Remembering With A Purpose

Did you forget where you put your keys last night? Do you sometimes forget the name of your best friend? Forgetfulness is common, especially as we get older. But some things we think are important to remember and others we want to forget. When we have painful or traumatic experiences there seem to be two common approaches to them. One voice says we should forget them in order to put them behind us - get on with our lives. Another voice counsels us to remember the pain because if we submerge them beneath the waves of our conscious mind our lives will be directed by hidden forces and we will never be truly free.

The moral economy is also influenced by memory. In 18th century England when bread shortages were created by new marketing schemes, rural women demanded that bread be sold according to the just price established by royal statute. The law in question had been created 150 years earlier to be used during times of famine. For the first time, people were experiencing a famine created not by nature but by the market system. The women remembered the law and insisted that it be enforced. Justice in commercial relationships and care for the community were key elements in their identity. By remembering the law and acting on their memory, they were refusing to be diminished and insisting that these values be carried forward into the future.

In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created the conditions for the truth of life under apartheid to be told. By validating the truth of the experience of ordinary people, the Commission made sure that the experience could never be denied. South Africans would always have to remember who they have been and where they came from. Across Canada every December 6th, there are spontaneous memorials to the 14 young women who were gunned down at Montreal’s L’Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. They were all engineering students and their crime was being female. Canadians remember because it is important not to forget that society is still so patriarchal that being female can get you killed. We will never be free of this hatred if we allow ourselves to forget. So, we remember with a purpose.

Soon it will be August the 6th. This year it will be 62 years since we (the western allied powers, including Canada) dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and three days later a second one on Nagasaki. Over 200,000 people died as a result of those two bombs. We remember those events, but for what purpose, to what effect? Remembering the atomic bomb means remembering our capacity to do the most unspeakable things to each other. In order to be free we have to remember what horrors we are capable of. We remember so that it will never happen again. We cannot truly commit to change our behaviour unless we confess what our behaviour has been. We want to remember ourselves as compassionate, caring and just. We want to think of ourselves as good. We can only be just in the future if we make a point of remembering with clarity, our willingness to be the opposite.

Readers who want to read more on memory from a theological point of view could turn to Miroslav Volf's The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, Eerdmans 2006.