“We remember them” we say, in one of the litanies from our hymnal. But if honoring the dead depends on memory, then what happens when memory fails? And does the value of a life die with the death of the last person who remembers? I can’t respect such a contingent valuation. Something greater than human memory is necessary to give lasting honor to those precious but forgotten lives that came before.
Many years ago, I read a short book called Sum, by a neuroscientist named David Eagleman. It was published in 2010, which is probably when I read it. Think of the title, “Sum” in the sense of “summing up”, a conclusion, the end of a long series of events. The book is about death, or rather meditations on what might happen after death. As a neuroscientist, Eagleman knows something about the moment of death, the end of brain activity. But like the rest of us he’s clueless about what comes next.
So his book is a work of fiction in which he imagines forty different possibilities for what might happen. These are fantasies, not meant to be scientific speculations. Some of them humorous. All of them intriguing.
In one of them, Eagleman imagines the afterlife in two stages, or two big rooms. The first room is a kind of purgatory: a waiting room. The second room is where the afterlife really begins. In the first room, newly deceased people come in through a door on one side of the room, and after a time, short or long, or very long, they leave again through the opposite door.
The test that determines how long a person stays in the waiting room is simple. You’ll stay in the waiting room as long as there’s someone still alive who remembers you.
Some people pass through the waiting room very quickly. They weren’t much thought of by anyone even as they lived: the anonymous, unidentified dead, the dead who had lived alone and estranged. The quickly forgotten hurry through the waiting room and join the afterlife of all the other unremembered.
Then there are those like most of us. While alive, we’re well-known by a small number of friends and family. But most of the folks who know us are about our own age, and there’s no reason for anyone born later to learn about us, so within a few generations after our death we will be forgotten. I remember my mother and my grandparents. But I never knew my great-grandparents. And they didn’t leave anything behind that would cause a wider public to know them. So in Eagleman’s fantasy they would have left the waiting room and started whatever comes next.
But the humor of Eagleman’s story comes from considering those poor famous souls who are doomed to be remembered forever: Shakespeare, George Washington, Cleopatra, Galileo, all stuck in God’s waiting room because they’re still attached to life by us living folks never letting them go. I suppose Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha, are facing the same fate. Whatever final afterlife they imagine is waiting for them they can’t ever get to, because we the living won’t stop talking about them.
Imagine the plight of some obscure historical figure stuck in the waiting room only because one obsessive scholar has made them a specialty. Impatiently, these almost completely forgotten souls wait for that last cloistered academic to final give up his own ghost, so they can be released. But other figures: Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, are doomed. They spend their days in the waiting room, playing cards, and envying the unknown.
In one of the readings for a Memorial service included in our hymnal we affirm how forever present the remembered dead still are in our lives. After every phrase we respond with, “we remember them.”
In the rising of the sun and in its going down
In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter
In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring
It’s a lovely statement, written by Roland B. Gittelsohn, of the lodging that loved ones take up in our hearts. Their lives become interwoven with our own. We are changed by knowing them. They are our history, a part of our story. And their life story has its epilogue in ours, in what we do after them, in part because we knew them.
The final line of the reading is this: “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”
Imagine hearing the tolling of distant church bell, marking that someone in the community has died, or is dying, and death is coming closer. The poet John Donne in his Meditation XVII warns us not to ask for whom the bell is ringing. It is for us, he explains. He doesn’t mean this to frighten us. It may not be us who is practically dying at that moment. But he means that whoever’s death is announced by that bell: mine, yours, a stranger’s, the death will affect us, too.
It’s a statement of universalism. We’re all in this together. A birth adds a new member to the human community and forces the reconfiguration of the relationships of every other member of the human community, including us. A death of any one of us, near or far, known or unknown, shakes the whole structure, and we feel the trembling in our lives.
It’s from the same Meditation that Donne makes the observation that “no man is an island.” He says we’re all part of one great continent, and if a simple clod of earth falls off the edge of the continent into the sea, it’s just as impactful as whether it were a lighthouse that fell, or the home of a friend, or our own home. He writes, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Because living persons have value, in a way that dead persons do not, when a person dies, we take care to extend the value of life to them for as long as possible. Some religious persons extend life itself to the dead, denying death and claiming that they live on, just somewhere else, in another form. Or we might say, as at a Unitarian Universalist memorial service, that we lend our value to the dead because we live and we remember them. So we have a memorial service to keep the dead alive in our memories. And we set up a gravestone, to prompt our memory. And we mark holidays, like the Memorial Day tomorrow, to urge us to keep remembering, so that the dead don’t sink into the value-less place of being forgotten.
But the unadmitted corollary to that strategy of giving value to the dead by keeping them connected to life through memory is that once we stop remembering them, then they will be completely dead, “most sincerely dead”, as the coroner in the Wizard of OZ says about the wicked witch of the East. And thus, permanently erased from human memory, ever after: worthless.
Yuck. I say to that. I recoil from the idea that a person could ever be worthless. Even dead, even forgotten, a person is never worthless. A person is a person of inherent worth and dignity. Our worth doesn’t depend on what others think about us, or even whether they think about us at all.
My great-grandparents, who I never knew and don’t remember my parents much talking about, are as anonymous to me now as is everyone else born in the nineteenth century, except for the folks that we all remember. But it seems wrong to think that Abraham Lincoln, and William James, and Susan B. Anthony should have a kind of worth due to being remembered unavailable to the rest of us.
