What Do We Do With Memory?
Never Forgetting, Always Penitent
This weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the attacks on New York City, orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden, himself dead for ten years. While not an official holiday, it has all the earmarks of one, with state officials making speeches, flags held at half-mast, dulcet tones on even social media.
But whereas on some officially recognized holidays, like Mothers’ Day, there is no qualifying or positioning of the day, as if there is were two ways to feel about 9/11. On Mothers’ Day, a day set aside to honor the material figures in our lives, there are inevitable statements clearing room for those who are of two minds about the day, or can’t bring themselves to celebrate, or are not mothers by choice or chance. 9/11 is a day, unlike Mothers’ Day, which cannot be parsed, but only borne witness to.
And so, on 9/11 each year, we bear witness to the complex emotions which cannot be disentangled: honor of bravery and fear of having to be brave, grief and praise for the dead, and most of all, what that inarticulate day yielded. For over the next twenty years, as the cloud raised by day turned into a fire by night, burning through Iraq and Afghanistan and consuming nearly a million lives, innumerable separations from family, myriad lost birthdays and anniversaries and first steps and births.
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Our memories are not infallible, and are inexact bearers of both grief and joy: neurologically, we have found that over time, pain gives way to gratitude, with the the complexity of trauma slowly absorbed into our lives, synthesized. But left unexamined, our memories remain an insoluble knot, in which we cannot judge our present without losing the past.
Augustine’s Confessions, an extended exercise in how God’s providence is seen in the backwards-looking vision of a life, is like this. Augustine recounts his early life, one of privilege and ingratitude, and watches as small movements in the past have large resonances in the future: his memory, far from being a sure recollection of facts is inflected with a sense of wonder as past sins become folded into God’s grace.
But, in the end of the work, Augustine does not simply “learn from his past” and he does not deny that his past happened: the past laid the path for the present, both for good and for ill. The past remains partly unresolved for Augustine: his concubine and son are not with him, and Monica, his beloved mother, died before see her son convert. But this does not mean that Augustine tries to resolve that pain: he gives up trying to understand his own past except as an occasion for praise of God having worked anyway.
There is no pure resolution waiting to be discovered--there is simply the recognition of God’s gift and the hope that all will be restored. It is not that Augustine forgets the horrible things he has done, but that these past scars become enfolded into penitence, wonder, and exultation. And herein lies the trick: without remembering the sins as well as the gifts, we cannot receive the past well, and we will not live into the present at all. Unable to live in the past, we drag it into the present, as it entangles the present and future in its web.
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As a culture, we are still--twenty years on--not in the place where we can distinguish what can name the grief and gift separately: they remain intertwined in an insolubly solemn whole. And the consequences have of this have been innumerable: grief becomes policy, remembrances never allowed to be transformed into gratitude for the lives who lived, and for what they were in life. The last twenty years, thus, can never be anything but a justification of grief, one unified voice where there should be two voices, one grieving and the other penitent for what that grief birthed.
Part of this is, I think, the way that political violence and their dead tend to be renarrated in justifying ways: the dead, unable to speak, are spoken for by our acts of retribution and by violence done in their name. But part of it is, I think, an inability to do the work to process 9/11 as anything but a complex whole which cannot be untied: we are not yet able (or willing?) to distinguish between the grief which should be mourned, and the actions out of grief which should be repented of.
Christians, I have written, have a particularly hard calling here, to mourn on behalf of not only the victims of the towers, but on behalf of those caught up in the violence in the years to come because of the towers. By being a penitent body, repenting in word and deed for that which has eventuated these last twenty years, Christians can help a broader culture pull apart an insoluble whole, to make one voice into two: one part grief, and one part what was done through that grief. Only then might our memories be repaired, as we grieve what should be grieved, and recover something resembling repentance.