Memory and Forgiveness

May 27, 2001

The other night, during a bout of insomnia, I imagined what it might be like if time suddenly began to go backwards. I imagined that in an impossibly distant future, time imploded, and the universe began to unwind. I have no idea if such a scenario is scientifically plausible, but imagine that instead of moving from birth to death, we suddenly began to move from death to birth.

All tragedy, all illness, all stupidity and cruelty would be undone. All our mistakes would be corrected, or, at least, erased. Wars would be unfought. The movement in life would be from sadness to joy, from loss to fullness, from age to youth. The earth would slowly be reclaimed, and the direction--theoretically--would be toward paradise again; though ultimately it would return to that time mentioned in the Book of Genesis when the world “was without form, and void.”

Would our lives simply be lived in reverse, but with all of our accumulated wisdom intact? Or would our experience corrupt us as we moved back toward our youth and our childhood? Would we recapture our innocence as we went along? Could we change history in reverse, or would we even need to?

We would end our lives as infants. We would still move from oblivion to oblivion, from unknown to unknown, but how different this would seem if the movement was from decay to new life to--what? Can we call the time before our birth death? But isn’t death simply a return to the time when we were not? We are so curious about the afterlife--but what about the before-life? Why is it not equally troubling to us?

I remember when my youngest son Josh was little and the conversation would turn to some event before he was born. He would insist that he was there, too, refusing to allow the possibility that there was a time when he was not.

You can tell that we are nearing the end of the church year, if these are the kinds of speculations that occupy my sleepless hours.

But there is something comforting in the thought that it might be so.

I am fascinated by the power of memory. I am constantly amazed, and sometimes dismayed, by the details secreted away in my memory. How can the brain possibly store all of this stuff? What is the point? Is it blessing or curse?

To remember, we are reminded, means literally to “re-member”: to put back together that which has been torn asunder. Remembering is remarkably similar to “religion,” which means “to rebind together.” It is a seeking after wholeness. It is what I think we are about most of the time. Amazingly, memory allows us to remember our lives, to put them back together the way they were, or even the way that we wish they had been. Unfortunately, it can also allow us to put them back together in a way that they never came close to being.

Obviously, not all memory is good. Some of it is terrible, and we know that some memories can color our lives and even ruin them. And memory is not always accurate. We have invented the term “selective memory” in recognition of this reality. Selective memory can be both positive and negative, depending on what we choose to select.

Some of us--the positive thinkers, the optimists--are very good at selecting the good memories. There is quite a lot of evidence that people who live to extremely old age are very good at managing their memories. Some even claim that they don’t spend a lot of time looking back--that is, they don’t spend a lot of time with their memories. They are forward-lookers.

Others among us can’t seem to escape the burden of our memories, whether good or bad. Our natural orientation is toward the past, rather than toward the future, or even the present. And some of us actually prefer to live in our memories. Marcel Proust got six minutely descriptive volumes out of his!

Assuming for the moment that all of us are influenced in greater or lesser degree by our memories, I want to consider some of the positive and negative consequences of our approach to memory.

For me, memory is a bittersweet place. I am acutely aware of all that has been lost, of all that is past and gone. I tend to remember the many stupid things I have done, and to sometimes dwell upon them. I recognize too late my failures to appreciate the present moment. I find myself too often wishing to repeat the past rather than reaching out to embrace the future. This could easily become neurosis if I am not careful.

The positive side of this dilemma, of this awareness, is that I believe it can help me to frame for myself and, I hope, for others the quest for wholeness on which I believe we are all embarked. And it is this quest which makes memory powerfully religious.

All of us carry sorrows and regrets, and, most of us, hidden grief. The question for us is, what shall these sorrows and regrets do to us? How shall we use them to improve upon the present? There is nothing wrong with sorrow and regret as long as we learn something from it, and change ourselves for the better. And as to grief, to forget would be to forget the source, which I assume none of us wants to do.

This is where the forgiveness comes in. For me, memory is an important source of change. Sometimes I must forgive myself and others in order to be able to move on to the next stage of my life. Too many of us are stuck in the blame game--blaming ourselves or others for the problems in our lives. We and they may well be guilty, but we need to get beyond it if we are to progress in life. Memory can play a very negative role in such attitudes. Whether it is the good old days or the bad old days that we tend to remember, we can covet them to an unhealthy extent.

