Talking Tuesday: The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being many years ago, and one of the lines of that book has always stuck with me: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

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Last week, Rod Dreher posted an excellent reflection on what he termed "the fragility of historical memory," or how the West forgot its stories.  I've written at length about the importance of history (both in a meta sense, and on a personal level).  We cannot possibly understand where we have been, where we are, or where we are going without having a detailed history in our minds, both as individuals and as a society.  The crisis of the modern era is one of forgetting, and without memory, we cannot find or follow God.

Dreher writes:

"I have spoken of the Benedict Option as a project of remembering as resistance.The urban theorist Jane Jacobs was not a religious person, but she described our time as the beginning of a “Dark Age” in that it was characterized by mass forgetting. We have deliberately cut ourselves off from our own history; the past has no hold on us. We have maximized our own freedom by minimizing any narrative that tells us who we are and what we must do. We think of ourselves as self-created. There is no “Great Chain of Being” to the modern American, no order extrinsic to ourselves that we belong to. I think again of Rowan Williams’s remarks on Dostoevsky, which I highlighted in this recent post on the novel Laurus:

RW: Dostoevsky famously said: “If there’s no God, then everything is permitted.” It’s a view the west might consider more often. Dostoevsky’s not saying that if there’s no God then no one’s watching us and we can do what we like. He’s really asking: what’s the rationale for living this way and not otherwise? If there’s no God, then there’s no shape to our lives. Our behaviour needs to be in tune with something. If there’s no divine tune, how do you know where to go, what to do? To believe in God is not a business of rewards, but an ability to make sense of things."

~Rod Dreher, The Fragility of Historical Memory, American Conservative Blog, November 3, 2015

 It is difficult to fight the impulse to forget when all around us seems to encourage it.  When each new outrage or horrific event crowds the mind and blinds the eyes.  But we must remember.  We can start by reading (or listening) to the Bible.  By reading the lives of the saints, to understanding the arc and sweep of historical events, particularly in the early years of the Church.  We must remember we are the Creation, and that God asks specific things of those who choose to follow Him.  Things that are not easy, and may even cost us our lives.  We must be ready for sacrifice.  We are not called for a life of ease and comfort, but for a life of salvation, of being made perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.  The process is often painful.  But we must remember in order to know who we are: children of God.