in love and in hope. Amen.

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Copyright 2003, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.