The moral life begins not in our remembrance of God, but in God’s remembrance of us.
The Body in Pain, Memory Undone
Recently, I’ve had more than one acquaintance touched by rare forms of cancer, the kinds which are slow and grueling, the kinds of which steal senses before they take lives. The suffering of the old, and of myself as I slowly move into the middle of the human lifespan, is understandable: there comes a point at which a 45-year old body begins to show wear and tear, even if cared for. But not this.
Slow death is harder to watch because of the deterioration, the unmaking that it puts before us all. This week, in my systematic theology class, we’re covering a doctrine of sin.1 And if the doctrine of sin is anything, it is unmaking, an un-rendering of creation that takes intricate things and destroys them: love, bodies, time, virtue. The body in pain, Elaine Scarry writes, is a body which is being unmade: pain is that which not only rends our present, but destroys our history. Pain is that which calls our past into question, that we were ever happy or that goodness could ever be possible. It unmakes us, beginning with the present, and works backwards. Pain makes us, compels us to forget who we are.
From this vantage point, much of the moral life is at stake, for our ability to have a moral life is in no small part linked to our ability to have memories: to learn from error, to grow in wisdom, to gain skill in tracing out the lineaments of judgment in order that we might follow the Good Shepherd through tall grasses.
We learn the voice of God, to listen to the voice of the Spirit, and these things are all tied into memory. It is being able to see where we have come from that roots us in the present, and gives us orientation for the days to come. And without this, the tree which we are meant to be collapses into the ever-flowing river, washed endlessly out to sea2.
What We Don’t Remember Remembers Us
Memory in Scripture is a two-way street, and for the moment, I want to draw our attention to one end of this boulevard: Human Memory.
If I ask you to recount your childhood, what you’ll give me is in fleeting pieces, images, bright lights, flashes of conversations and events. Over time, these fragments come together into something like An Image, A Feeling, A Sense of Having Been There.
There are, to be sure, some strong scents and stories, but in the end, our lives layer over and over again the most beautiful of stories until they too lie in the seedbed of our minds. This is not to say that they are gone, but that they simply are now the firmament within which everything else grows. Who we are now is rooted in who we were, growing in strange and fecund ways out of a complex ground. A ten-year-old birthday party when it was raining, a sixteen year old part comprised of awkwardly mixed guests in my parents den, my grandfathers’ hands.
These are the layers upon layers of memory for the people of God: the generation of Exodus recounts the waters and the manna, and in that recounting, the Law comes forth given as a clear sounding which echoes down deep until the people’s history and the words of the LORD are one and the same. It is a rich and fecund soil, and in that soil, many roots grow. The stories are told and re-told, and then told until one day, that which cannot be forgotten3 is4. But when then, the people’s lack of memory is not the end. That which lay latent, which made the people, has become visible again. How this is, is a puzzle.5 But what is not a puzzle is that the Law lay down deep, remaining unremembered but unlost.
The command to remember is one of the most frequent in Scripture, to remember and not forget who God is and where God has brought the people from. It is this memory which orients the people to who they are, a backward glance which makes any and all forward motion possible: to live into the future is walk backwards into it, with the Law giving birth to proverbs, psalms, and stories to help the people understand the Law long after Sinai is one story among many, and apparently, long after the Law itself is no longer present.
And so, whether because of its literary children or because of what we are as creatures, it is impossible to read the Old Testament and to say that the Law was gone, even when it was absent. If what philosophers and theologians call “the natural law” is true, God’s speech always resounds through creation, written as a divine promulgation into our temporal affairs and mortal bodies. This law, Thomas Aquinas writes, becomes specified in the law of Israel as a visible and repairing word of an invisible reality which cannot ultimately disappear. In this way, the Law remained the unforgettable memory, the hope which cannot be abandoned, for where could we go from its presence?
And so, any remembrance we have of who we are, of what we have been summoned to be is made possible not because of our clever constructions of law and discipline, but because who we are as God’s creatures could never ultimately be forgotten. Much like the aquifer which disappears into the ground, the water will resurface, invisible to the eye and nourishing to the land anyway.
