Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

October 5, 1997

“In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.”
Patricia Hampl
A Romantic Education

Inviting memory is not always easy. In fact the process is more than not likely to give us more pain than we bargained for. I try to solve this problem with amnesia—“I can’t remember,” I’ll say, and in truth, I can’t. But when I feel my heart growing cold, sometimes memory is the key to my redemption. And so I sit with it, whatever it is. Maybe I’ll write about it, maybe I’ll talk to one I trust, maybe I’ll find the memory working its terrifying way into a sermon. And I’ll feel my heart breaking, and this cycle of memory and redemption, memory and redemption, has once again given me softness, warmth, pleasure, hope.

Perhaps such a redemptive process was the goal of Geoffrey Wolff in writing his book “The Duke of Deception,” a memoir of his late father. Duke was a con man, a bunko artist, who was awash in lies and bad debts, who deceived everyone he ever knew, including his own son. The family moved constantly, as Duke’s lies caught up with him, and he was fired from job after job and the family was evicted from house after house. When Geoffrey Wolff heard that his father was dead, a possible suicide in a squalid, dank room, he simply said, “Thank God.” But as that evening wore on, his feelings overtook him. He wanted his wife to mourn with him, and she wouldn’t. For a few hours, he thought he hated her. He decided to go out to a seedy bar, where he sat drinking whiskey chased by beer. He wanted a fight, but no one seemed interested. He decided to go to his friend Kay’s house. He could always talk to Kay. And she had lost her husband in a particularly nasty suicide.

Geoffrey woke Kay up three hours before dawn. You know you’ve got a friend if you can wake her up at that hour, the hour when dreams of madness haunt our sleep. This is how he tells his story.

“My friend lit the Japanese lanterns <on the terrace> so we could see them from the living room. Above the fireplace a motto was cut into the mantel: ‘Kind friend, around this hearthstone speak no evil of any creature.’
“The morning with Kay changed me. She spoke of her dead husband and I told of my dead father; we traded scandal for scandal, and soon we were laughing. . . . . I had come into that night alienated. I was becoming handy with repudiations of every kind, and learning to nurture anger solicitously. I had felt betrayed by my father, and wanted to betray him. Kay turned my course. She had the authority of someone who had passed through the worst of fires. I listened to her. I saw again what I had seen when I was a child, in love with my father as with no one else. He had never repudiated me or seen in my face intimations of his own mortality. He had never let me think he wished to be rid of me or the burden of my judgment, even when I had hounded him about his history . . . like a reviewer, for God’s sake! He didn’t try to form me in his own image. How could he? Which image to choose? He had wanted me to be happier than he had been, to do better. He had taught me many things, some of which were important, some of which he meant, some of which were true. The things he told me were the right things to tell a son, usually. . . . I had been estranged from my father by my apprehension of other people’s opinions of him, and by a compulsion to be free of his chaos and destructions, I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him. I miss him.

“When I finally left Kay’s house I felt these things, some for the first time. I drove home slowly, and stopped at stop signs. The door to the room I shared with Priscilla was open when I came in, but I didn’t go through that door that night. I went to my children’s room. I stood above Justin, looking down at him. And then my son Nicholas began to moan, quietly at first. They did not know their grandfather was dead; they knew nothing about their grandfather. There would be time for that. I resolved to tell them what I could . . . .Nicholas cried out in his sleep, as he had so many times before . . . . Now I smoothed his forehead as my father had smoothed mine . . . . Justin breathed deeply. I crawled in bed beside my sweet Nicholas and took him in my arms and began to rock him in time to Justin’s regular breaths. I stunk of whiskey and there was blood on my face from a fall leaving Kay’s house, but I knew I couldn’t frighten my son. He ceased moaning, and I rocked him in my arms till light came down on us, and he stirred awake in my arms as I, in his, fell into a sleep free of dreams.”

