Memories

I didn't think I was a collector. I'm the one who visits the thrift store with bags and bags of household goods because I can't stand crammed closets and disorderly shelves. The refrigerator that I like best is the one with the empty shelves, not the one bulging with food and leftovers. What I have faced into recently, though, is that I am a collector after all. I collect memories.

In cleaning out the attic last week, I found our son's First Communion suit, his cub scout uniform, his boy scout uniform, his band jacket, his morterboard, every stuffed animal he'd ever had and the sweater set that my grandmother had knitted for him as a baby. Not to mention every report card and scrap of paper that spoke of his love, every love letter my husband ever wrote and dozens of art works that have hung in our home of 40 years. Yes, I collect memories and what memories they are.

Our scriptures are like that. They are our memories of our encounters with God. Some of these memories are  clear, some are foggy, but they are a record of the moments when people were touched by something beyond themselves and they said, "I must remember this."

Sometimes what the scriptures record doesn't seem worth recalling because the stories speak of cruelty and bloodthirsty revenge.  The punishing and judgmental God of the Hebrew scriptures and the Book of Revelation is not one who is easily loved and it takes a lot of faith to get past this image and find the God who saves us by grace. Some of what the Christian church has chosen to remember, on the face of it, we might really be better off forgetting.

Memory, however, serves a purpose. It provides a context through which we are able to examine our choices and how these choices played out in our lives and the lives of those who have gone before us. However, I believe that we should be retelling some of these early stories of our relationship with God more to remind us of who we have been than to reveal who God supposedly is.

We have been a people so limited in our understanding of reality that we sometimes made God into the worst of ourselves in order to elevate our own responses and excuse them. The Islamic extremists are still doing it today. We shake our heads over their misguided interpretation of God's will, but, to be fair, the Hebrew scriptures depict much of the same kind of violence, allegedly sanctioned or even demanded, by God.

Our collected spiritual memories reveal our progressive understanding of the nature of God, culminating in the gospel of John where we discover the God who is Love residing within us. Because of this awareness, we are changed and we see our non-loving responses for what they are: the places within us where we haven't made room for God.

As a collection of memories, the Bible is something of a mystery. We may have misconstrued over the years why our forebears wrote down some of the stories, just as I looked in wonder at some of the things I had saved in the attic. We shouldn't be afraid, though, to look at what is written through the lens of our enlightened understanding and say: "don't ever think like this again."