by Jennifer Schnayer, Intern Minister

A sermon given May 27, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Welcome this day to this house of worship.  May we find the space to honor those who have gone before us today, and may their legacy be one that brings our hope for a better world to life.  Come, let us worship together.

 A couple of years ago I was at dinner with a colleague of mine.  We weren’t very well acquainted yet and toward the beginning of the evening he asked me this question:  “What is your first memory?”  Not a question I had been asked over dinner before, but as you might imagine, by the end of the meal, we had discovered a great deal about one another.

What is your first memory?

My first memory is of saying goodbye.  I was probably around three and I remember running from the front of my house to my bedroom, climbing onto the bed and then standing tiptoe so that I could see out the window.  I was hoping to catch one last glimpse of my neighbor friend.  She was my closest playmate, and she and her mom had just come over to our house to say goodbye.  They were moving away.

When they left our house, I ran to the window to watch my young friend and her mom make their way back to their house and get into their car.  I watched as the car drove away, watched until I couldn’t see them anymore.  My first goodbye and the first time someone in my life would leave and not come back.

Standing alone in my room so many years ago, I did not understand what goodbye meant.  I was learning about it as I stood there.

Our memories shape who we are and who we are becoming.  Memories can keep us trapped with fear or warmed by a sense of well being.  Our memories bring us both pain and pleasure—life in all its richness is poured out with the benefit and sometimes the curse of hindsight.

But what is memory?  Memories are the images and impressions we have about people and events.  And memory is also the act of recalling what we have learned.  Memories are not the events themselves, but our impressions of them.

Every time I meet with a family to prepare for a memorial service, I am aware that something new is being created in that moment.  Everyone shares stories about the person who has died.  Right then, a part of the person’s life is being resurrected as they are recalled by others.  The connections we create in our lives, either through families and friends or through the legacy of our works, live on from generation to generation.  What survives death is how we related to our world.

A friend of mine tells a story about her father’s death.  At the end of his life, the family gathered around him—his wife, two sons, daughter and grandchildren.  They spent time together talking with him and caring for him while he was dying.  One day during that time, my friend and one of her brothers were talking about the loss of their father and what it meant for each of them.  My friend said to her brother, “I will miss him so much, but I will always treasure the memories of our childhood.  It is good that we will always be able to remember those happy times.”

“Happy times?”  Her brother responded.  “What do you mean happy times?  I had a terrible childhood.  Where were you?”  He told her stories about what his childhood had been like.  His pain, grief and anger shocked my friend as she listened to what her brother was telling her.

That day opened her eyes, and also deepened her relationship with her brother.  Over the months and years that have followed, both have been able to hear each other’s memories and feelings.  They understand each other and their family in new ways.  She told me her own memories were changed forever on the day her brother shared with her the pain of his childhood.  She still has her happy memories, but she understands more about her father and her family, understands more about what created those memories.

The construct of our memory is malleable, changeable and flawed.  It can also be a wellspring of strength, hope and courage.  However we remember, our reflections are in constant change.

Those who live through the same event will often have different recollections, because each person brings to the events in their lives their own perspective and their own experiences.  Memories are intensely private and personal creations.  We recall what is true for us.  Contradictory views can be held by two people who experienced the very same event.  It may be that the reality of the events neither person grasps, or both their views are equally valid, or one person’s memory is not related to the reality of the event at all.  But regardless of the factual accuracy of our memories, there is no refuting that they can be compelling truths for the people who hold those recollections in their heart and mind.  This can be frustrating for other people involved because those recollections may not accurately reflect a particular event or relationship.

Earlier this week, I was talking about this with a member of our congregation.  I’ll call her Mary.  She told me a story.  I asked her if I could share her story with you today.

When Mary was nine years old, she and her family went on a trip.  While she was away, her young friend—an eight-year-old-girl—was hit by a car and killed while she was crossing the street.  The accident and funeral both happened while Mary and her family were away on vacation.  For years she regretted being away—missing her friend’s funeral and her chance to say goodbye with everyone else from her school.

Years later, she told her mom about her feelings.  How she wished they hadn’t been on vacation, how it was hard for her that she hadn’t been to her friend’s funeral.  Her mother got really upset when Mary told this story and said, “Mary, that was the last time we were with my father while he was alive.  That trip is filled with wonderful, important memories for me.  We were together as a family for the last time.”

Nine-year-old Mary hadn’t remembered that aspect of their vacation, and mom had not remembered this was the same time when her daughter’s friend was killed.  Both have a new sense of that trip, and a better understanding of what it mean for the other.  The same vacation—but completely different memories.

Our memories are our own.  And until we share them, and make an effort to hear the recollections of others, our own understanding of the world will be a singular and truncated vision of the past.  Since our own view is limited, I believe we must make an effort to expand our vision and understanding of creation.  Our view cannot end at the edges of our own lives and the lives of those we know.

I remember someone telling me about what it was like when his father abandoned their family.  He was a teenager at the time and began talking with his friends about his family; he realized that the violence and rage that happened in his house were not happening in their houses.  He began to look outside his family for models of how he might be in the world.  He listened to other people talk about their childhoods and families, and sought out healthier models.  He tried to imagine a better way to be a family and tried to discover ways to be a respectful participant in the relationships he created.  We do not have to be paralyzed if our memories bring with them a legacy of pain:  we can listen to the stories of others—really listen, with our hearts open.  We can learn from others what is possible.  Hearing about experiences other than our own can help us to find ways to disentangle ourselves from destructive patterns and gain a better perspective.  We can learn a new way of living.

