"Memory Informs Imagination and Vice Versa"

I read a book review not long ago which seemed at first to be an unauthorized biography. The book is entitled, "Why Life Speeds Up as you Get Older." One sentence became quite poignant to me:

"To remember too well, to carry with us the full burden of the past, is
cognitively and emotionally overwhelming, to say nothing of being
profoundly disturbing and disorientating." [Andrew Scull, "I Remember It
Too Well," Times Literary Supplement, May 13, 2005, p.7.]

I am certain that one of the reasons this sentence about the burden of memory stuck me is that my brother, who is seven years older than I, invited my siblings with our spouses to a reunion. We met in July at my younger sister's home in Indiana. For three days we sat and remembered our family of origin and heard stories from our spouses about their growing up. Because I am considered a raving liberal by my siblings I promised not to talk about politics or religion.

When we met for that reunion, we soon realized that we had very few common memories of growing up in the same family. Of course we weren't in the same family! By the time I came along my brother was seven and my older sister was five. The family changed each time a child was born. My older brother and sister have distinct memories which my younger sister and I do not share.

As a kind of refresher for this family gathering, and at the urging of my Daughter, I have been working on some memories of my childhood and youth. I am interested that in fifteen closely-typed pages, my memories tend to be primarily related to emotional impact more than factual information. I remember better those things which had emotional content.

For example, about the only memory I have of sixth grade is being in a play in which all the boys were dressed in Roman or Greek "togas," something like long shirts which came down "thigh length." So far, so good, except that on the day of the play I had to wear my older brother's hand-me-down underwear which was too big for me, and kept slipping down showing, beneath my "toga." I remember that incident because of my embarrassment!

Memory cannot always be trusted. In the book I mentioned earlier, there is a story from the life of Jean Piaget who had a vivid memory of his nurse fighting off a kidnapper on the Champs Elysees. Piaget remembered the crowd, the policeman, even the location. However, years later it turns out the whole incident had been fabricated by the nursemaid! She had fabricated the story, even to scratches on her face where she supposedly fought off the kidnapper. Piaget's parents gave her a gold watch to reward her for her bravery. Yet, years later she wrote to admit it was all false and returned the watch. Piaget's memory was based on nothing more than hearing the story.

I am not suggesting that our memories must necessarily be either factual or accurate. In fact, they are usually neither. Anne Sexton writes somewhere, "It doesn't matter who my father was, it matters who I remember he was." Memory is usually a mixture of truth with fancy. That point was made when Terry Gross interviewed Mary Karr for the program, "Fresh Air." I used a quotation from that interview as one of today's Readings.

Mary Karr, who wrote the book, Liar's Club, grew up in a small town in Texas. She was sexually abused as a child. That book and a subsequent book are built around her memories. However she vehemently denies that they are memoirs. She recognizes that memory is not perfect. "Memory informs imagination, and imagination informs memory," she writes.

Our memories are most often, if not always, impacted by experiences. Peter Berger wrote somewhere, "The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened." Perhaps the most cynical remark about memory came from Albert Schweitzer who described happiness as "good health and bad memory."

I want to suggest a way beyond that kind of cynicism about memory. We all have our memories which may be tainted or a distortion of the facts due to emotional content or wishful thinking or imagination. Memory can also become fixated, locked in the past. This is not only a personal issue, it has to do with our Nation and culture.

President Bush has nominated Judge Samuel Alito to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Based on my limited reading, to say nothing of my limited understanding of judicial decision-making, I am concerned. I am concerned that Judge Alito seems to believe the Constitution of 1791 should be "frozen" without regard to contemporary context.

For example, I understand he did not believe the Congress should make federal laws regulating machine guns on city streets. His reasoning seems to be that the Constitution does not give the Federal Government authority to regulate weapons. That may well have been true in 1791, but life has changed radically. This seems to me to be faulty "constitutional memory" which does not accept the realities of context, as though the Constitution is a dead, not a living document.

My suggestion is that we can learn to appropriate meaningfully the past in order to give meaning to the present. We will soon move into Thanksgiving, a national holiday based on memory. Then, a month later into Christmas and Hanukkah, quasi- religious holidays based on memory.

Thanksgiving is a celebration of civil religion. It is based on memory, more importantly on a story repeated through the generations, of the Pilgrims gathering after that first harsh winter in New England to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. Well, yes, but . . . What was the location of the first Thanksgiving?

Betty was born and reared in Virginia. We went to school in Richmond, our children were born in Danville, Virginia. Virginians insist the first Thanksgiving was actually at Berkeley Plantation on the banks of the James River, predating the Pilgrims' thanksgiving feast. Of course that is a little-known fact which should not be allowed to interrupt our Thanksgiving feast.

However, the story of Thanksgiving is not complete unless we also remember why the Pilgrims celebrated and how their celebration can become meaningful for our present. That is why this Congregation will celebrate the "Pilgrim Feast" in a couple of weeks. The Readings for the Pilgrim Feast are not only filled with memories of the past but with challenges for the present.

The first several readings of the Pilgrim Feast have to do with history - past tense. And then the tense changes; suddenly the readings are in the present tense. As you probably know the Pilgrim Feast follows the ancient ritual of the Jewish Seder Feast. The Seder celebration is remarkable in that it celebrates the past and the present. The tenses of the readings are mixed. For example, "Our fathers went down into Egypt . . . pharaoh mistreated them . . . and God brought us out of Egypt."

