Collective Christian Memory

Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” it is said, and a background in literature has taught me that in earlier periods writers often borrowed from one another without compunction or complaint.

But I was shaken, early in my activist writing career, to discover another writer had “borrowed” something I had written for her Methodist curriculum. She put her name as the author because she had “adapted” it. I had felt similarly offended when I noticed Cat Stephens failed to acknowledge on an album that “Morning Has Broken” is an old hymn that he “adapted.”

About the same time, someone told me that a mutual friend had used one of my stories as his sermon. She thought I’d be thrilled, but no, he hadn’t credited it to me, claiming to have “found” it, a rhetorical device to add to the piece’s mystery. What concerned me at the time was that his large high-steepled not-yet-welcoming church might have become more welcoming if they knew it had come from a gay Christian.

Reading a book decades later, I discovered a sentence I knew to be mine, and then another and another, and checked the footnotes at the end of the book to find the author finally attributed a quote from the same article to me in the chapter that followed. When I shared my dismay with another writer, I was advised not to take it too seriously, as it was probably “just poor scholarship.” I never brought it up when I later worked with the author, but ironically heard his own complaint of another writer borrowing liberally from him!

I’ve mentioned on this blog my own failure of attribution when I wrote somewhere, “We know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all.” I had no idea the quote originated with body theologian James B. Nelson because I had not yet read any of Nelson’s work or heard him speak! When I happened on the sentence in one of his early books, I was chagrined, to say the least.

All these examples came to mind when I read two chapters on memory in Oliver Sacks’s last book, The River of Consciousness. He concludes, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

He cites one of his own memoirs as an example, in which we recounts an experience at his family’s London home during World War II. After publication, a brother explained to him that he and Oliver were away at school when the event happened. Another brother had written to them about the incident, but apparently with such great emotion and detail that Oliver had incorporated it into this own memory bank.

Even more memorably, Sacks describes the “plagiarism” controversy surrounding the beloved public figure Helen Keller, just 12 years of age, when a story she wrote paralleled another written by Margaret Canby. Keller did not remember Canby’s story, but realized she was more prone to think a story hers if, in Sacks’ words, it “had been ‘read’ to her, using finger spelling onto her hand.” To Canby’s credit, she defended Keller, writing, “What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have!”

All of this prompts me to compare our collective Christian memory, one that began with the first encounters of Jesus all the way to us “latter day saints.” As we follow the church calendar, reliving Jesus’ life from his advent to his elevation, following him in baptism and Communion and ministry, his story becomes our own, much as Helen Keller’s tactile reception of Canby’s story.

On a television program promoting my first book, Uncommon Calling, an evangelical pastor countered my “revisionism” of the Christian story, as I read biblical stories in the light of contemporary experience. I explained that was the task of every generation, to make sense of Jesus and our faith for the present times. (Though I did not say this, even his fundamentalism was a 19^th century example of this.) Revisionism, I said, was quite traditional!

No less for progressive Christians, who are making sense of Jesus and our faith in a world that has a grander and more accurate perspective of the cosmos, thanks largely to science and Christianity’s intercourse with other faith traditions.

Citing Freud, Sacks explains, “remembering…was essentially a dynamic, transforming, reorganizing process throughout the course of life.  …Memories are continually worked over and revised and…their essence, indeed, is recategorization.”

And so with collective Christian memory in the course of the church’s life. To repeat, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. I took the photo during a speaking trip to that welcoming congregation some years ago.

Remember the Gift

Resting in God, temple in India, 1983.

My sleep was interrupted very early the morning I write this as I struggled with a request to co-lead a several-day contemplative retreat, doubting my qualifications. Suddenly my mind began structuring the course, bringing order to chaos. I continued organizing in a dream as I drifted off to sleep again. Waking, I felt more confident.  

I have yet to share it with my co-leader, so there will be changes to come, but I thought it would also be a helpful way to write posts that might speak to those of you who follow the spiritual season of Lent and Holy Week as well as those of you who don’t! So eager was I about this that here I am, up at 5:19 a.m., writing.

For the next six Wednesdays I plan to reflect on themes that could be used in such a retreat, in an order that roughly parallels the evolution of contemplation in the Christian tradition. Today I write of memory.

I have been told that studies indicate personal memory is unreliable. But I could not do my work or “do” my faith were it not for such a faulty instrument! My present self may easily be reshaping my personal narrative to suit myself. Lillian Hellman, believed to have reshaped her own personal narrative in her memoirs, famously wrote that the longest sentence in the world begins with, “I remember…”

One of the things I remember but have never been able to document is a line from W. H. Auden: 

Remember the gift,

The one from the manger,

It means only this:

You can dance with a stranger.

When I used to send Christmas cards, I created a card with that verse one year. It is in “remembering the gift” that contemplation begins. The first followers of Jesus told stories about him, recounted and amplified his teachings and parables, and remembered, re-enacted, and sometimes re-shaped his deeds and life events. Lent is simply remembering his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness after his baptism.

If personal memory is faulty, collective memory can be fanciful, and as it passes through time, evolves into myth. Myth, for me, offers a deeper spiritual truth. Jesus came to represent to those who followed him and those who followed them what the world needs.

