Remembering and Forgetting

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"And when they saw him they worshiped him but some doubted…"

-- Matthew 28:17

This enigmatic parenthesis shows that it is possible to doubt even at times of maximum revelation. The disciples see the risen Christ on a mountaintop in Galilee and while most fall to their knees and worship him, some stand off to one side and mumble. What precisely do they doubt? Probably that this glorious being is indeed He; and if they doubted that how much more would they have doubted that he has all authority in heaven and on earth?  Today we have more historical reason than they to doubt that Jesus, born “Prince of Peace” is in control of history, and especially on this special weekend when we observe Memorial Day, in honor of those fallen in our wars. Of all human follies war is surely the most foolish, so while we honor the fallen we must abhor the reason for their fall. Today, Trinity Sunday, I want to devote this sermon not to the Holy Trinity, whom we celebrate on every Sunday of the year, but to remembering and to forgetting, especially as they pertain to warfare.

The ability to remember is one of the essential capabilities of mind. Memory gives us our identity; we are the persons whom we remember ourselves to be, identified in terms of where we come from, who our parents are, what our education has been, and how the experience of our life has unfolded, not to mention the mundane things like where our bed and dining table are and what we do on Sundays, and the essentially important things like who they are who love us, and when and where we might see them. The course of diseases like Alzheimer’s shows how people cease to be who they are as the memory fails, and eventually do not recognize the significant others who by relationship have defined their lives. Sufferers lose their subjective identities; we continue to identify them but they do not know and really no longer care who they are.

(It is important, therefore, to know that God never forgets who we are and that His call to us establishes and maintains our identity. This is the same theology as lies behind the baptism of infants. Before we know who we are and after we no longer remember or care who we are, God remembers and His love claims us, names us and sustains us, in our true identity before Him and beyond what our earthly loved ones can know or could ever have known. Each one of us has a true identity known only to God, and for that reason indestructible, so that the decline of the brain does not compromise the integrity of the person, who remains perfect in the mind of God, - but that is another sermon).

The ability to forget is also essential to our identity, especially to its recovery from trauma. These days we see people coming forward to accuse priests of malfeasance more than thirty years ago. It’s hard for me to shake the feeling that greed for gain is a major motivating factor, but one must allow that there are also unforgettable hurts. Then there are the cultures of revenge: an anthropologist working in Kosovo decades ago tells of hearing the murder of a 12 year old boy by a grown man justified and indeed praised as payback for an insult to the murderer’s family by the little boy’s grandfather. The community praised the murderer for restoring the family honor.

I love reading history and I believe that those of us who do not know history are condemned, not to repeat it, as Hegel optimistically once said, but rather to lead lives without resonance or depth. (In a wiser moment Hegel also said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, so knowing it clearly does not prevent us from repeating it. One of the most terrifying things to observe as one reads history is how the human race, ignoring the copious record of evidence to the contrary, eagerly chooses combat to solve problems, rushing to offer up the lives of 18 year olds on the “slaughter bench of nations” - another phrase from Hegel).  Without knowledge of history we are also condemned to the vanity that thinks it is the first to come up with some good idea, or the first to suffer some dreadful setback, or the most crippling vanity of all, optimism. Nevertheless, I would support a ban on the teaching of history if it meant a forgetting of the hurts of the past that poison the present and mortgage the future. The Ten Commandments tell us that God visits “…the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me…” (Exodus 20: 5). That seems to me to be a statement of sober fact. Oh for some sweet forgetfulness! Another word for forgetting is amnesty; will we ever be able to forget wrongs done to us for the sake of the lives of our teenagers, to offer amnesty rather than agony?)

On this weekend we remember the casualties in all our wars beginning, if not in time then in importance, with the 660,00 who died in the War of the Rebellion, or the War for Southern Independence. The first official celebration of Memorial Day was in 1868 when the general commanding the Grand Army of the Republic, Gen. John Logan, issued General Order #11 on the fifth of May.   Its first paragraph read  “The 30^th day of May 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet church yard in the land…” The day was first called Decoration Day, and General Logan had military personnel place flowers on the graves of Union and Confederate dead in Arlington Cemetery. Since the late fifties of the last century soldiers of the 103rd Infantry place small flags on the graves in Arlington on the Thursday before and patrol the cemetery from that time until Memorial Day is over. This year we are all asked to observe a moment of silence at 3 p.m. local time, in memory of those who died that our nation might live. I commend it to you.

It is no wonder that the defeated South did not respond to General Order 11, which refers to their effort as the “late rebellion,” but it does seem sad to me that seven out of eleven of the states of the long defunct Confederacy still honor the Confederate fallen on days other than Memorial Day, despite the fact that it was officially changed after WWI into a memorial to all the fallen in all our wars, and its name changed from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.  And does the “Stars and Bars” still fly atop the State capitol in Montgomery, Alabama? I did not hear the outcome of that debate the year before last. Surely there are die-hards and blowhards, but it is part of the problem not the solution to keep remembering the things that divide us. And what of the Arabs in their refugee camps generation after generation, and the Jews, terrified by their cruel history into a braggadocio and a brutality that bespeaks not strength but weakness, not confidence but foreboding and desperation, while my heart bleeds for them all, and my prayers rise unceasing for the peace of Jerusalem.

On the one hand I ask, ‘Do we encourage further warfare by lionizing the fallen? Does war provide the occasions and the sacrifices for a national cult of the state? The Mall in Washington DC is nothing less than a shrine of the cult of the nation consecrated by the sacrifice of soldiers. Every president needs a war, and the current one has placed himself beyond criticism, in the realm of the sacred king whose impunity is sanctioned by sacrifice, by telling the people that we are at war to avenge the blood of our innocents. How long will it be unpatriotic to criticize the Republican administration because we are at war? Are we really “outrageous” (Cheney) because we suggest that the administration should have been more alert to its own intelligence sources before the attack, or are we aiding the enemy by criticizing measures by the Justice Department that seem to threaten civil liberties (Ashcroft)? Will it be like the Cold War, which for 50 years inhibited frank criticism, and allied us with crooks and gangsters around the world just because they were anti-communist.

On the other hand I have no words to express the awe and gratitude I feel at the skill, bravery and selflessness of the men and women who fight our battles and die.  I believe that there is such a thing as a just war, that the profession of arms is an honorable one, and that it is the greatest love to lay down one’s life for one’s friends and fellow countrymen.

So what shall we say, this Memorial Day? We shall remember especially the thousands of our fellow citizens, most of them not soldiers, who died on September 11th. We shall remember those who have died since then trying to eradicate the threat of terrorism to our peace of mind and our safety. 

Finally and more important than all, we shall remember Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who is Almighty God become human to re-create the world. We shall remember that since that is the case every wound, every blow, every fatality registers on his divine heart, and thus he transforms them from death to eternal life. Let us remember therefore, not only the valor of those who fought for us in this world but the power of him whose spiritual victory saved us to the utmost.  Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo I am with you always, to the end of the world” (Matthew 27:18-20).   Let’s do it!