Memory is a funny thing

Rev. Chris Spruill
Incarnation United Church of Christ

(5/18) The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines memory as "the power or process of recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms." However, if you ask any two people to tell you what they remember about the same experience, you are likely to get two different answers. Often our memories can be colored to show us a flawed version of past reality. Each one of us brings earlier experiences, biases, prejudices and beliefs to every new experience and we see through the lens of our lives up to the point of that new experience to a point where even when we share the experience closely with someone else, we don’t see it the same way they do.

I am reminded of a mission trip I took with several teenagers back in 2004. It was my first time traveling to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and our group was introduced, many of us for the first time, to first-hand accounts of the atrocities of our nation’s past with Native Americans from their perspective and the horrific conditions under which many of the reservation people lived their daily lives. When given the chance to reflect on the experience afterwards, each of the young people who attended had chosen to remember the experience in very different ways.

Some of them seemed to have forgotten the stories we were told about the traditions of the native people while others were somehow able to forget the sadness many of the people shared with us about their lives. It was almost as if some of them had a completely different experience than the one that I remembered. It was then that I had to reflect more deeply on my own experience to see that even I may have been remembering differently than the events had actually occurred.

While it is important to see memory as a construct of our individual brains, it is also important to understand that memories can also change over time. Sometimes it is our brains playing tricks on us. Often, it is simply the fact that older experiences bleed over into newer experiences and we begin to believe that the memory constructed in our brain is the actual reality, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

This month, as a nation, we are focused on memory. This year, on May 28th, we will remember the members of our fighting forces who have made the ultimate sacrifice during their time of service to our country. Other countries have similar observances, such as ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, Remembrance Day in Canada, Armistice Day in much of Europe and Volkstrauerstag in Germany. In America, we had traditionally used Armistice Day (Veteran’s Day) or, after the Civil War, Decoration Day (May 30) in both the North and the South as groups (often women’s auxiliaries of local Armed Services remembrance groups) would decorate the graves of soldiers who had died in various Civil War battle with fresh flowers.

The term "Memorial Day" was first used in 1882 but became even more common in usage after World War II. Finally, in 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moving the observance of Memorial Day from May 30 to its recurring pattern of the last Monday of May where it has been celebrated annually since 1971.

Memory is also important as we focus on our religious belief systems. The three major monotheistic religious traditions, which account for more than 70% of those who profess a particular religious faith around the globe, are focused on sacred stories of history. Without history, memory is pointless. Christians are called to remember the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross as we celebrate communion in our various traditions. We tell the story once again of Jesus’ final meal, shared with his followers on the night of his arrest – the day before the Crucifixion. Without exercising memory, we cannot recognize the significance of such a sacrifice made on our behalf.

Often, in our memories, we call up images of heroes in our lives as larger-than-life characters who can do no wrong. We tend to forget ways in which these real-life individuals did not always live up to heroic tendencies. History books are filled with stories of the wonderful ways in which American heroes have sacrificed parts of their lives (some their entire lives) to further the American Dream but history books never tell us the entire story. We are quick to gloss over ways in which those same "heroic" individuals espoused ideals that we don’t want to associate with that same American Dream. We do that with our cultural heroes also. We forget that everyone is human and when current heroes fall from the pedestals on which we have invariably placed them, we are often harder on them than we would be on ourselves for showing the same limitations of humanity. While there is an inherent unfairness in such treatment, we are often quick to allow our good memories to become overpowered by bad behavior.

Our religious heroes can also fall into those same categories. We want to remember the ways in which they were used by God to reach extraordinary goals, but we tend to forget that they were also human beings, much like us, and were flawed and ordinary, just like most of us. Noah is portrayed as the righteous man that God saved from the Great Flood, but he is also the first vintner who became hopelessly drunk after learning to ferment grapes into wine.

David is seen as the first Great King of Israel, but he is also guilty of stealing Uriah’s wife and then sending Uriah to certain death so that he could keep Bathsheba as his own. Peter is the Rock on which Jesus built the new Christian Church, but he also denied knowing Jesus when confronted on the night of Jesus’ arrest, fearing for his safety in the unfamiliar city of Jerusalem among the uncertainty of what it meant to be one of Jesus’ followers.