8 November

This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday.

We recall the end of the First World War, and we pay tribute to those who sacrificed their lives in that war and every war thereafter.

Except for these already important moments, there is something about the Christian theme of remembrance that, I believe, is extremely important for our world today. The theologian Miroslav Volf writes about this in his book The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. He says that our lives lose the richness and texture we are meant to enjoy as human beings if we do not remember rightly. He explains it with this image:

“You know, sometimes I use the example of a stringed instrument. When you play a musical note, co-present in every tone are also subtones. The same is true also of our pasts. The past needs to resonate in the present in all its tonality. And when it does, the present then acquires a richer texture. No memory, no rich identity.”

There are moments in my own life I would rather forget, times of regret or pain. The same is true for our societies. At times it feels as though we suffer from a kind of social amnesia. We prefer to leave the past behind, to “forgive and forget.”

But what if we cannot forget? What if our memories continue to haunt us, to excite us, or even to control us? What if the victims of past trauma do not want to forget? What happens when our forgetting comes at the cost of ourselves or of others? More positively, what if our memories could rightly contribute to the richness of our lives, like the subtones of a violin? It is indeed our memories that shape us.

This is true for our Christian identity as well. Every time we confess our faith, as Volf reminds us, we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In doing so, we are identified with Christ as the people of the resurrection. Without memory, our identity (our Christian identity included) suffers. In many ways, what we do each Sunday is to recall the ancient story and to place ourselves, with all our troubles, fears, and joys, within this larger story—God’s story. We pattern our lives according to these stories. How we remember them matters.

Creating space in our lives for remembering might also be a very important way of resisting the fast-paced, consumer-driven culture that urges us to forget and move on to the next new thing. Volf, speaks about this specifically:

“I think we need to make sure that we have time and space for ascents, and that we create environments in which we can immerse ourselves in tradition and in remembering, and climb regularly to the mountain of God. Otherwise we will end up just swimming in the stream of our fast-paced culture, simply echoing whatever the culture happens to be doing. It takes courage, it takes strength, it takes distance, in order to be able to speak meaningfully to the culture, and if we cultivate the time and space for ascent, then perhaps Christians can truly be that prophetic voice within culture today.”

So, let’s carve out time for ascent. For memory and remembrance. Perhaps there we will discover the deep wells from which living water might flow for our own time. Lest we forget!

Marius Louw