What happens in both the celebration of Seder and the celebration of Thanksgiving is a communal memory which is a mixture of both historical fact and legend, memories of the past which can have meaning for the present. Perhaps one incident from the Exodus story will illustrate what I mean.

Just after the Israelites had escaped Egypt proper, they found themselves at the edge of marshy wetlands, the "Reed Sea." They became aware that Pharoah's army was closing in behind them. They began complaining to Moses, who in turn asked God for a miracle. According to the ancient text, the reply given to Moses was: "Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward." Namely, tell them to march right straight into and through that muddy estuary.

That story from the past is a universal story of how people throughout all ages have dealt with difficult situations. Rather than hoping for a miracle or a quick cure, the reply comes, "Stop whining, stop hoping for the miraculous, and get on with your life!" The present meaning which can be appropriated from this ancient story is that every individual comes to those times in life when we stand at the edge of what seems an impossible situation, being chased by some fearsome force. The people who deal best with those situations are those who "go forward" with life.

There are also some elements of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving which need to be remembered, and which may give meaning to the present. The Pilgrims are celebrated because they came to this "barren land" seeking freedom of religion. That is a perfectly valid memory. However, unfortunately those dissenters from tyranny did not provide freedom of religion to others. They exiled Ann Hutchison, a Quaker, and exiled the Baptist Roger Williams in the dead of winter. The universal meaning of this memory of the Pilgrims is the warning that people, all people, sometimes fail to provide for others what they want for themselves.

One of the worst things about memory is that people may sometimes never get over their pasts. I have known Unitarian Universalist adults who never could get away from adolescent rebellion against the religion of their youth. Rather than accepting the past - good and bad - they are enslaved in past memories and rebellion.

In other words memory can bring either helpful or harmful meaning to the present. If we get locked into the bad experiences of the past, we may become resigned to hopelessness. Our memories will stymie our lives.

If, however, we can rehearse the past, reciting the good memories, but also the bad memories we may learn. More than anything else memories of the past can provide hope. I read an article by a hospital chaplain which takes the old saying, "Where there is life there is hope," and turns it upside down; "Where there is hope there is life." Based on his experiences of people dealing with cancer, he writes:

"Within the limits of the studies cited [in this article], there are indications
that hope enhances the quality and even the quantity of life. Hope helps
people to deal with their feelings and to cope with their illness. Hope
affects immunity and survival." [Robert L. Richardson, "Where There is Hope, There
is Life: Toward a Biology of Hope," The Journal of Pastoral Care, Vol. 54, No. 1, Spring, 2000,
pp. 75-84.]

When all is said and done, it seems to me the historicity - the factual details of events from the past - are not as important as the meaning we may elicit from the events of the past. Facts are important, but not as important as our willingness to learn from and appropriate the meaning of history so that we may live better in the present.

In one of his novels, Wallace Stegner has a character writing a letter to his long-dead parent. Here is part of that letter, note the present meaning from the past experience.

". . . Your kind of love, once given, is never lost. You are alive and
luminous in my head. Except when I fail to listen, you will speak
through me when I face some crisis of feeling or sympathy or
consideration of others. You are a curb on my natural impatience
and competitiveness and arrogance. When I have been less than
myself, you make me ashamed even as you forgive me. . . ."
[Wallace Stegner, "Letter Much Too Late," pp.22-33 of "Where the Bluebird Sings to
The Lemonade Springs," pp. 23-24]

Last Sunday we observed El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, and by extension All Saints' Day. We remembered people near and dear to us who have died. We're moving to Thanksgiving and the Christmas/Hanukkah holidays which overflow with memories. Some of those memories may be true; some may be faulty. Some of our memories will be heavy with emotion - both good and bad. The key will be not simply to remember, but to re-claim those past experiences from despair to hope. Finally, you see, our memories will be not only for what has happened in the past, but for what can happen as we live in the present.

In a few moments we will sing Samuel Longfellow's poem, "Light of Ages and of Nations." I invite you to notice how the past speaks and brings meaning to the present. The Hymn is numbered 189, you're invited to stand as your spirit and physical abilities allow as we sing together.

Readings for the Service, November 6, 2005

"For me memoir is an act of memory and not an act of history. It's remembered
experience; it's not lived experience. There are all kinds of theories about ways we remember, and I have no doubt that I do have a better long-term memory than most people. . . . But memoir is a corrupt form. Memory informs imagination, and imagination informs memory. So when people ask me how I remember all this stuff, I always say, 'Well obviously, I don't; I just think I do, which I think is true.' " [Mary Karr in an interview with Terry Gross, October 2, 2000, printed in "All I did Was Ask" by Terry Gross, p.52.]

"After more than half a long lifetime I find that my recollection, however vivid and lasting, must unavoidably be mixed with many afterthoughts. It is hard to remember anything perfectly straight, accurate, no matter whether it was painful or pleasant at that time. I find that I remember best just what I felt and thought about this event in its own time, in its inalterable setting; my impressions of this occasion remain fast, no matter how many reviews or recollections or how many afterthoughts have added themselves with the years." [Kathryn Anne Porter, "The Never Ending Wrong," pp.31-32]