The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

By Margaret Bendroth

We often dismiss history as dull or irrelevant, but our modern disengagement from the past puts us fundamentally out of step with the long witness of the Christian tradition. Yet, says Margaret Bendroth, the past tense is essential to our language of faith, and without it our conversation is limited and thin.

This accessible, beautifully written book presents a new argument for honoring the past. The Christian tradition gives us the powerful image of a vast communion of saints, all of God's people, both living and dead, in vital conversation with each other. This kind of connection with our ancestors in the faith, Bendroth maintains, will not happen by wishing or by accident. She argues that remembering must become a regular spiritual practice, part of the rhythm of our daily lives as we recognize our world to be, in many ways, a gift from others who have gone before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781467438896

Margaret Bendroth

 Margaret Lamberts Bendroth is executive director of the American Congregational Association and director of the Congregational Library in Boston. Her other books include Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism and Fundamentalism and Gender.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

On Keeping and Tossing

One chilly winter Sunday I walked up the steps of a small New England church, and into a set of questions I have been thinking about ever since.

Part of my job as director of the Congregational Library, an old Boston institution in the heart of Beacon Hill, is visiting local churches. In fact, a lot of my responsibilities are ceremonial: I give talks at anniversary services or sermons for history Sunday, and I have been guest of honor at more church suppers than I can recall, from Maine to Washington State. My task is to remind people that they are part of a much larger story, one that began with the New England Puritans and still continues today. And somehow, despite all the watery coffee and starchy church food, that part of my job never gets old.

These trips are always an adventure, especially for someone with a historian’s training and, I admit, instinct for prying. But this one was unusual from the start. Even by New England standards this particular church had a long past, with deep Puritan roots and a few famous pastors. In fact, one of them was already very familiar to me: he looks down from an oil portrait mounted high on the wall of our turn-of-the-century reading room — not very happily, I should add.

After a while I learned not to take this personally, and as a gesture of good will I came with a few anecdotes about him to share with the congregation. And so, as a group of us stood together in the narthex, I launched into a story about how the famous reverend would arrive at church on Sundays, stepping down from a large carriage, all dressed in black. He was a small man and made up for his deficiency in size with an intimidating presence. As the story goes, the congregation would part like the waters of the Red Sea as he marched down the aisle and up into his pulpit holding a very large black tricorne hat against his chest.

Why, there it is right there! one of the group broke in. I turned around and saw that very same hat, now much the worse for wear, sitting in a small Plexiglas box right below a large window. It was slowly baking to death in the sunlight.

Fortunately, my hosts interpreted my gasp of dismay as one of awe. One of them even offered to let me take it back to the Library, though I declined politely. Unless someone was interested in eighteenth-century millinery, the hat had relatively little to offer any of our researchers. I also added a few suggestions about better places for the display than under a window.

On my way home, I could not stop wondering what that poor old tricorne hat was doing in the entry hall of a Protestant church. I have visited enough Roman Catholic churches to be familiar with reliquaries, made to hold the sacred memorabilia of saints and church fathers, and I had been to plenty of museums that displayed everything imaginable from the colonial era, from clay pipes and pottery shards to underwear and old shoes. But something different seemed to be going on here, and the question would not go away: what did those Yankee Protestants see when they passed by that Plexiglas case every Sunday?

Probably to most of them it was just an odd curio, a silent reminder of a mercifully bygone past, when ministers aimed to intimidate their flocks rather than sip coffee with them in the fellowship hall. Others might have seen the tricorne hat as a kind of a totem, almost like a magic amulet offering protection against outside forces. A few would have seen it as a testimony to the perseverance of the old saints through difficult times.

I knew beyond a doubt, however, that the Plexiglas reliquary would have irritated the hat’s original owner no end. Like many Congregational ministers of his day, he was fiercely opposed to anything that smacked of ritual, including the keeping of relics. The old eighteenth-century meetinghouse he presided over would have been as stark and plain as the theology he thundered from his pulpit. And nothing would have horrified him more than to see his hat living on in a plastic case — long after his ardent Calvinism had fallen by the cultural wayside.

So why keep it? And for that matter, why hold onto anything old and no longer useful?

The Power of Old Things

Certainly that tricorne hat survived because it was, in some way, wonderful. There is something awe-inspiring about an object that is indescribably and incredibly old. A three-hundred-year-old devotional book in my Rare Book Room is, on the one hand, just ancient paper and ink in an old binding in need of careful preservation. But it is also an object of mystery. Perhaps a minister pored over it by candlelight or a father read it aloud to his family, sitting around the fire after a long day of work in the fields. It might have belonged to someone who died in war or who was lost at sea. Sometimes the owners wrote their names across the title page, in careful and uneven script, and sometimes they underlined or commented on the text. But these clues only raise more questions about what moved those readers in the first place — not just to underline the text, but to buy the book itself.

