To Remember

This Thursday, April 9, marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, the symbolic end of the Civil War. As happens with many significant dates, people across our country will pause to remember this hopeful ending to a tragic time in our nation’s history. To commemorate that day, the National Park Service has invited churches, temples, schools, city halls, public buildings, historic sites, and others to ring bells across the nation as a gesture to mark the end of the bloody conflict in which more than 750,000 Americans perished. The plan is that bells are to be rung for four minutes, beginning precisely at 3:15 p.m. EDT.

Why should we bother to mark this particular date? The Park Service suggests that communities and individuals will ring their bells for a number of reasons, such as in celebration of freedom of a restored Union, as an expression of mourning for the fallen, or to mark the beginning of reconciliation and reconstruction that began after that great war.

But why do we want to commemorate something like this? After all, the Civil War is ancient history, inglorious history that we shudder to remember. Edmund Burke would tell us that we must remember because, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Mark Twain said it a bit differently: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

One of the challenges of history is that its rhyming power can paralyze us, a PTSD of the nation’s soul. Whether it’s the Civil War, the Viet Nam Conflict, or a terrible battle with our spouse, as we remember the offenses of another against us, we struggle to be able to move forward. Yet as Lewis Smedes reminds us, “Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.”

As we create a new way of remembering, we can look at what we’ve done, what someone else has done, and determine to move in a different direction. But we can also hold onto the hope of reconciliation, the reminder that the work of re-union can occur, that both a nation and a relationship can be healed. As our country experienced, it can never be the same, but it can move on.

Yet it is not only the horrors of history that we choose to remember. We remember our first kiss, our first puppy, our first home and the birth of our first grandchild. As we sit in a darkened theater, we remember the first movie we went to see [Emil and the Detectives], and as we inhale the scent of baby powder, we are returned in memory to those early days of parenthood, with its immeasurable delight and unimaginable exhaustion.

As we consider the role of memory, we recognize the dual gifts of sorrow and joy, warning and encouragement. Whether in our communal history or in our personal life story, joy and peace never stand alone. They always stand in contrast to the grief of loss and the horrors of conflict. It is a truth we cannot escape.

And so it is with faith. In his Holy Week hymn composed in 1707, Isaac Watts wrote of the sorrow and love that “flow mingled down” at the cross. In our remembering, we repeat the ancient words and rituals that have marked the walk of faith for centuries. We taste the wine and bread, we whisper the well-worn prayers, and we sing of the sacred head now wounded and of the old rugged cross. “Do this in remembrance of me” lives on in our devotion. We were not there but we remember. We do not fully comprehend but we believe.

A century and a half after the Civil War threatened to tear our nation asunder, we will ring a bell on April 9^th and remember. And on this weekend of holy remembering, twenty centuries after a crucifixion took place on a Jerusalem hill, we will stand with our brothers and sisters to proclaim, “I remember.” Alleluia!