This weekend, I attended a small memorial service at my church.
It wasn't for a member, but was instead a gathering of members of a local organization whose purpose is to remember the lynchings inflicted on Black folk in the Jim Crow South. Poolesville, Maryland isn't in the South physically, but it sure was the South culturally back in the day.
The last lynching in Montgomery County was right out front of my church, as it happened, of a young man named George Peck. That 1880 murder is memorialized by a marker that sits right out front of my congregation's community garden. So to remember the anniversary of his killing and the history of racial violence in America, a little group gathered in the warmth of our sanctuary on a bitter and rainy January afternoon.
My task was nothing more than to support the gathered group, so after opening the space up, turning on heat and lights, and welcoming the organizers to our sacred space, I was done. After that, all I had to do was just sit and listen and reflect.
As friends from the community talked about the importance of remembering, and how vital it is that human beings not forget the past, I was struck by several things.
First, that so much of the language being used about the necessity of holding on to the past felt oddly...conservative. I mean, this was a gathering of Card Carrying Progressives, without question, but so much of the language was about acknowledging those who had come before, about memory, about the truths that can only be grasped if we connect with our history. As the civil rights movement was discussed, the folks gathered affirmed those who had come before, honoring their memory, their efforts, and their culture.
This is, again, a conservative thing, a holding on to what is good in the face of regime propaganda that wants us to forget anything bad ever happened ever. It's an odd inversion.
Second, the tenor and the focus of the conversation resonated off of our cultural struggles to maintain our attention and hold on to a cohesive sense of self. We are being wired differently now, trained to exist only in the ephemeral moment, to think and act without reflection. It isn't just that we forget the long deep tragic story of human history. We forget things we ourselves have experienced, and the continuity of our essential personhood becomes hazed with a cloud of dopamine and cortisone.
It's like being trapped forever as a sophomore in high school, as a "wise fool" who has intelligence but lacks the context necessary to apply it. We flit from moment to moment, good little malleable consumers, both ungrounded and purposeless, here a little, there a little, but never understanding.
If a people are separated from their history, if they are torn from their sense of place and a relationship to past, present, and future, it sabotages their souls.
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