Memory and redemption. It begins with numbness, which we tell ourselves is indifference. Shifts to anger, white and hot. The camera on the past clicks, and we discover that under the anger is a deep, deep pool of sadness and regret. Why couldn’t it have been different? And then the letting go. Because it wasn’t different. Because it was what it was. And I can live with it. And I’m OK. And I can love, and that’s all that matters.

Why do we invite memory? Because without memory, we are a slave to time and its endless account of the trivial and the accidental and the, heaven help us, factual—something that really doesn’t exist. We are a slave to the chaos of events. But memory redeems the way literature does, through emphasis and hyperbole and theme, ultimately rendering harmony and balance and a sense of proportion. To be without memory is to be without story, and to be without story is to be drifting without any thread of anchor through this perilous world, in which false narratives everywhere surround us. Everywhere, from the school books that tells us our history to billboards to TV sitcoms, we are invited to partake of lies of one kind or another, we are told that the image is to be preferred over the actual. What are we asked to believe about Blacks? About Native Americans? About what it is to be a man, a woman? Memory asks us to visit the land of the real. No, as one author said, we cannot “leave the blood and folly in the attic,”^{1 but when we allow ourselves to encounter that which we so much wish to escape, we find paradoxically that we can let it rest at last. “Roots hold me close, wings set me free.”}

Besides which, when we take this hard journey, we find soon enough that we are not alone. Parents are never ideal; kids are endlessly ungrateful. Did you see that cartoon with the caption “Convention for Adult Children of Non-dysfunctional Families”? There is a picture of a huge conference hall, empty except for 3 or 4 attendees with party hats. Making friends with your own memories encourages others to engage in this redemptive struggle, which I am convinced is a universal one. Who escapes loss? Who escapes pain? Who has never been betrayed? Remembering is a creative act and ultimately a kind of witnessing. It lends a hand to others who may be struggling with shame and regret. Afraid to speak, when we do speak, we are likely to hear from others, “That happened to you, too?” And the future suddenly seems to be more hopeful; possibility appears in new, rich forms.

Recently I was taken back in time, by an unexpected phone call from a high school friend. Her name? Well, wouldn’t you know, her name is Grace. I hadn’t seen her for over 35 years. She traced me down when a friend of hers sent her the article that was published about me in the Oregonian last December. At first she couldn’t imagine who this woman was, because she didn’t recognize my married name, but then it hit her. She called saying that she and her husband were coming through Portland and wondered if we could have breakfast.

I wanted to see her, and I didn’t. You see, although we were in the same social group in high school, we were from very different circumstances. She was the only child of the district attorney and his beautiful blonde wife. Grace had piano lessons and played beautifully. She took art lessons. She was the drum majorette in our award-winning marching band and was able to throw a flaming baton fifty feet up into the air and catch it again without being immolated on the spot. In our little town this family was the closest thing to culture we had. I envied her her good luck, her privilege. I envied her her sense of ease, her optimism. Suffice it to say, I was not optimistic back then. My mother was mentally ill and lived in a distant state. My father went to alcohol to ease his pain. We lived with my grandparents, who seemed to be from another century altogether. My grandmother was not blonde and bubbly. She was old and gray and liked to rock in her big easy chair in front of the fire and read Bible verses aloud. Grace was elected “Best Personality” and “Most Likely to Succeed” our senior year, whereas I was elected “Best Christian.” Get the picture? So I wanted to go to breakfast, and I didn’t want to go. I decided that I wanted to go more than I didn’t, so I went.

