13.11.05 Steve Remembering, Imagination, Dreams.
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“There are three things that happen to you when you get old. The first is that you start to lose your memory...... and I can't remember the other two” (Brian Johnson, the greatest of all cricket commentators).
So I think I may have mentioned this story before.... I can't remember ... so bear with me if I have. Back in my touring musician days, I was working in The Netherlands. We had a few days off, and one lunchtime I cycled to a nearby town – wonderfully picturesque – a tiny walled city, with beautiful canals and tiny narrow cobbled and shuttered streets, clustered around a Cathedral. In the Cathedral precincts I found a cosy pub. It was empty, candlelit, and designed around a bewildering but evocative collection of religious statues. A refectory table and some splendid 'trappiste' monastery beer provided an ideal context for some writing. As the afternoon wore on, I became aware that the pub was filling up. Eventually it was very full. Nearby offices had emptied their personnel into it – noticeably young professionals. As the level of noise began to rise, I began to think that the chances of concentrating had gone. Suddenly all went quiet. I realised that the entire crowd was standing in silence watching the big TV screen in the corner. They were watching the independence day ceremony – from the Amsterdam equivalent of the act of remembrance from the cenotaph. I was struck by the reverence of young people, at least one, maybe two generations removed from the war. I supposed that the cultural pains of an occupied people are probably still very present. I didn't imagine it would have happened in Scotland.
My little story is about twelve years old. I have recounted it many times. I wonder to what extent the details are accurate – and to what extent the memories have been neatly packaged, tinted, and archetyped by other images and other scenes, and other stories that crowd my mind. The powerful capability of human memory is one definition of what makes us human. By its power we learn. By learning, we can modify our behaviour to our advantage..... and the full working out of that process ends up with civilisations. It is fundamental to human existence.
We are
so used to memory's remarkable powers that we are surprised and then
frustrated by even the smallest ways in which it fails us. It is
virtually impossible to be so self aware that we are conscious of the
mind's seamless ordering of different classifications of memory,
(old, new, trivial, vital...), and of how this complex process is all
the more complicated by the ways the mind compensates for mislaid, or
painful memory by drawing on untold layers of alternative material:
by
drawing on imagination (how things may have been);
or by drawing on similar memories ('people who bought this memory also bought......');
or by drawing on dreams (the vast other world of memories created in our unconscious). As the Scottish poet Harry Smart says:
Memory
plays funny games
Imagination
Dreams
They
seem as fresh as yesterday
They
seem a thousand miles away
Who's
to say that memory tells better truth than dreams?
Imagination
only seems less real than what we call reality.
As believers who have chosen to enter into a religious tradition that emanates from ancient civilisations, we are in the business of exploring a world view that is characterised by collective memory. Our faith is founded on remembrances of oral traditions – the memories of generations of real people who wanted to be people of God, people of the Christ and his Way, with whom we align ourselves. Written scriptures, yes – the written recorded memories, imagination, dreams of very human people.
The Hebrews were Hebrews because they remembered the towering stories of persecution, exodus and exile. Christians, from their earliest times, have been Christian because they have thrown themselves back, week after week, generation after generation, on the last great commandment of their Lord – to remember. Do this – in remembrance of me. What was he doing? Was he worried they would forget?
They would never forget, but the gift of the ritual remembrance is the divine acknowledgment of what is most human in us. God our maker, knows, of course, that we are creatures formed by remembering.... the part of human experience which re-members us – which makes it possible to put ourselves together.... with all that has mattered in our lives (conscious, unconscious, or imagined)... and with all that is beyond us and from whence we have come – the divine memory of perfect love. Do this in remembrance of me.
We
will remember these boys and these men whose memorial is before us –
and the untold thousands like them – those whom we remember, and
those whom we can only imagine. Our remembering is embodied in the
poppies. Scarlet poppies grow
naturally in conditions of disturbed earth throughout Western Europe.
The destruction brought by the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th
Century, transformed bare land into fields of blood red poppies,
growing around the bodies of the fallen soldiers. A scene repeated in
late 1914, when the fields of Northern France and Flanders were once
again ripped open. The white poppy was first introduced by the
Women's Co-operative Guild in 1933 and was intended as a lasting
symbol for peace and an end to all wars. The Guild (a movement for
social justice among the poor) which had spoken out strongly against
the First World War and maintained their pacifist principles, and
commitment to the peace movement throughout the inter-war years began
to feel that a new impetus was needed. In 1933, several branches
asked for a symbol to express their opposition to war, and the white
poppy for wearing on Armistice Day (now Remembrance day), was born.
The Guild stressed that the white poppy was in no way intended as an
insult to those who died in the First World War but that it was a
'pledge to peace that war must not happen again'. Indeed, many of the
women lost husbands, brothers, sons and lovers. There is, it seems to
me, no conflict in these symbols of remembering. One which powerfully
evokes the memory of those who died, and one which calls us to
re-member our broken world which remains so terribly dis-membered. We
will remember them.
-
and we will remember those other women and men whom we have loved,
those whose memory is distant, and those whose memory is very present
(of course, often the oldest memories can be the most
present).......all of these we will remember because they have made
us and always will be part of us.
- and we will remember our Lord who knew that to be in our ritual remembrance was to be at the very heart of who we are.