If we think the good old days are all gone, then we may fail to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us at this very moment. That is why I think the Native Americans pray to the beauty above, below, and all around them. They want to constantly remind themselves of the good that is. Similarly, if we remember only the negative, only the “bad old days,” we may miss the reality that there is always good to be found in life, even in the midst of the darkest times. And we can easily allow the past to have more influence on the present and on our approach to the future than it deserves or warrants.

Unitarian Universalist minister Forrester Church, in a sermon entitled “Forgive and Let Forgive,” writes that

. . .in most instances forgiveness is a tonic. It liberates us from the tyranny of the past. Say someone has harmed us, snubbed us, lied to us, broken a promise, embarrassed us, left us standing. At first there is no question but that he is the offender, and we the victim. But over time half of this equation changes. For by nurturing this hurt, by refusing to let go of the pain, it is we ourselves who are both victim and offender. It’s like a little vial of poison. Once having received it from another, we keep refilling the same prescription and administering it to ourselves. Forgiveness breaks the pattern. In part it is to say, I shall release myself from the curse you have placed on me: you are forgiven.

Memory and forgiveness go together. I have forgiven myself for most of my mistakes along the way. And I have tried to forgive others for their failures to relate to me and to treat me as I wished they had done. The past is done and gone, but insofar as I can, I try to learn from it and to become a better person because of it.

Our failures to be the friends we wish we had been, the parents we wanted to be, the children we should have been, need not destroy us in the here and now. Forgiveness can liberate us and help us to reinvest our energies in a positive direction.

Often at night, when I am not thinking up weird scenarios of time travel, I like to remember. Sometimes, as I think I have mentioned before, I try to remember the occupants of all the houses in my home town. I like to remember my grandparents, and I try to remember their faces, what they looked like, and their voices, how they sounded. I like to remember my neighborhood when I was growing up, what the mornings felt like, how the sky looked, the smell of the ocean and the sound of the sea gulls overhead. These are good memories.

Other times, though, I dwell overmuch on the bad memories and wonder what I might have done to make things different. Of course, there is absolutely nothing that I can do to change the past, but that doesn’t stop me. The only thing that helps is when I realize that I can still change the present. I can choose how to use those negative memories. Perhaps I can even forgive myself, though too often I don’t come to that conclusion until I have missed a good night’s sleep.

I think that on a far deeper and more profound level that is what Donald Murray is talking about [“In war, everybody does the same thing”]. Murray refuses to allow his selective memory to change his war experiences into something they were not. He personally finds nothing in them to celebrate, but he does not criticize how others choose to “survive.” By being brutally honest about his memories, he is able to live with them, and seemingly to forgive himself and others for what they were asked to do. He is not naive about the terrible reality of war.

Would that we could all be so honest with ourselves. And perhaps we can be. Perhaps we can turn our nostalgia for the past into what one of my colleagues calls “nostalgia for the present.” If our memories can help us to make the world a better place, and perhaps to avoid some of the mistakes we have made in the past, then well and good. Memory can be a powerful tool in our quest toward wholeness, not only for ourselves but for the world. But it must be real memory, not some revisionist version which makes it better or worse than it really was.

Anyone who dives deeply into the pool of memory will eventually discover a need for forgiveness. It is far wiser to forgive a parent or friend for being unable to provide the love and understanding and support we needed, then it is to carry the burden of our bitterness with us through all our days and sleepless nights. And it is far better to forgive ourselves our shortcomings then to allow them to permanently color our view of who we are and, more important, of who we might become.

In the conclusion of his sermon, Forrest Church writes,

Forgiveness is an elixir, as close to honest magic as religion gets, a potent tonic for healing our lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters, our parents, our children, our spouses and ex-spouses, our co-workers and friends. A little like going back in time. Probably we and others would make many of the same mistakes and commit many similar little crimes all over again. But having visited our past (as we do with each act of forgiveness) we might return from them a little more able to accept our own and one another’s humanity, remembering that we are all imperfect sons and daughters of life and death, whose trespasses need to be forgiven, even as we need to forgive those who trespass against us.

On Memorial Day, I like to remember who I am and where I have come from. Though I will most likely never have a chance to relive my past, I can use memory to help me live my life better in the here and now. When combined with forgiveness, memory can be an important tool in the quest toward wholeness and harmony. In that sense, memory is religious in the best sense of the word. May all our memories, even the bad and sad ones, bring us to peace in the end.

May it be so. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock