These Things I Remember

These things I remember, as I pour out my soul . . .

(Psalm 42:4a)

Do this in remembrance of me.

(Luke 22:19c)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, August 6, 2006

(Volume 1 Number 7)

First United Methodist Church, 605 West Sixth, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 As a student and as a pastor, I’ve moved many times from places that had become beloved, the towns and landscapes which have shaped me.  Yet, I remain attached to those places by the threads of stories.  A chilling winter air still blows across my face when I remember walking across the famous Diag of the University of Michigan, immersed in academia.  Paddleboats on the Huron River still gently splash in my mind when I recall our weekend trips to the park, broken by the laughing sounds of our girl’s glee.  The ornate elegance of the immense study chambers in the Rackham Building still quiets my mind, remembering the countless hours I labored over Hebrew and cuneiform, ancient literature and philosophy.  The meandering layout of married student housing emerges pumpkin orange in my memory as, in my soul, Sherry and I walk the creatively decorated townhouses again with the girls at Halloween.  The crack of the bat at Tiger Stadium still sounds in my ears as I remember Larry Herndon’s solo shot over the center field wall on that bright and loud October Sunday in 1987 when we snuck out of church after Sunday School (I wasn’t a pastor at the time) having acquired box seat tickets to the final game of the season, the game in which Sparky Anderson’s Tigers clinched the pennant, beating Toronto 1 - 0.   In my memory, the auditorium of Pioneer High School yet fills with the lively music of Shabop Shop, a youth choral group of which Page was a proud part; and the screams of Roller Coaster Heaven on our Cedar Point getaways to Sandusky are with me still. 

 These things I remember.  Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor shares her rules for telling personal stories in preaching, “Only say ‘I’ when you are reasonably sure that those listening to you can say ‘Me, too.’”   So I share these personal reflections in order, not to tell you about myself, but to remind you about yourself, as we consider this morning what it means to Remember.  We are bound, you see – you and I -- to one another and, I think, to God, by a web of stories, our stories. There’s an old Hasidic saying, “God created man, because he loves stories.”   I like that, for how do our souls develop, but by an accumulation of stories, like the gradual accretions of a stalactite?  By keeping those stories fresh, we keep the places themselves alive in our imaginations.  Living in our hearts, these make up the landscape of our souls on which we walk, even when our feet are still.  Our stories map out the geography of the heart, charting seas and continents known only to us, a map crowded with detail when we live attentively.  

Speaking of a map crowded with detail, an ancient allegory, related by Jim Lewis in WIRED, asks us to imagine a map of the world that grows in detail so precisely until every point in reality has its counterpoint on paper.  The twist is that such a map, ideally accurate for its precision, is also entirely useless, since it has become the same size as the thing it intends to represent.  It becomes, then, not a map, but a duplicate, a new reality of its own, losing its function as the guide it was intended to be.  In other words, perfect replication of reality, which at first glance seems the ultimate map, actually contradicts what a map is intended to be.  The same is true of our mental maps.  Perfect memory, an exact replication of our accumulated experiences, is actually harmful, stifling our imagination and hindering us from developing stories.

One wonders if our technological world of digital memory has brought us to precipice in this regard.  Consider the first-time mom and dad who purchase a video camera to document their baby’s first years, only to discover that, by filming anything and everything, they view important events in their child’s budding life through a lens, losing wider angle perspective and, in any event, never get around to watching all they recorded, anyway.  Of course not, for there aren’t enough hours in the day for such marathons of consumption unless, one supposes, one is willing to give up the present in order to feast on the past (“Hey honey, I’ve got an idea.  Let’s forget what’s happening with Junior today, let’s watch last Thursday again”).   The result is that pictures accumulate on hard drives like wet leaves in a gutter, and when that happens, people limit the ability to weave their own stories into their experiences.  If they want to remember an event, no need to let the mind and soul shape the story, just go sit at the computer, insert the DVD, and watch it happen all over again.

In the For-What-It’s-Worth department, this is a real concern of mine in leading people to the Holy Land.  I’ve seen busses pull into a holy site, disgorge itself of tourists who seem permanently attached at the squinted eye to their cameras, thus experiencing copious segments of their Journey through a lens.  Their intention is good, seeking to record the profound experiences of pilgrimage in real time, for replay later.  It’s not the best way, however, I counsel our pilgrims.  I encourage them, at each site, to snap a few pictures, but to allow ample time for meditation and reflection – time to allow the experience to build the soul rather than the hard-drive, to record the pilgrimage in the heart, rather than merely on Kodak paper.

You see, if the experiences of our life get recorded in real time, it hardly counts as a record at all.  Life and experience are too wonderful for the map to be the territory.  True enough, human memory is not as precise or an enduring as digital technology, but while our memories are vital to our joy, the gradual degrading of the detail of our memory is natural and good, allowing us to weave stories, not guided by DVD exactness, but with the participation of heart and soul.  You see, both Remembering and Forgetting, in proper balance, is a wonderful gift from God.  

So I ask this morning as we consider the well-known text, “This do in Remembrance of me,” what is the role of Forgetting in the forging of our stories, the shaping of our souls?  

A couple of summers ago our daughter Ashley traveled back to the Ann Arbor of her childhood to be Maid of Honor at her friend, Laura’s, wedding.  Before she left Arkansas she described, close to our house on Manchester, right on the path of her daily walk with Laura between home and Junior High school, a phantom Howard Johnson’s Motel.  Phantom, I say, because her memory was defective.  There was no hotel between school and home.  The Howard Johnson’s, which our family knew because we used to eat Saturday breakfast there at Silverman’s Restaurant, was about a mile the other direction, in Ypsilanti.  “No,” she argued, having none of it.  “I Remember.  The Howard Johnson’s is there.” 

It wasn’t.  Arriving in Ann Arbor, she called home, admitting she was wrong.  But was she wrong?  Well, yes and no.  Digitally, yes, she was wrong.  Still, what emerged from her memory is precious, preserving a reverence for her holy places not based on digital fact, but in the imagination and landscape of her heart.  It was a Howard Johnson’s, half-remembered, half-imagined.  I much prefer such half-ness to perfect memory.  You see, in digital memory the past is always here, never half, always whole, always perfect, nothing lost to time.  Yet, like a map as big as the world itself, such memory would be useless, precisely because it’s too good.

“Memory,” wrote a great Roman philosopher, “is for those who have forgotten.”  What Plotinus meant, I think, is that one can’t Remember, until one has Forgotten.  Remembering implies that something has been Forgotten.  So only those who have Forgotten can be called to a Moment of Remembering, and that Moment of Remembering becomes a Moment of Search, a Moment of Presence transcending the passing of time.

Utopia is a word was coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, the title of his book about an ideal society.  Derived from Greek, it consists of two components, “U” and “topia.”  Topia is obvious enough, from the Greek topos (“place”), as in topography (again, conjuring the image of a map). The other component, though, is vague.  The “U” of Utopia, is derived either from eu  (“good”), as in eulogy, or ou (“not”). 

I think Sir Thomas intended the contradiction, causing us to wonder whether Utopia mean “Good place,” or “No place?”  Take your pick.  I think, both.  Ashley’s Howard Johnson Motel was a “Good place” in her mind and memory, in her soul as it was shaped in childhood experience.  But, when it comes down to details, it was “No place.”  And that’s okay.  It’s okay for us fondly to talk about the “Good Old Days,” knowing that, were the chance offered, we would not want to go back.  The “Good Place” of those “Old Days,” is, often, “No Place.”  In the actual living of it, it wasn’t quite so good.  It was life, with all its mix of joy and struggles, of happiness and suffering (which to some extent has been left behind, in mercy forgotten).  In other words, treasuring the past comes as precise memory degrades, allowing the stories which fashion our souls to emerge.