The setting was a playground. The event was called KinderCon - a weekend conference for Unitarian Universalist 7th and 8th graders. Most of the kids were involved in a rousing game of UUU (Unitarian Universalist Ultimate) Frisbee. A couple were climbing trees and a few were lounging on the jungle gym, engaged in philosophical conversation. As I walked by I overheard an opinion: "I have been thinking that when you are like ten, you have a lot of different personalities. When you get to be around our age is when you really should pick one and stay with it." This confident sounding proclamation from a 13 year old boy caught my attention. I wanted to ask him so many questions: had he recently selected a personality? If so, how did he evaluate his options? How did he choose? How does he know who he is?
It is a question I've pondered often. I remember once hearing of someone whose mother told him every day, along with the goodbyes and I love yous as he was headed out the door to school, "don't forget who you are." I don't think anyone has ever said such a thing to me. But, like most of you, I am constantly being asked to explain who I am. The answer varies all the time, depending on the context, my mood and my perception of those wanting to know. Sometimes my name will suffice. Other times I choose from a string of descriptors: I am a young, white woman, a daughter, sister, friend, a Unitarian Universalist and a theological school student, a lesbian, a hiker, an activist and a dreamer. I am a citizen of the United States and a resident of this planet we all share. Then there are times when only stories will do, times when I articulate who I am through the stories of my life, the places I have known, my loves and losses. Our identities are so complex, so multi-layered, we tend to be multi-lingual when it comes to telling the stories of ourselves.
But no matter the language we choose, we rely on our memory to help us know who we are. The formative experiences of our lives are etched into our being. We are shaped by the circumstances of time and place, the details of the particular lives into which we were born. I was raised in a family that teetered somewhere between poor and working class. My memories of poverty and financial distress profoundly influence how I think about who I am in the world. They affect not only my personal financial decisions but also my attitudes toward the economic affairs of institutions and organizations, businesses and governments. Our experiences become part of the tapestry of our memory, and the colors and textures of that tapestry are like so many threads woven through our vision.
This is true not only for individuals but also for groups, for collectives of any size who share a common life. The story of this congregation is woven with the threads of memories from times preceding our tenure here. In my short stay among you I have come to learn that you see yourselves as a congregation devoted to the work of social justice. You believe it is your responsibility to work with and for the disinherited and the oppressed. Your beloved minister of many years, the Reverend Dr. Richard Gilbert helped you focus and develop your ability to be a force for justice in your community and beyond. But I have also come to learn that over a century ago it was the Reverend William Channing Gannet who inspired this congregation through his preaching of the social gospel. With his leadership this church developed a Boy's Evening Home and what was called a Neighborhood Friendly for Girls. These programs sought to support and nurture the development of local children with limited means and opportunity. It was during his tenure that Susan B. Anthony made the decision to become a member of this church.[1] You are who you are, in large measure, because those who came before you tended the memory of who you have been.
As I reflect on the force of memory in shaping our identities, I have to wonder what happens when we lose it. The provocative filmmaker Luis Bunuel claimed that you have to begin to lose your memory to realize that "life without memory is no life at all."[2] Like anyone my memory fails me from time to time, but I have not yet experienced the kind of loss of memory that causes alarm. I have, though, seen that alarm registered on the faces of those who catch hints of names and times that are just beyond their reach. I have sat with elders who, mid conversation, realize that they cannot recall a detail they were certain was printed indelibly on their memory. Often this lapse startles the speaker who can't help but worry that this might be a sign. Trouble registers on her furrowed brow as she whispers, "oh, I hope I don't lose my memory."
Claudia Osborne has written a compelling tale of her own struggles with memory as a result of head injury. She was a fabulous physician and a respected teacher of medical students. She led a rich and busy life until the day she was hit by an oncoming car while riding her bike. At that moment, everything changed. After the initial trauma subsided, she gradually came to realize that she suffered from profound and disabling consequences. She became adynamic with virtually no affect and often no thoughts. She had intense problems remembering and concentrating. She was easily and deeply fatigued by the simplest tasks.
In her book, Over My Head, she tells the story of her injury and rehabilitation. Despite her fierce resistance and with the help of dedicated and skilled physicians, she eventually came to learn strategies to compensate for some of her losses. With help she established a written system to help her know what to do and when and how to do it. She discovered through trial and error that it wasn't enough to write a note telling herself to go to the store. She also had to write down what she should buy when she got there and what to do with her purchases when she finally got them home. This part was hard but even more challenging was her struggle to accept that many of her losses were permanent, that no amount of rehabilitation could restore her to her pre-injury self. So while it is a tale of loss, she will not be able to practice medicine again, it is also a tale of hope. She has learned how to construct a new self using the shattered pieces of the old one and to construct a new identity that drew on who she was while honoring who she has become.[3]
While Osborn's memory is permanently impaired, she found that through writing she can document her personal history, "the events and emotions that provide the richness, philosophy and color" to her life.[4] Her writing stands in when her memory fails, helping her reflect on who she is and who she has been. But what happens for people with degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's who can't perfect a strategy to hold onto memory? I've heard people say things like, "The mother I knew is gone. All that's left is her body." Many of us have heard these words spoken about a loved one living with dementia. Maybe you have even spoken them. Stephen Sapp, professor of religious studies at the University of Miami, has explored the theology that underlies our attitudes about dementias.
Sapp argues that the Hebrew Bible describes a human self as terra animata, "living, breathing, animated flesh . . . In other words, "both animated, 'ensouled' bodies and incarnate, 'enfleshed' souls."[5] He goes on to argue that European philosophers, chief among them Rene Descartes, dismantled that biblical system by proposing a dualistic understanding of mind and body. Descartes' "famous dictum, 'I think, therefore I am'" exalted the mind and linked cognition with the real self.[6] When people suggest that those living with dementia have lost their selves, they are drawing upon the legacy of Descartes. Sapp suggests that the biblical view more accurately reflects the reality of a human life. He argues that cognition, memory and a personal history come only as a result of a body. "Is it not curious," he writes, "that many people today are so quick to disregard this fact and to consider 'the person' to be lost when the memories are lost, with no regard to the value of the organism that permitted those memories to be made in the first place?"[7] "Each human life," he continues, "consists of a story that began before that person was aware of it and therefore presumably can continue after he or she again ceases to be aware of it."[8]
I think this is a little easier to see in our collective lives. Take our shared identity as Unitarian Universalists. No matter our personal history of Unitarian Universalism, each of us stands in a stream of shared religious history that began centuries ago. We know who we are because those before us have preserved our legacy, they have handed down to us memory. Even if we don't know the specific stories, the memories have become a part of the fabric of our shared lives. Within our hymnal are recorded the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before us. Through these songs we learn about our precious inheritance, about who we have been. In our opening hymn we sang of those "comrades gone before" affirming that "what they dreamed be ours to do." Each time we witness the ritual lighting of our chalice we are preserving and communicating our religious history. The Unitarian Universalist minister Linda Olson-Peebles defines ritual as "an act or event which carries with it memory and association beyond the event itself."[9] In our rituals, in the ways we do church, we are living out the stories that began long before us.
I love our history, but part of what I also love about our faith is that we are not only historical. Ours is a living tradition. Just as profoundly as all those who came before, we too are creating memories that will shape the course of this religious tradition. In our actions and innovations we are influencing the way our children will do church. Our shared religious story will be changed by our presence, by our revelations. Those who come after us will remember our voices in song and their identities will be shaped by the memories we leave behind.
It's like that in families too. Many of us can tell the stories of our family, the stories of memory that have etched themselves upon our own lives. And those of us who can't often long for the missing memories. I don't know my father and there is a part of me that yearns to know the stories of his family. I want to know their religion and nationality, I want to know how they spent their days and what they loved. Somehow I have this sense that I would know better who I am if I knew who they were. I think that is part of what inspires so many to research their ancestry. I think that is part of what inspires children who have been adopted to seek out information about their birth families. We know that we are partly made up of memory and we hunger for the substance of those stories.
In many historically oppressed communities, the stories of the preceding generations are fiercely protected. When a people faces daily discrimination, stories can be sustenance. Sweet Honey in the Rock, an African-American women's musical ensemble, sing of this power, "I don't know how my people survived slavery, but I do remember, that's why I believe." Through a wide range of musical styles, along with other literary and oral traditions, African-Americans have preserved the stories of resistance and survival. All of us can and enjoy and learn from those stories, but in them African-Americans can find themselves.
One of the consequences of racism in the United States for white people has been the trading of our ethnic histories for a homogenized whiteness. There are fewer and fewer white folks who know the songs and stories of our cultural heritage. In his poem, "A Country Funeral", Wendell Berry tells of the death of an old farmer and urges the protection of that history "lest the dead die a second and more final death." "What we owe the future," he writes, "is not a new start, for we can only begin with what has happened. We owe the future the past, the long knowledge that is the potency of time to come."[10]
For a time, we are the ones who can care for the stories. Let us tend them while we are able. We can research the stories of our families, of our churches and organizations. We can listen and remember the stories of our elders. We can tell the stories of those we love whose memory is failing, whose memory has faded. We can record our own stories, knowing that they are built on the memories of those who came before. When we take care with the memories, writes Stephen Sapp, "the community can not only remember [those] who are no longer here but can also remember for [us] when [we] can not do so for [ourselves].[11]
At that KinderCon, after our free time, the kids did a service project making personal care packets for homeless people. They delighted at the chance to make a concrete contribution toward justice and a world more whole. Adults helped supply the tools and the youth brought all the head and heart they needed to complete the project. I find myself thinking about the less concrete tools with which we try to equip our children - tools that can help to dismantle hatred, injustice, ignorance and fear - tools that can help them know who they are and who they might become. I'm not sure how many personalities we have or if there comes a time when we settle on one, but I know for sure that the boy who spoke those words is in the process of exploring what is possible in a human self, of discovering who he is. May we ever be the kind of religion that provides, along with the tools of freedom and possibility, memory and history. And with those tools, may we all know a little more fully, a little more deeply, just who it is we are.
May it be so and Amen.
return to main page