What It Means to Be A Living Memory
In his book Dementia: Living in the Memories of God, John Swinton explores this problem of what it means to be a creature who forgets what they have been and who yet has to live. This is a great question mark to a world in which we are summoned to live on our own, for ourselves, by ourselves. For what could it mean to live when you have forgotten who you are? What could it mean to live by oneself when there is no history pulling us backwards, no present calling us forward?
The answer here is not necessarily “community”, that others remember us when we cannot remember ourselves; as Swinton notes, our treatment of those with dementia frequently accelerates their decline. They become strangers to us, and we to them. The answer here is only God: the one who remembers us, and whose remembrance of us makes possible any and all memories of ourselves, or of God. It is God’s remembrance of us that makes it possible for us to even forget God, for we can only forget that which we rightly knew to begin with. It is God’s remembrance of us that, even in our forgetting of our selves, sustains us.
That we might forget God does not efface God’s own remembrance of us: such is the promise. But there is another face to this problem: that we might want to forget what we are.
Long before dementia might find us—if it does—this temptation toward forgetting ourselves comes in a different form, that we might disappear our past, bury it in a black hole turned six ways from the sun. Perhaps in the effort to live in the world well, we want to disavow our own past, or worse, disavow the pasts of others.
This is too easy of a solution to the past, as Stanley Hauerwas writes. Here too God’s memory finds us:
To be forgiven means that I must face the fact that my life actually lies in the hands of others. I must learn to trust them as I have learned to trust God. Thus it is not accidental that Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread…When we exist as a forgiven people, we are able to be at peace with our histories, so that now God’s life determines our whole way of being—our character. We no longer need to deny our past, or tell ourselves false stories, as now we can accept what we have been without the knowledge of our sin destroying us.6
If what we are is not forgotten by God, then what we are is not forgotten by God in either sin or pain.
If dementia is nature’s way of violating this promise, then our attempts to efface our past is the inverse of this: a destruction of the past which God has overcome. It is with good reason that the sins of the saints are preserved, both in Scripture and in their own journals and hagiographies, that in his Confessions, Augustine did not preserve his own reputation but laid open his own history: what we are is preserved by God, for better or worse, and in God’s hands, even the worst can be turned to good.
That we are living memories, known by God, is to say, as Hauerwas points out, that we need not live with fear: our journey to God has been made possible, and sustained by the unfailing memory of God, which is to say, God’s eternal faithfulness. Our own failing memories of God cannot undo us, for God has remembers. And our desire to forget our own history cannot be possible, for it is that very past that God has redeemed and worked our present out of.
This is an audacious endeavor. Systematic theology is nothing if not audacious, though I don’t take audacity to be wrong-headed: swinging big and striking out is better than a bunt. This is terrible baseball strategy, but good theological one, because to swing big is to try to say whatever can be said, to plumb the depths in anticipation that even if I offer up a large vision, there will be more to say. Better to do that than to speak with absolute circumspection and modesty, which is frequently just false humility: if there is gospel to be spoken, speak it well, even if your voice shakes.
Psalm 1.
Proverbs 3:1
2 Kings 22:8
I’m setting aside the debates here about the historiography, as to whether or not the Law is compiled during the time of Josiah, and taking the story simply at face value.
Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 89.
We are told in Scripture to remember. We are tied in relationship, even self-efficacy, to memory. For this reason, I truly worry (as in, I lose sleep sometimes over this thought) about our increasing insistence to outsource memory--factual, relational, personal--to machines. What happens when I no longer need to remember anything or even anybody because I've got it / them stored? The same "outsource to storage" concern could be spoken of journals and traditional photograph albums, but even in those recording devices the ACTIVE recording of memories (writing, choosing and filing photos) succeeds at aiding memory. Machines, however, allow for passive storage of memory in ways that diminish cultural nuance, idiosyncrasies, and personal voice. You've chosen a good subject, Myles. I'm here for it.
I am new to Substack, and pleased to cross your path. I am intrigued by your thoughts here, because they intersect many of my own. I have recently written a book (Things Charlie Says) that chronicles life with my Dad in law. He wakes up every morning with the question, "How long have I been here, a day or a week?" The answer 6 years.
In keeping I have plumbed the scriptures exploring themes of Memory. What does it mean to be remembered by God...what does it mean that God should forget our sins?
I will follow your series.