The Sacred Act of Remembering

The last time I saw my grandfather, he remembered me. Like my grandmother, he struggled with dementia at the end of life.

When I walked into his hospice room, he was sitting in a wheelchair, slouched, weak, frail, and asleep. I hated to wake him, but I wasn’t sure when—or if—I’d see him again.

At first, he looked at me with dull, confused eyes. But then those eyes narrowed, and a slight smile appeared. 

“You are Kristopher Michael Norris,” (He had acquired the habit of calling me by my full name.), “my grandson.” He told me he was proud of me, that I was traveling all over the world to spread the gospel.

I was actually traveling for research for my doctoral studies, but if that was his final memory of me, I could think of worse.

The prospect of dementia or other forms of memory loss is terrifying, and relationships with those suffering from it are so painful, because the act of remembering is part of what makes us fully human. 

Memory loss is also identity loss, which is why those confused or muted by memory loss seem so broken—somehow less than whole. Part of what makes them who they are is missing.

Our memories—the good and the bad—shape us, mold our character, and bind our relationships. Forgetting even the memories of our mistakes, of terrible things we have done, would make us into someone else entirely—likely someone prone to make those same mistakes again, who had not learned from and changed in light of their memories.

Attacks on Corporate Memory

We live in a time when memory is under attack. Not by medical conditions like dementia, but by assaults against our social, cultural, political and racial memory. 

By targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts (and the bogeyman of CRT before that), erasing BIPOC pioneers like Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson from government websites, and punishing universities and museums for teaching about historic and systemic racism, this administration is attempting to literally whitewash U.S. history.

This summer, during a speech at Fort Bragg, President Trump announced he was restoring the names of bases named for Confederate generals: “Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Lee.”

But in a case of superficial trolling that further erases memory rightly told, the forts would, like Bragg, be named for other veterans whose surnames administration officials discovered were the same surnames as Confederate heroes. Instead of honoring Robert E. Lee, Fort Lee would supposedly commemorate Private Fitz Lee, a Black soldier who served in the Spanish-American War.

But the message is clear. By ignoring—or even trying to redeem—the darkest parts of our history, like slavery, plantation life, Jim Crow and lynching, and by downplaying their lasting impact today, these efforts create the false impression that equality has already been achieved and everyone begins on equal footing.

These are simply efforts to erase our collective memory, with the consequence of suppressing the voices and opportunities of those who have been oppressed by it, to the raucous approval of Christians.

This is especially disheartening coming from practitioners of a faith with memory at its center.

Memory-Centered Faith

After delivering the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, Moses tells the Israelites, “Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deuteronomy 5:15). They are commanded not only to recall God’s salvation and provision, but also their sins. Later, Moses says, “Remember and do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness” (9:7).

In his letter to the Ephesian church in Revelation, John calls the congregation to “Remember from where you have fallen” as the first step toward their repentance (2:5).

During Holy Week, we remember the gruesome stations of a cross-centered journey on a Friday we call good and we don’t look away.

As Christians, one of our central practices—if not our most central—is remembering.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” reads the inscription on the Communion tables in front of the altar of nearly every Christian congregation. We eat the flesh and drink the blood of a Savior who asked if this cup could be taken from him, but who also told his followers every time they ate and drank, they were to do so in memory of him and his death.

Christianity is a faith that calls on the faithful to remember the good and the painful, to allow all of it to shape us, mold our character, and bind our relationships. Christianity is a faith based on the practice of remembrance—remembering our baptism, recalling the formative stories of scripture, eating and drinking in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice.

At a time when other morally formative and educational institutions—those charged with preserving history—are being silenced, it is up to the church to stand up and tell our history rightly, because, as Alice Walker says, “We are who we are largely because of who we have been.”

Therefore, we must remember our role in the beginnings of white supremacy, our christening of ships carrying Africans in chains across the Atlantic, our endorsement of segregation, and our celebration of the detentions and deportations of immigrants and refugees. This is who we are and the preservation of the memory of our fallenness remains our task, central to our identity, faith, and worship.

Within congregations, this might mean explicitly addressing the racial history of the church or its denomination, seeking out the ways the congregation still benefits from a system of white supremacy, and retelling its story in a more truthful way.

“Memory is a moral exercise,” claims theologian Stanley Hauerwas. “We must be the kind of people capable of remembering our failures and sins if we are rightly to tell the story we have been charged to keep, for a proper telling requires that we reveal our sin.”

To remember is to fight through the veils we employ to shield our conscience from the history we wish was not ours. That is why this task of remembering requires a community constituted by repeated practices of remembrance—like reading scripture, confessing our sins, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper. 

These practices require us to reckon with our dark history, resist the repression of our atrocities, and renounce our selective amnesia. We remember the good and the bad because we are all of it.

Memory Makes Us

As my grandfather’s memory was fading, it is my own memory of those good and bad final days with him that makes me who I am. I not only remember the gentle way he’d wake me for school when I now wake my son or how he’d regale me with stories of his childhood adventures. I also remember this man, once so strong and vibrant, sitting frail and confused in a hospice bed—and all of it shapes my sense of life’s fullness and finitude, driving my desire to live fuller, better, and more loving for as long as I am able.

When Christ first appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, he still bore the scars of that sacrifice—the physical memories of his wounds etched into his flesh. Yet, like memories of our failures and finitude, scars are also signs of our redemption. 

Our corporate, national, and Christian wounds of racism, oppression, white supremacy and systemic racial bias will all be healed. However, the scars of these sufferings—like those of Christ’s resurrected body—will remain. And we must remember. They shape who we are and make us fully human.

The memories cannot be eliminated without also losing who we are. The memory of the wounds of our racist past forms us and reminds us that we are a people in search of grace, a people in need of healing, and a people responsible for the hard work of repairing these breaches.

As Thomas touched the scarred hands and side of Christ, so too must we see the scars of racism and touch them, weep for them, and believe. They are the transformation of our wounds—the wounds we have inflicted on one another and the wounds we have inflicted on the body of Christ by inflicting them on one another.

Only by owning our past are we liberated to move forward, unshackled by our sins, but never forgetting them.