We are not just talking about books, of course. That much becomes obvious with any trip through a church archive, where oddities stare down from every shelf. The Methodist library at Drew University, for example, is the memory receptacle for one of the most plainspoken and simple forms of American Protestantism, yet it boasts a collection of relics that would do the Vatican proud: a scrap of fabric from one of John Wesley’s clothes, a piece of velvet upholstery fabric from a chair he owned, and a wooden peg from a Methodist church where his fellow evangelist Francis Asbury once hung his coat. The collection even includes an oddly-shaped black object, said to be the tip of the thumb of eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield.¹ My Congregationalists were a bit more prosaic in their collecting habits, but we certainly have our share of rocks (in our case from Plymouth), furniture sat upon by semi-famous people, and unidentified pieces of fabric and coins. I am certainly not immune to the lure of old things: the flotsam and jetsam in my office includes a two-hundred-year-old brick from the Park Street Church, a souvenir calendar featuring famous Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, and many piles of old tracts, Sunday school buttons, and commemorative coins.

I suspect that in some mysterious and compelling way those old objects point us to the unseen. Even more, they form an emotional bridge to the now-invisible people who made them long ago. A brick from a demolished church building has the power to evoke feelings of sadness, joy, and regret. Even one of the old chairs in my library has the metaphorical power to raise the dead, at least in the memory and imagination, as I wonder about its original owner, Jonathan Edwards Jr., and what his world was like. We could say that in some sense they are holy — things that are special and set apart from ordinary use.

In this sense remembering is an act with spiritual meaning, pushing us against the unknown. True, it has all kinds of practical value, especially when we need to find the way home or come up with the name of the person standing in front of us. But there is another dimension. Thinking back through time can be like reaching into dark, murky water with no idea of what your hands will come across: a lovely shell or something with spines and venom. Remembering, like all matters spiritual, requires imagination, trust, and courage.

It is also deeply woven into the religious faith we have inherited. Both Christianity and Judaism are fundamentally religions of remembrance, as historian Jacques Le Goff writes.² Thousands of years ago the Jewish people came to know God, not through a set of abstract philosophical principles or religious rituals, but through the nitty-gritty realities of human history. While the deities of other peoples were associated with places or things, writes Abraham Joshua Heschel, the God of the prophets was the God of events: the Redeemer from slavery [and] the Revealer of the Torah.³ The people of Israel honored God by marking time, stopping their ordinary activities for one day of the week. The Seder meal, the feasts of Tabernacles and Purim, all were re-enactments of events that had happened to their ancestors, taking place not somewhere up in the eternal realm between gods and demons, but in human space and time.

The Israelites also remembered God in stories. After they crossed the Jordan River into Canaan, ending forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the first task was to erect a memorial in the middle of the water. This mound of rocks piled one on the other was not some mysterious symbol but meant to remind everyone of a story: when the river stopped its flow while the Levites carried the Ark of the Covenant into the land of promise. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Joshua ordered them, tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. These stones, he said, are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever (Joshua 4:6-7).

The gospel accounts are similarly concerned with tracking time. The life of Christ unfolds through festival seasons and harvests, cycles of life and death. But even more than that, we know when Jesus came before Pilate — in the early morning — and the exact time of his death — the sixth hour, according to Luke. We know that the resurrection took place in the wee hours of the first day of the week. Why is all this detail necessary? Over and over the gospel accounts reinforce what the Hebrew Scriptures had already taught, that God dealt with creation according to the flow of the human calendar. Jesus was a real person who lived on the earth in what we have come to call the first century. Moreover, like the people of Israel, Christians also honor a God of events. The cycle of the liturgical year, beginning with Advent and continuing on through Christ’s birth, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven — followed by an interval of ordinary time — is not a recital of magical or mythical episodes, but a way of keeping in memory things that happened.

We have lost these rhythms. The modern view that history is a luxury, a hobby for buffs and know-it-alls, puts us fundamentally out of step with all of our spiritual forebears. The past tense is essential to our language of faith; without it our conversation is limited and thin — and growing thinner all the time.

The Cost of Forgetting

In a broad sense we all believe that the past is important. Telling your life story to someone else cements a relationship more powerfully than all the flowers and candy in the world. As any therapist or doctor would say, talking through personal experiences is often the best way to unearth the real me, that complicated person with a past carefully hidden from public view.

Moreover, most of us can also recite the famous line from the philosopher George Santayana that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. When I used to ask college freshmen why they were required to take my class in World Civilization, they quickly zeroed in on this idea, that history is a tool for avoiding past mistakes. They also recognized that history can be inspirational, which is why we build monuments and museums and put up plaques and historical markers; we honor the Founding Fathers on the Fourth of July, soldiers on Veterans Day, and the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving.

But what do we do with those stories? It’s hard to come up with any instances of our political leaders checking their history books before going to war, or deciding to include a historian or two in their circle of advisors. Learning from the past is a great idea