When memory attacks

So I suppose this post is a companion piece to this one from almost five years ago.

I'm not sure why -- whether it be the usual stresses of the season, amplified by many pastoral care needs; being rather sick, such that tending those needs becomes unwise or even dangerous; feeling the strain of relationships fading or failing across time and distance; the daily soul-crushing quality of life in 2017; strangely fluctuating weather; or who knows what -- I suddenly started talking about my mother yesterday in a mini-sermon.

We had a "jazz evensong" at the church yesterday afternoon (not really an evensong in the formal sense, but let it go) and, in the spirit of jazz, I concluded my brief reflection should be improvised. I had some basic ideas going in, but I wanted to try to respond to the seasonal tunes played by the quartet in "real time," so to speak.

I'm not fond of unscripted sermons (and I am wildly hacked off by the smug condescension of those preacher-types who insist that memorized sermons are the only way to go; if I'd been able to memorize that much I'd be a singer or actor, or both, and neither musicology nor preaching would ever have crossed my path). The one time I tried to do so, the sermon went twice as long as it should have. And don't even start with that Holy Spirit crap; if the Holy Spirit only "comes upon you" once a week, for an hour on Sunday morning, you seriously need to re-examine your faith.

But, for this occasion, a meditation that was necessarily going to be brief, it seemed worth a shot.

The basics were easy enough to start with -- a lot of popular Xmas tunes (not Christmas carols, but the more secular stuff) have a fairly deep streak of melancholy in them. That led to an o.k. reflection about how this particular season can be deeply painful for some, but in some ways we only harm ourselves if we can't at least acknowledge the grief or sorrow even as we celebrate the joy of the Nativity. Not going to enter it into any preaching contests (especially since it wasn't written down or recorded), but it was, I think, working for the occasion.

Then, suddenly, I was talking about my mother.

You see, she died suddenly twenty-eight years ago today.

I told that story about as much as possible eight years ago, in one of those Facebook notes that I would occasionally write before I discovered blog sites and headed off into the fool's errand of seminary and this regularly-remade blog. I can't say much has changed. As much as I blanch to admit it, there are some years where the anniversary slips by almost unnoticed. Then there are years, like this one, where it smacks me in the face out of nowhere, in the middle of ruminating about melancholy Christmas songs.

I guess I'm caught this time by our relentless drive and unflagging energy to suppress memory that we don't want to recall. We can bury it and push it away and consign it to its place in the murky and unwanted past...until we can't.

Churches do that too, on a much larger scale. We studiously avoid reflecting on the blood on our hands over decades or even centuries, until #metoo or #blacklivesmatter or Roy Moore inevitably shines that infrared or whatever on us that shows the blood we thought we had wiped away ages ago. And it's not just any one branch; mainline church folk owned slaves and oppressed and abused women and settled themselves on land stolen from the native peoples who had lived there for centuries every bit as much as more "evangelical" types did.

Memory is unpredictable. Maybe it's just the not-quite-flu-but-bad-enough bug talking, or other general sources of melancholy, or just the unquenchable need for memory -- even the nasty ones -- to assert itself and force me to look it in the eye and acknowledge its existence, its part-of-me-ness, when I just want to get well and get ready for Sunday. But even if twenty-eight is not a round number, that memory of loss and ongoing absence is claiming my attention this year. I don't quite understand what its plans are for me, as the day winds to its close. But it his here, and it is there, and there is nothing to do but ride through it.