Welcome to Brothers and Sisters, the weekly meet-up for prayer* and community at Daily Kos. We put an asterisk on pray* to acknowledge that not everyone uses conventional religious language, but may want to share joys and concerns, or simply take solace in a meditative atmosphere. Anyone who comes in the spirit of mutual respect, warmth and healing, is welcome.
This Memorial Day weekend, we're engaged in something of an official act of memory. But that isn't what I want to talk about tonight--or at least, it's only part of what I want to talk about. Follow me below the fold and let's think together a little about memory.
As already noted, this is Memorial Day weekend, the weekend on which we are engaged, in some sense, in an official act of memory--though it's easy to lose sight of that amidst all the hoopla around the quasi-official start of the summer traveling season, the end of the school and academic years, and eleventeen sporting events from tennis to hockey to a fairly famous automobile race.
But why should we confine that memory to one particular day, or one particular weekend out of the year? Why do we choose to remember only certain people--at this time or at any other? Why isn't there a parallel holiday devoted to official forgetting: an anti-Memorial Day?
Those were all questions that popped or drifted into my head as I was musing on the meaning of this weekend. And I don't have very good answers for any of them.
Let's start with the last question: why isn't there an annual forgetting holiday? After all, as the Psalmist reflected (Ps. 130:3), "Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who could ever stand firm?" I think I'm on reasonably safe ground when I say that there are things that all of us would prefer God (or someone) did not remember.
As most of us know, Memorial Day, which began its life as Decoration Day, is officially dedicated to remembering the men and women who have given their lives in the military service of this country. But should it be so narrowly dedicated? In 2002, for example, the French gay activist Jean Le Bitoux, who died just last month, published a book entitled Les oubliés de la mémoire, which I would preferentially translate as Those Whom Memory Forgot, on the subject of the gay victims of Nazi oppression. If we narrow our remembrances too much, we run the risk of rewriting history, and of forgetting things that could be important. As George Santayana famously observed:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
--The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress
Let us not make that mistake.
Perhaps it's part of my vocation as an historian--a professional "rememberer," if you will--but I have never been perfectly comfortable with the idea that things should only be remembered on specified days or at specified times or in specified ways. The more, the merrier--or in this context, the more the better. As one library organization dedicated to preserving digital content wittily puts it in its very name, Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. For the purposes of this diary, I might paraphrase that as "Lots of Memories Keeps Us From Forgetting."
There are all manner of days and seasons and places set aside to remember things: birthdays, anniversaries, saint's days, Yom Ha-Shoah (and, indeed, Yad Vashem, whose very name speaks of remembrance, coming from Isaiah 56:5, "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial [literally, "a hand"] and a name ("yad vashem")... that shall not be cut off."), All Souls Day, Veterans Day, Mothers and Fathers days, etc. Museums are places of memory. So are libraries. And cemeteries. But we shouldn't restrict our remembering to those days, times, or places.
(Saint John on the island of Patmos, writing his Ἀποκάλυψις, better known in English as the Book of Revelation. From the Très Riches Heures of Jean, duc de Barry)
One of my little rituals is that whenever I pass a cemetery, I say a short prayer for all those buried there. Since I regularly pass three of them on my way to and from work each day, it's a prayer I say a lot, but it makes me feel good for at least a few moments. Perhaps it does the souls of those departed brothers and sisters a bit of good, too. That is, after all, the doctrine of the Communion of Saints in action.
So let's talk: What do you remember, and how? What do you wish you could remember? What do you (or would you like) to forget? What places, or times, or things hold memories for you, and how do you relate to them?
To send us forth this evening, I'll leave you with three settings of the Canticle of Simeon, perhaps better known under its Latin title of "Nunc dimittis." The first is by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and is sung in Latin; the second is by John Sheppard and is sung in English; and the third is in a setting by Sergei Rachmaninov and is sung in what is technically Old Church Slavonic, which is reasonably close to Russian.
The text of the prayer goes like this:
νῦν ἀπολύεις τὸν δοῦλόν σου, δέσποτα, κατὰ τὸ ῥῆμά σου ἐν εἰρήνῃ·
ὅτι εἶδον οἱ ὀφθαλμοί μου τὸ σωτήριόν σου,
ὃ ἡτοίμασας κατὰ πρόσωπον πάντων τῶν λαῶν,
φῶς εἰς αποκάλυψιν ἐθνῶν καὶ δόξαν λαοῦ σου Ἰσραήλ.
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace:
Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum
Quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum:
Lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel.
Ныне отпущаеши раба Твоего,
Владыко, по глаголу Твоему, с миром;
Яко видеста очи мои спасение Твойо,
...еже еси уготовал, пред лицем всех людей,
Свет во откровение языков
И славу людей Твоих Израиля.
Do you now, O Lord, let your servant
depart in peace, according to your word:
For my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples,
a light for the revelation of the nations,
and the glory of your people Israel (my translation from the original Greek of Luke 2:29–32)
Palestrina:
Sheppard:
Rachmaninov: