In the wake of Kristallnacht and Remembrance Day, I have been thinking about the practice of remembering.
Remembering can go two ways. It can be a terribly destructive exercise or remembering can be a declaration of freedom and healing.
Some remembering is like picking the scab off an old wound. The pain and grief of the original injury are brought to the surface only to be aggravated with renewed destructive energy. Ancient injustices, wrongs, betrayals, and sorrows are recited with as much intensity as if they had happened yesterday.The litany of my suffering plays over and over in the dark little prison of my mind, poisoning the present and destroying my hope of freedom in the future.
When I cling to the brokenness of my history, I create an identity out of my suffering. I become the person who has been wronged, the person who has been betrayed, let down, hurt by life. The stories I tell myself give the events of my past paralyzing power in my present, even though the actual events they narrate may have taken place in the dark recesses of history. It is hard to avoid the pain of a thorn clasped in my clenched fist.
Are forgetting, repressing, and denying the only alternative to destructive remembering? Is there a way to remember difficult realities without allowing those memories to continue to paralyze the present? What kind of remembering has the power to bring freedom and healing?
The key to healthy remembering resides in my awareness that my true identity does not reside in anything that happens or has ever happened in my life. I am not the things I have done in the past, or the things that have been done to me. I am not defined by my behaviour in the present or by the way people respond to me.
When I am remembering in a healthy way, I look at the events of my past, feel their pain with compassion, but at the same time stand aside from those events almost as if they had happened to someone else. What I call my “history” is really just my story, the story I tell myself about what has taken place in the past. When I recognize that my “history “is all interpretation, I begin to be able to re-frame my past with a different more liberating narrative.
Healthy remembering has nothing to do with forgetting or denial. I do not need to forget or deny my past, because my history no longer has the power to define or control my life. Remembering past pain offers a path to freedom as I see through the painful realities I have experienced to the light of truth that knows these horrors say nothing about the person I am.
I begin to see the suffering of the past as the means by which the incrustations that have obscured the luminous reality of my deepest self are being slowly chipped away opening me to the deeper reality of my true being. The pain I have known becomes a tool that loosens the obsessions of my life that have obscured my awareness of the steady strength that resides at the heart of my life.
As I cease to define myself by my past, I begin to open to the unchanging and unchangeable steady reality I call God that is the solid ground of my being. My need for self-protection begins to ease as I discover that the strength within me is stronger and more real than anything I have ever experienced. I am free to remember in order to benefit from the lessons of the past but without continuing to give those difficult circumstances power in my present.
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In her short, but grim memoir The War From Within, Sophie Goetzel-Leviathan recounts her time in the Warsaw Ghetto, then the months she spent hiding in a basement on the Aryan side of the city before being captured and interned for nineteen months in Bergen-Belsen.
At the end of her memoir, written just months after her “liberation”, Goetzel-Leviathan writes,
Should I say that I would be glad to erase those years, or shout I say I regret their passing? I do not know. True, they brought bitterness, pain and torment, but perhaps they made us richer; perhaps they taught us to treasure life more than ever. There have been moments when death was so close to us that we thought our lives had come to an end. There have been weeks and months in which we were dazed, in which we lived without feelings, and almost as if we were dead. We thought we could never laugh, never rejoice again, but two months of feredom have brought us to life. We can rejoice! Our hearts are sensitive to sadness, happiness, and love.
Life lies ahead of us. Unfathomable, inscrutable life pushes us forward on its constant, immutable course. From somewhere deep within me Goethe’s words surface into the present moment. Only after all our experience and all our sufferings, do I realize their greatness:
For as long as you do not have
this: ‘death and birth,’
You are but a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.
Sadly, judging by what I am able to glean from the google translation of her German Wikepedia page, Sophie Goetzel-Leviathan’s optimism about he future was not entirely fulfilled.
On 23 June 1945 Sophie emigrated to Palestine with her husband David where they settled in Haifa.
There, Sophie took the name Goetzel-Leviathan. Since she suffered from severe depression that could not be cured in the following years, her daughter Miriam grew up on a kibbutz. Two years after their divorce in 1946, David remarried and in 1950 he and his new wife moved to the United States. Sophie Goetzel-Leviathan never escaped from depression and died in Jerusalem in 1994.
For some people the memories of the past seem impossible to let go. But there are always more or less healing ways to remember. To whatever small degree we are able, we will experience greater freedom and life if we are able to remember in ways that bring light and hope.
6 comments
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November 12, 2013 at 5:42 am
Gill
well . . . that’s challenging. I read along thinking – ‘this is beautiful and true’ – and then I get to the end . . . so either we’re missing some big chunks of the story, or that’s not actually how life works . . .
November 12, 2013 at 7:32 am
Jennifer
Maybe what we are to remember is our lack of separateness. I woke up this morning in that hazy in between state of feeling at one with all family who had passed before…with Mary, Jesus too..and then the thought cams that if this is true then I am also at one with those like Hitler too. It was interesting…
Perhaps Sophie was both depressed and awake. It’s like living with a chronic health problem…it doesn’t make her less…perhaps?
November 12, 2013 at 7:35 am
Sarah
There’s something important for me in the importance of remembering in community, or at least not in isolation. Pain like you are describing is very difficult to bear alone. As children we need our trusted elders to help shepherd us through our pain, and as adults we still need others, though we have often learned to try and cope alone. When parents are deep in their own pain, the ground is ripe for the intergenerational transmission of trauma play out.
We need each other. We need to develop the capacity to sit with pain and remembrance, both for ourselves but also to be there for others in their pain.
November 12, 2013 at 10:49 am
Bob MacDonald
This remembering is clearly a key element of our theology and a key theme in the psalms. Two psalms are labeled ‘to remember’ that is Psalms 38 and 70. One other has three voices remembering – that is Psalm 137.
Ad coming up – I begin my 6 week course on the psalms tonight at St Barnabas. (There is a cost of $25- waived if necessary. I intend that all cash received will go to the Primate’s relief fund for the Philippines – I am assuming that we can get all the matching funds from such a donation. I have about 25 copies of the material – 526 pages – so I expect everyone will be able to get a copy.) end Ad
November 12, 2013 at 12:35 pm
Christopher Page
Endorsement coming – I have seen some of Bob’s work on the Psalms it is of unsurpassed quality. He is offering a rich opportunity to take an in-depth look at a profoundly important part of the spiritual tradition. I wish I could attend but alas evenings are at a bit of a premium.
November 12, 2013 at 2:04 pm
bobmacdonald
Christopher – thank you for your encouragement. I am really looking forward to tonight – but it is with much ‘fear and trembling’ also – though I know I am prepared more than I have ever been for any course I have led in the last 50 years! And I know I will learn a great deal from the interaction.