Worth isn’t only for the great, or famous, or those who discovered something, or wrote a bestseller. Worth includes even that anonymous clod falling off the edge of the continent into the sea. Worth includes every one of the eight billion persons currently alive and the billions of once living but now dead and forgotten persons and the persons who even while they lived were unknown to nearly any other human mind.
All things of being have worth. We imagine that the act of remembering extends being, and thus worth, to the dead, as if, were we to forget them they would no longer exist. But here we are confusing two very different categories of being: the difference between never was, and once was.
I said a few weeks ago that I would spend these Sundays in May, as I wrap up a year-long look at the foundational issues of spirituality, considering the biggest issue of spirituality, the question of God.
For many people, the word God can only refer to one thing. God means that old man in the sky. God the all-knowing and all-powerful. God the judge handing out rewards to those he favors, and punishing others. The God who overcomes the laws of nature to perform miracles. The God who somehow knows our fate before it happens but also expects us to avoid sin. The God who has the power to save us from suffering but turns his back to horrible human suffering yet still claims to love us completely
The logical contradictions in that definition of God make that God easy to reject.
But perhaps it is only that definition, not God, that we need to reject.
There are thousands of possible gods: Zeus, Shiva, Woton, Wankan-Tonka, Quetzalcoatl. Nearly all are just as logically impossible as the traditionally defined God of Abraham. But it is possible to retain the idea of God and define a theology without offending our reason or contradicting the laws of nature.
Process theologians such as Alfred North Whitehead and the Unitarian Charles Hartshorne, regard consciousness, not matter as the basic building stuff of the universe. They then define God as the universal consciousness that emerges from the collective organization of all that basic stuff. God is thus a part of nature and subject to the laws of nature, not supernatural. But, unlike a strictly material description of nature, a creation grounded in consciousness gives reality to intangibles such as ideals, goals, intentions, purpose, meaning, judgments of right and wrong, beauty, and so on.
This is one way to think differently about the nature of God. Not the old man in the sky but the mind of the universe.
A second question to ask about God is to consider the character of God. Different Gods can be described variously as playful, vengeful, loving or stern, intimate or remote, all-powerful or sharing power, changeless or adaptable. The God I believe in is creative, encouraging, sympathetic, generous, forgiving.
A third question to ask about God is the one I phrase as giving God a job description. What is God for? Creator, redeemer, destroyer, warrior, judge?
My answer is that God’s primary duty is to hold out a vision of the best possible future for creation and by whispered hints and suggestions, which human minds experience as the voice of conscience, God’s job is to urge all the conscious parts of the universe to use our capacity of free will to make the choices that will make that best possible future actual. God defines the goal. Our lives have purpose, because we align ourselves with that divine work. Our lives have meaning, because our choices are necessary to achieve the goal.
And another responsibility in God’s job description, is the duty I used as the title for my sermon today. It’s God’s job to be the eternal rememberer.
We forget. You forget. I forget. And eventually you and I will be forgotten. We will pass through the door on the other side of that waiting room and we will join those masses of people whose names are no longer spoken. Whose lives we don’t know and no living human can recall. Whose fears and hopes we don’t know. Whose deeds aren’t recorded. Who loved and were loved. Who sat by campfires. And sang. And gathered food. And entertained their children. Who suffered greatly. Who prayed for rain and wondered at the stars. Who walked for miles, and built boats, and dug roots out of the ground and filed paperwork, and sweated out a fever, and cheered at a ballgame.
All of those billions of lives forever lost to human memory.
Yet who had worth, because every person is a person of inherent worth and dignity.
And whose worth is not lost simply because they are not here today. Their worth is forever guaranteed because they were. Because they once did exist. Because they once lived. It is not human memory that preserves that worth, it is that their lives are written into the unfolding scroll of the ongoing creation of the universe that preserves their worth. Roll the scroll back far enough and there they are. They did that. They worked, and taught, and made. They contributed.
This is not an argument for God, because the fact of having lived justifies itself. The universe shifted a certain way, because every person who ever lived put their shoulder to creation and heaved it, and we’ve been following the consequence of that life of action ever since. It isn’t necessary to remember the writing in the scroll to know it’s there. We know it’s there because we’re living it.
But I have this poetic notion of God, flipping through the records of existence in ways that we cannot. See, there he is. See there she is. He existed. Leaning over God’s shoulder to look at the photo album we might point and ask, “Who’s that?” And God will answer. “That’s Rick-Hoyt-McDaniels. You don’t remember. But I do.”
When Langston Hughes says, “I’ve known rivers” he speaks poetically of our participation in this universal consciousness that remembers all, even when we personally forget.
“I bathed in the Euphrates,” he says, “when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.”
The collective consciousness I call God, collects our thoughts, too. We are with it, and in it, and a necessary piece of it.
Personally, I don’t remember much of existence back further than a few generations, but we collectively do and in the divine dimension, forever will.
“I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”
One continent that includes all and allows for no islands offshore.
Rank by rank again we stand
Ours the years’ memorial store honored days and names we reckon,
days of comrades gone before, lives that speak and deeds that beckon.
join we now their ageless song one with them in aspiration.
One in name, in honor one, guard we well the crown they won;
what they dreamed be ours to do, hope their hopes, and seal them true.