When Grace came to my door, I found that she looked just the same—except a few wrinkles, and she had gorgeous silver hair instead of the brown I had remembered. Interestingly enough, our lives turned out to have a lot in common. She got a degree in social work and became a therapist, as I had. She had a radio advice show for several years. Well, I had a TV advice show. Ha, that’ll show her! She had a book in print—I had two. What can I say? Her book was an advice volume called—what else?-- Coping with Grace. Then as the breakfast was eaten and the coffee cups were filled and refilled, her real story began to surface. Her father’s untimely death, her mother’s loss of memory, the way her parents tried to keep her at home in that little town when she needed to go, how she married the West Point man and lived everywhere in the world but Louisiana, how serious financial difficulties visited her family, how she learned to cope. How Grace learned to cope. She told me at one point, thinking back to our high school days, “I always thought of you as having so much”—she paused—“potential.” “But I was so sad.” I said it for her. “Yes,” she agreed. “You had so much going against you.”
Then I told her how I had come to leave Louisiana. “Do you remember Mr. Haley, the Superintendent of Education?” I asked her. Of course, she did. We both went to school with his two sons. “Well, after I finished college, I heard there was a job opening for an English teacher in our old high school. I thought that I needed to stay there in Homer and take care of my father and grandparents and little brother and sister, so I applied for the job. Mr. Haley did the interview himself. He said, ‘Well, Marilyn, your academic record is fine. You are highly qualified for this job.’ Then he looked over his glasses and said, ‘But I’m not going to give it to you.’ Puzzled, I asked him why not. He answered, “Because you need to get out of this town.’ He knew my family, he knew me, and he was right. I practically danced out of that office, I was so relieved.”

Love and wisdom, that’s what that was. And I went on to tell Grace that I had had the good fortune to come across many people who had loved me and guided me along the way—teachers, therapists, friends. What I needed seemed always to appear (though not necessarily as soon as I hoped), and my life had opened up in ways that seemed almost miraculous. I think this is what they mean by grace, I told her. I was coping with grace. Always waiting for the next step to be announced to me—and pushing the boundaries just in case God became a little too passive in my behalf.

And now as I look back on the lives of my mother, my father, my grandparents, I see the themes that have become a part of my own life. From my grandfather, I learned to fear God above all things; from my grandmother, I learned to love God above all things. There has been a shift, though, as the fear of God turned to awe and as the love of God the Heavenly Father has been transmuted to God as Beloved, as Lover, as Partner. I own my grandmother’s old black Bible, I treasure it. Her pencil marks on the verses guide me home: from the Psalmist, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, all that is within me, bless his holy name.” Or Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” All things work together. Well, I guess.

I got to know my mother when I was in my 30’s, just a few years before she died. She was a woman who laughed from deep within, and so taught me about joy, daily and particular joy, in the midst of loss. She taught me about enduring love. She never stopped loving my father to her dying day, and she prayed for years to be together again with her children. At the end, those last few years, she was. And my father? There was never a man who had such a tender heart. He drew all people to him. I’m still trying to learn his humility, his generosity of spirit.

After enough living, enough failures of our own with our own children, I think we come to understand that others make choices because circumstance has conspired against them, as it has against us all, and they do what they know to do. They don’t want to hurt us, never did—but sometimes can’t help it. We see our own experience and temperament push and prod us in directions we don’t always like in ourselves, and yet there you have it: we are who we are, maybe who we were meant to be.

I know of a young woman whose mother told her whenever she did something unworthy: “This will go on your permanent record.” You know, I don’t think there is a “permanent record.” There is only memory and what we make of it. And what we make of it changes as time brings us new experience and the capacity to reinterpret—to re-member, that is, to put together in a new way--our past.

Perhaps memory is simply a kind of redeeming, or of buying back, of the past. Perhaps it is a kind of mandala, a consecrated circle that protects us against evil, a container that has beauty and form and sense to it, a pattern for our own lives. This pattern is ours to create, as the years give substance and form to our deepest longings. It is our witness against history as we heed our call, as we make all things work together for the good.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER
Beloved, we acknowledge our need of your redeeming grace in our lives. The past is tearing at some of us just now, and we know we need to forgive others and to forgive ourselves. The pain of past experiences has too often led us down false paths and into dead-ends. May we allow memory to heal, and may we bless and be blessed as we go through our days.
Amen.


BENEDICTION
As you go from this place of memory today, leave all that would harm, enfold all that would heal. Go in love and in peace.

^{1 Wilson Carey McWilliams, book review of “Memory and Redemption—Mystic Chords of Memory” by Michael Kammen. Commonweal, v. 119n7, April 10, 1992, pp. 20-1.}

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.