Memory, with its beautiful, creative and imperfect message, is one of the most vital aspects of human life.  In his work with human development, Erik Erikson brought forward the notion of generativity:  for Erikson, the adult years brought not only the desire and responsibility to generate and nurture our children, but also brought the human urge to create and make better whatever one has engendered . . . be it a project, a skill or some contribution to the society at large.  These impulses to nurture the following generation and to create a legacy of our own come to life within the context of human community.  Erikson believed that we organized ourselves in communities in order to ground our lives with communal traditions and to expand the tools and resources we have to meet the needs of the next generation.  The collective resource of human communities reassures us and gives us a greater sense of stability—a greater trust and faith in life.[1]

I was reminded recently of the traditions and tools that are alive in my own memory that serve to reassure me as I live my life.

As many of you know, my husband was in an automobile accident a few months ago.  My mother came to stay with us for seven weeks—first to take care of Stuart so I could come back to work, and then to help me settle some of those countless details that arise when accidents occur.  My Portland-area colleagues were amazed that I was breezing along with my mom, her two dogs, my husband and I all living in my two-bedroom apartment.  How is it going?  They asked.  How are you handling having your mom stay with you for so many weeks?

From my perspective, it was an all-around relief.  Their surprise with my lack of distress about my full house really confused me.  Until I remembered the house I grew up in.  When I was small, my mom, dad and I lived in the back of my grandparents’ house.  There were three bedrooms altogether—and mom and dad, grandma, grandpa, great-grandma and I all called this place home.  Of course!  Having Mom and her two dogs stay with us was just the way we do things in my family!

But intergenerational households are not the norm in today’s middle class, white American lifestyle.  So my colleagues were reasonably interested in my easygoing attitude and I, reasonably, felt at home.  I was just doing things the way we do things in my family.  It was reassuring to turn to those old, familiar ways of being in the midst of a crisis.  But what is a natural tool in my own life is not necessarily familiar to anyone else.  (My husband might have some ideas about this, actually!)

We are first and foremost in our own orbit—wrestling with our own experiences and coming to find meaning and our place in the world.  It is with great effort that we lift ourselves above the fray of our own communities and our own lives and families to see and try to understand the experiences of others.  One of the ways we learn to look beyond ourselves and out toward others is by participating in other communities:  churches, unions, teams, classes—all of these tie us together in a different way than our family ties.

Our memories of the communities we are a part of can solidify our faith and give us a feeling of common destiny.  There is a sense of security that comes from these communities.  Groups larger than the ever-shrinking family can reassure us in the midst of life’s struggle.

As a religious body, I believe one of our central tasks is to maintain a community of memory.  When we share our stories and the rituals of our religious heritage we are strengthening our faith and helping our common vision to grow.  While trust and faith are an aspect of all of our memories, they are especially compelling when we consider the collective memory of a religious community.

As Unitarian Universalists, we embrace a pluralistic approach to religious understanding.  We believe that each one of us is compelled to search the religious wisdom of the world, as well as our own experience, and from that exploration develop a religious understanding that will sustain and uphold our moral life.  This is our practice, which means that human experience lies at the center of our faith.

Our religious understanding gives equal value to our own stories as to the stories of our tradition.  The place of power we extend to our own lives and experiences means that memory plays a central role in our religious understanding.  How we understand our lives and our willingness to look past the confines of our own existence to be present to the broader experience of creation is vital to our religious life.

Our church in downtown Oakland, California runs a homeless shelter.  It all started several yeas ago when they were approached by a group asking them to house a homeless shelter one night a week—different churches in the area rotated serving as the shelter site.  Over time, fewer and fewer churches were still participating in the shelter, and finally the UU church was serving as the shelter site daily.  The church was really not set up to provide such services.  They had no shower facility.  They had no way to provide ongoing phone service for those in the shelter.  And some people in the church didn’t want to have their church building used in this way; they were concerned about a myriad of problems:  security issues, the way the building smelled, the bugs.  But over time, people in the congregation began to look past their own experience.  They began to see beyond the confines of their own lives.  They began to have relationships with the people who were homeless.  And the people they used to not see when they walked down the street to church were now people that they knew and could call by name.

Then the San Francisco earthquake hit.  Their building was damaged.  When FEMA came through to ask what all went on in their building, they checked the social services box, because of the shelter.  The church got enough money from FEMA to pay for a major remodel of their building—complete with showers and other necessities to service the city’s homeless people.  In Oakland, the UU church has a full-service shelter today because when a devastating earthquake struck the bay area, they had been working to serve the city’s homeless.  Their work in the community was part of their institutional memory, part of who they were.

Memory—personal and collective—is one of the tools we have been given by the previous generations to connect us to one another, through time and space.  These memories can help to ground our faith and inform our work in the wider world.  It is from a strong foundation that we can become agents of transformation in the world.  When we are open to our collective stories, and when we are empowered by our imagination to consider what we might be, then we can begin to bring to life the world that we hope for—the one alive in our minds and perhaps in the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before us.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life and Sustainer of all of Creation, we give thanks for the gift of memory this day.  May we have the wisdom to use it with care and an open heart.  We know that memory is a precious gift—death and illness and injury can rob us of our memories.  Help us to find peace when our memories fail us, and be with us as we care for those we love who might not remember us.  Give us the courage and compassion to hear the memories of others with care.  Help us to be a community of memory and hope—one that seeks to be present to and honor the truth of the memories each of us carries.  May we find a way for the stories of creation to heal our world and bring us peace.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now and know that today we are creating memories of the future.  May peace, compassion and justice abound in all that we do.  Go in love and go with hope.

[1] For information in this paragraph, I am indebted to Charles Gerkin, An Introduction to Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1977) p. 187.

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Copyright 2001, Jennifer Schnayer.  All rights reserved.