Keywords of the Moral Life: Memory, Part Two
Memory is Tricky, and Hagar Would Like to Have a Word
The first installment of the role of memory in the moral life is here, that God remembers us. Today’s builds on this by asking “Why do we remember our own strengths and failures so badly? What do we need to see ourselves more fully?”
You Are Not A Collection of Moments
There are many aspects of the smart phone which we should all do without. But one of the things which I remain curious about is what these devices mean for our memories. I would love to say that a tool is a tool is a tool, but at least one recent study indicates that the more you think about your phone, the more our recall is affected.1 That being said, it compiles photos of my kids in ways that break my heart: bringing together images from Florida, from family vacations, from recent weeks and from years ago.
It’s fun to be able to compare these images, to see the ways in which my youngest’s cowlick hadn’t yet come in versus his unruly mop today. But what is lost is continuity, a sense of how he has gone from a toddler to learning to cook, to remember his sweetness as compared to his present day full-tilt volume corked with rage and cackles. In holding up images to us—bits and fragments of our past—we are invited into a highlight reel, but one without a story. Whatever story that is there is one we supply, a private rendering which consists not of continuity, but of gaps to be filled in.
The problem is this: this is a terrible way to view ourselves or others, as a collection of moments.
Monuments and highlights are fine: there’s nothing wrong with having Big Moments to hang our larger stories on. The problem is that, absent some other kind of framework, they become just that: a collection of Big Moments, stories without points. By this, I don’t mean that all stories we tell should have morals, like “And the point of the story is X”. But the best stories we tell are not about the moment, but that the moment tells us something important about the people in those moments. But how do we remember ourselves well?
The Self-Told Story and The Value of Narrators
So, here’s a fun thought experiment: if we were to sum up Abraham in a series of moments, which ones make the highlight reel? Which episodes from Abram’s life end up being the ones replayed by the Iphone algorithm? Undoubtedly, his call away from Haram, his rescue of Lot, the near fatality with Isaac. The heroic is rightly prized by us not only because, in the acts of great joy and virtue do we see our selves as we always wish to be—obedient, courageous, truthful.
But these are just moments, and moments don’t tell us much about the person.
Thomas Aquinas, in distinguishing between sin and vice puts it like this: sin is that which is done with intention and knowledge, those things for which we must repent and seek forgiveness. But vice is the habit which makes sin more likely: vice is the recurring choice which makes sin possible. And likewise, the great heroism of Abram is made possible by other virtues—contrary to opinion, we don’t actually rise to the occasion in a moment of crisis unless we have some ability to be that kind of courageous person already. We won’t sacrifice ourselves for someone unless we are already a person of great love, and we won’t stand up to the bully unless we’re already a person who lacks fear and is courageous. The important part is what lies behind those moments, and which makes those moments possible.
The memory we have of ourselves is, then, prone to extremes: the worst moments of what we’ve done and the best we’ve done, but neither of these really tell us who we are, what kind of person we are over time. For habit lies behind the scenes, and often invisible to us.
To see how habit is both what makes us, and makes it hard for us to see who we are, let us consider a different episode from Abraham’s life: the banishment of Hagar. Already, we are in position to see how knowing who we are requires more than our own rendering, for this story is made possible by a narrator who knows things about the story that Abraham can’t possibly know. Neither Abraham nor Sarai are there in the desert when Hagar despairs of life and seeks to leave Ishmael to die. Neither one are there when the angel approaches and offers a great promise to the firstborn son of Abraham, that his nation will be expansive.2
As Delores Williams describes it, the story discloses what is purely visible to Hagar and the narrator, and yet remains invisible to Abraham. The narrator, knitting together Abraham’s courage with his failure with Hagar, allows us to see some of the habits operating behind the scene, and some of the assumptions which constrain and inhibit Abraham in this way:
Hiding beneath these economic realities centered in inheritance and power and property dynamics that could seriously affect the lives of Hagar and Sarah in the future. Among these ancient Hebrews, wives could not inherit their husband’s wealth…Sarah’s hostility here might also have been aggravated by what she perhaps knew about contemporary women in the surrounding cultures.3
Omnisicent or not, a narrator is the one who can see things about the scenario that Abraham cannot, and provide an account which judges Abraham accordingly. He cannot know what he cannot know, but he can know that banishing a child into the desert is certain death.
What lies behind the great moments of Abraham is, Williams suggests, an action made possible by habits of inheritance, of what is owed to whom in a family, and who belongs to a family. It is this kind of habit which will trail behind Abraham his entire life, making possible both his faithfulness to his other children, and his inability to be faithful to Ishamael here.
Remembered By Others, and Well
To see ourselves well, we need another who sees, like the narrator, that which remains beyond our grasp, the story that remains obscured to us. Abraham is remembered fully across the New Testament, in ways which do justice to the total arc of his life, and the truth of his faithfulness over time. The story of Ishmael remains a surd for Scripture, retold by Paul as an analogy between Law and Spirit, that one child was the child of promise and another the child of the Law. It’s one of the hardest parts of Galatians to read, because it’s entirely plausible to read it in a way which just repeats the omission of Hagar and Ishmael.
But interestingly, Paul’s use of this story reveals precisely the dynamic of memory which Williams wants us to see: Abraham’s story with Ishmael does not go unremembered, but rehearsed, and not in a way which brings praise to Abraham and not in a way which insults Hagar with hagiography. Hagar is remembered well here, in that she is remembered fully, along with the habits of speech which made Hagar’s life possible.
Ishmael is remembered rightly as the child which came out of Abraham’s desire to fulfill the promise on his own terms, a child born and removed. Hagar is remembered as the one who taunted Sarah, and this is part of memory as well: remembering truthfully and not in ways which omit wrongs done. There is no mention of her having been a slave who has little choice in the matter of her life, nor is there any note of the injustice of Abraham’s action toward her. This much is clear from Genesis, and lies beyond Paul’s concern in bringing her story up.
But in her speech, because of her habit of speech, Hagar is narrated on the side of the Law, on the side of those laying outside the covenant. But notice something strange and almost laudatory in this: in this analogy, Hagar is equated with Sinai4, and Ishmael with that which comes forth from Sinai. This may mean nothing for the Gentile, who Paul is trying to distance from circumcision and placing themselves under a rigorist kind of Law, but this naming of Hagar alongside Sinai would mean everything for a Jew. She is not the heavenly Jerusalem5, nor the mother of the promise, but neither is she left in the desert, abandoned. She is transported through the deserts of Arabia to the foot of God’s own mountain; she is taken from the wilds of the desert and put on the side of the caretaker of the people until Christ comes, as Paul will write in Galatians 3, and that she is included here in that lineage is no small thing.
There is no snapshot version of Hagar here, but one which tries to see her fully. It is a picture which accounts for the habit of bold speech, which contribute to her expulsion and to her bold address to God. It is a picture which sees her as a slave, and yet, included within God’s larger economy. For Hagar is not only a slave, even in Genesis: Hagar becomes the first person in Genesis to give God a name, and that will not be taken from her. In both Genesis and Galatians, the habit which makes Hagar Hagar is on full display, neither as its defining feature nor as a full virtue.
It falls to others to remember her—and us—well, and to others to remind us of what we are, that all of what we are might be brought before God, the one who sees us.6
Beware whenever anyone says “studies have shown”: that’s usually a sign that there’s one study somewhere that proves the point the writer wants to make. I’m in the midst of an ongoing workshop on psychology and ethics, and this is hammered home to us: validity isn’t just one study, but a study which repeats and can be validated. It’s cooler to be able to say “studies have shown” and move on, but that’s not the way this works.
Tradition holds that this is the forerunner of Islam.
Sisters in the Wilderness, 28. Consider that, by this time, Sarah and Abraham had spent time in not only Canaan, but Egypt and Iran.
Galatians 4:25
Galatians 4:26
This is the name Hagar gives to God, “the God who sees me.” It is also where our first dog’s name came from: Elroi.
Per "studies have shown", it's worth nothing that "according to scholars" carries as much weight as "they say". Or should.
The note above on sin vs. vices is one I'll be pocketing. Thanks.