Teilhard de Chardin (yes, I’m still reading him) writes, “However personal and incommunicable it may be at its root and origin, Reflection can only be developed in communion with others. It is essentially a social phenomenon.” I would add, a social phenomenon over time, a communion of saints over the ages. In another context, he writes, “Coherence and fecundity, the two criteria of truth.”*

This is what separates mythological truth from “alternative facts.” There is both coherence and fecundity in mythology: it makes sense to our inner selves and is fruitful in its outcome. The sacrificial love that Jesus taught and practiced and lived bears fruit in our transformation and in the transformation of the world.

Zen Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield tells the story of a woman attending the trial of her son’s murderer. Overwhelmed with grief, at one point, she cries out, “I’m going to kill you!” After he was imprisoned, to his surprise, she came to visit him. “Is there anything you need?” she asked casually, and she began providing little things here and there whenever she came to visit.

When he approached release, she asked, “Do you have a place to go?” He said, “No, ma’am, I don’t.” So she offered him her son’s room. She also found him work with a relative. After living together for a while, she asked him if he remembered when she shouted, “I’m going to kill you!” “Yes ma’am,” he said, “I could never forget that.” The mother replied, “You see, I did ‘kill’ you. You are no longer the man who killed my son.”

Sacrificial love transforms. That’s why early followers of Jesus gathered to relive his sacrifice in the Eucharist in which all attending, not just the spiritual leader, spoke the Words of Institution that rendered bread and wine into body and blood.  The Eucharist was preceded and prepared for by the Service of the Word, the reading of scripture and a contemporary interpretation. Liturgy too is a way of remembering, spoken or sung or choreographed. And early on, art and architecture served the Christian memory, especially in a largely illiterate world.

In Jesus and the Eucharist, Jesuit Tad Guzie wrote that the meal was “above all, a natural way for Jesus to express the meaning of his impending death, a death which he knew lay at the heart of Yahweh’s promise of life and a kingdom for his people.”**

This, to me, is not a sacrifice to an angry God, but a sacrifice to show us a greater love.

*The Future of Man, 133, 182.

**Jesus and the Eucharist, 57.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Pentimento and Palimpsest

We watched the film Julia this past weekend. Vanessa Redgrave as Julia is at her most beautiful, I think, in this film. It’s a film about writers and lovers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, and Hellman’s adventure, after her play The Children’s Hour opened  on Broadway, smuggling Julia’s money into Berlin to save Jews during the Nazi madness. The authenticity of the story has been questioned, but it’s a high-minded tale worthy of truth or fiction, much like scripture.

Released in 1977, it brought back a flood of memories of my own past. “The longest sentence in the world,” Hellman once wrote, “begins with ‘I remember…’” I graduated from Yale Divinity School that year, was midway through serving on the two-year Presbyterian Task Force on Homosexuality, and began as founding director of The Lazarus Project, a first-of-its-kind ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. I was also one of a handful of openly gay candidates for ordination in the Presbyterian church. Both the support of colleagues and the interest of the media seemed to assure me of a promising outcome of my activism and ministry.

Monday was my day off, which of course was virtually nobody else’s day off, so I “recreated” alone, running on the beach, reading in a park, and sometimes going to the movies. That is how I came to be sitting in an almost empty Westwood movie theatre to see Julia by myself. But before the movie started, someone behind me leaned over a row of seats and tentatively called, “Chris?”  It was Troy Perry, founder of MCC, seated next to a friend and sometime bodyguard, and he invited me to join them, which I did. At the end of the movie, just like my mother, I was crying. Troy turned to me supportively but chided with a smile, “Oh Chris, you’re so sentimental!”

I recalled this as I cried once again at the end of Julia. Wade is used to me by now, so was unsurprised. But I was crying not just for the lost innocence depicted in the film, but for that moment that Troy and I shared in a Westwood movie theatre, just as our dreams were taking off—his founding an LGBT-affirming denomination and me hoping to help change the Presbyterian church.  So much seemed possible then!

This week I took Hellman’s paperback Pentimento from my bookshelves, the memoir of which “Julia” is one chapter. By the bookstore receipt that I obviously used as a bookmark, I purchased it on Halloween (Oct 31), 1974, for $1.95. The other book on the receipt, I imagine, was her memoir An Unfinished Woman, which has gone missing. I know I didn’t read these for any class, and I’m not sure what prompted my purchase. But I remember how much I enjoyed these memoirs.

“Pentimento” is the term for a painting that fades, revealing another painting behind, of which the artist is said to have “repented.” Hellman uses it as a metaphor for memory and memoir, explaining, “Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.”

Another favorite writer, Gore Vidal, entitled a memoir Palimpsest, which he thought of as an architectural term, but discovered its original use had to do with paper or parchment “which has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out.” Vidal observes, “This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text.”

That’s what I find myself doing these days, remembering and re-membering. And that, to me, is what scripture (and scriptural interpretation) is. It’s a remembering and a re-membering. In Hellman’s words, “an old conception, replaced by a later choice…a way of seeing and then seeing again.” And in Vidal’s words, “Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought.”

That’s also the process of the spiritual life.

Related posts:

Better to Follow than to Arrive

“I Love to Tell the Story”

Mark your calendars, L.A!  I will be offering a lot of “I remember’s” speaking during the 11 a.m. Sunday service October 13, 2013 of the West Hollywood United Church of Christ, formerly known as West Hollywood Presbyterian, as part of its year-long celebration of its 100^th anniversary! This is where I served a decade as founding director of the Lazarus Project.

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