If Memory Serves

Matthew 12.43-45

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it comes, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So will it be also with this evil generation.

When our son David decided he would study geology in college, I gave him fair warning. “We are Arts and Letters people. We write poems about rocks; we don’t actually know much about them.” It was not long into his pursuit when he saw the light and switched to history. I have no dispute with science, nor am I a flat-landed luddite trying to prove the six-day creation or discover the resting place of Noah’s ark. Evolution is fine with me; I am not bothered by Darwin or Oppenheimer, the later was worried enough for himself.

No. We need science, enjoy science every day. Although I believe my computer is a magic typewriter, I am sure there is actual technology at work that makes the words appear and disappear. Yet, I do have a bone to pick or point to make, and it is a rather Epicurean one, or Jesus’ point better still. Science values emptiness, the absence of the observer, the elimination of possibility, and worse still objectivity. To create the germ-free, to eliminate the outlier, this is a persistent goal of the scientific experiment. This is a problem.

I can see the value it adds, to reduce the variables to study one thing in particular has led to some rather important strides in medicine. The trial which leads to confidence in a drug, a treatment, a procedure needs to be as free as possible from bias. Double-blind is an ideal. Yet, I must attest, that all of this objectivity has created a terrible distance. The desire for certainty and distance from what is observed has left us rather unpoetic.

By and large Americans are not a poet loving people. The best we do is sing along to rather crass pop lyrics or recite the one poem and only poem we were forced to memorize in the ninth grade. And the challenge of this lack of poetic appreciation does not come clear very often. We can do our jobs without the sonnet; we can communicate our thoughts without quoting Dickinson. (I can’t, but this makes me odd.)

Indeed, we value the “straight talk” we are people who “just want the facts” we need to “cut to the chase.” And again, if you are working to produce a budget or finance a deal then Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself may be out of place as a line item in a profit and loss statement. Shakespeare really doesn’t have a bottom line, only a fourteenth line of iambic pentameter which rhymes with the thirteenth line.

We don’t see the absence of poetry or feel the need for it until life ends or begins; we don’t search for the poetic expression in the office, but we do at the graveside, the exchange of vows, the graduation, and celebration. Here poetry peeks from behind the skyscrapers of industry and the tall towers of academic objectivity to gasp a word or two. This is what

Dickinson was trying to say, to proclaim: his name is Arcturus; I don’t want to be the clover bells who forget butterfly; I do not want count stamens or account for genetic design.

Yet, her greatest claim or protest, for this is protest poetry, her great claim is this: look to beauty before death and tragedy robs you of true power, the power to be in awe. Ramble hills and know this time is flying by, speeding to a revealing we would rather conceal. To know, what we call science, has value and importance, but if you do not remember from whence you came and unto where you go, then the brief masquerade will have lacked delight and song and fullness.

I read this poem at my grandmother’s funeral. I read it mostly for the last line:

My grandmother was naughty. No one who knew her would dispute that. She taught me how to cuss, play cards and drink wine as all good grandmothers should. The first part of her eulogy I described the cast iron skillet she gave me; how she was like the fierce, porous, seasoned place where the sustenance of life was made and offered. I recounted how she me was unimpressed that I moved to Princeton to study leaving her so far behind. She called me on the phone, angry. “Freddy, come home,” she demanded, “you’re smart enough. Come home.”

Yet, mostly what I spoke of at her death was how she showed me the way back to life, how to fill the emptiness grief can create, how being stoic or indifferent or objective is a horrible way to live. Mostly, though, in her I saw a way of waiting for memory to return.

That is what Jesus says to the Pharisees with his terrible parable of the way life can become worse. We can become purified through strength of will or rendered empty by loss, but if we seek to live that way, all is lost. Clean the room, clear the deck, empty the attic, of course. But don’t live in empty rooms. Don’t put the flowers under glass or the butterfly in the cabinet; find heaven within you and do not confuse the kingdom of God with the distance of stars.

My grandmother was emptied by tragedy. Although not her first loss or hardship, the tragic death of her son gutted her. The woman who was larger than life, shouted terrible things at drivers and laughed with too much abandon and always had a poker game to go to, this woman became lost. She grieved for years; she wore sadness. And I carried her grief with me because I tried to make sense of it. On the day her son took his life, she asked me, “why, why Freddy, why my little boy?”

Her sorrow, the heart made empty, persisted until she could remember joy, remember love, see beauty. I will never forget the moment I saw this. We were dancing in a driveway to Nat King Cole; it was a party. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t proclaim or confess or describe her path back to life, it was in her eyes. I could see the goodness of life once again in her eyes.

I read the Emily Dickinson poem to her friends and neighbors at her funeral, and I am sure very few could make any sense of what I said, but that’s the beauty of poetry. It is not to make sense; it is to conjure memory. In her eyes as we danced, I could see she remembered she was “his little girl –/ Old fashioned! naughty! everything!” Her memory was restored; love waits to lift you “over the stile of pearl.”

Poetry, at its best, is meant to conjure the memory of being beloved, being a child of God, being one with creation. This child lives in each of us. So often, though, we are removed from the joy of life, the freedom of peace. Poetry can describe this distance too, reveal the weight of absence. Yet, in the end, if poetry doesn’t fill you, restore you, then it has simply made things worse.

In recent years I have struggled with the 9-ll memorial. I have struggled with its emptiness. Just before the site of the tragedy was closed for construction, I walked the path of sorrow along the scaffolding leading to the crater, this must have been 2002. I walked past the shrines made for the lost, the prayers and mementoes and pictures and flowers and candles that were left by broken hearts. It was as if they were trying to fill up the emptiness, the pit in them that was being excavated and removed of debris just like the site.

The shrine that is there now, the empty space with water falling into darkness, I get it. It certainly evokes very strong emotions and is a very poignant image of loss. And for the generations to come who were born after this moment, it will certainly make an impression. In some ways it is reminiscent of the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. No images, just names; the smooth granite allows your reflection to appear in the right quality of light and thus wed you to the lost; you are invited to be with them.

My struggle with the empty shrine is the emptiness. In the midst of life, death and loss and tragedy empty us. Long times of suffering and grief rob the beauty of our soul and we eat bitter bread and drink vinegar instead of wine. And then we don’t. We begin to heal.

Healing is not forgetting tragedy, nor is accepting tragedy. It is never finding something good in it. Healing, being restored, is having the joy of life return to our eyes; it’s is remembering we are a child of God, freed and forgiven and that is enough to dance, “to dance beneath diamond skies with one hand waving free; silhouetted by sea; where are memory and fate are driven deep beneath the waves.”

What I hope for as we move forward is that we find the fullness of life. This is what is so hard to find, so hard to trust. I heard a nun speak of this once. She suffered a great tragedy. What she spoke about distance and healing are words that are ever with me. She talked of a church bell, a massive church bell. In the mother house of her order there is a massive church bell and when it is rung, struck, the sound is deafening; it is terrible and painful. Up close all you can hear is violence. This to her was the experience of loss, the violence that can come to us and do great harm.

And then she said, but if you go out into the country, if you gain distance, go out beyond the city, the farm fields, and hear the bell from a distance, the beauty is overwhelming, the depth of life is sounded, you can hear the love of God. It is the distance that creates the moment to be filled. Up close the sound was violent; at a distance, the sound becomes beauty.

To make her words clear she made sure the distance was not forgetting, the distance she felt was not that she no longer remembered the tragedy that hurt her. She will never forget the tragedy. The distance was the moment where she remembered to love, to laugh, to be filled with song. If memory serves us well, like poetry, it restores the soul, and we remember we are a child of God to be lifted over the stile of pearl. Amen.