La Memoire Collective

Every once in a while, a book will stir a very specific memory.

It's not a common occurrence, even if you read relentlessly, but when it happens, it's a delight.  What I mean when I say this is simple:  you're in the middle of a story and carried along with the flow of it, when all of a sudden the author describes something you know.  It could be a particular type of car, or a very specific place you know personally.  All of a sudden, your story and the story being told intersect with one another, and you say, "Hey, I know that place!"

Like last year, in the opening chapters of an ultimately pretty mediocre fantasy/horror novel, the protagonist went on a date, and took his soon-to-be paramour to one of my favorite special-occasion restaurants in the DC area.  "Hey," I said, "they're going to L'Auberge!"

I'm deep into a re-read of Thomas Merton's spiritual memoir THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, which I last read thirty years ago.  I was in my late twenties, and in the fierce first throes of exploring my calling to ministry, and I remember finding Merton's journey of spiritual discovery profoundly resonant and delightfully written.

I'm in my late fifties now, and I find myself resonating to Merton just as deeply, but differently.   He wrote the book when he was in his early thirties, meaning it rises from a soul of roughly the same vintage as I was when I first encountered him.   

Now, his writing still delights, but I'm essentially encountering it anew.  Of course I am.  More years have passed between my first reading and now than I'd lived when I first read the book.  My recollection of it is like my memory of a place I might have visited for a few days three decades ago.  Meaning, a scattering of sense impressions and visual images, and very few specific memories.

On one particular page, the memory of that first reading came rushing back, along with a wash of other memories.  It was from Merton's description of the death of his father, and the subsequent funeral:

Tom got an obituary printed in the Times, and he saw to it that the funeral went off more or less decently: but it was still another one of those cremations.  This time it was at Golders Green.  The only difference was that the minister said more prayers, and the chapel looked a little more like a chapel, and Tom had got them to hide the coffin under a very beautiful shroud of silk from the Orient somewhere, China or Bali or India.

But in the end they took the shroud off and rolled the coffin through one of those sliding doors and then, in the sinister secrecy of the big, intricate crematory, out of our sight, the body was burned, and we went away.

When I was a boy of twelve, I lived fifty yards from where Merton's father was cremated.  

If you stood at our front door, and looked slightly to the left from the little semi-detached we were renting in London, you'd see the grounds of the Golders Green Crematorium cattycorner across Meadway Gate.  It was an elegant brick building, subtle towers and arches standing stark behind a brick wall on Hoop Lane, with memorial gardens tastefully nestled behind the main structure.  I'd pass it whenever I walked to the Tube, or was coming back from taking the double decker bus from St. John's Wood on days I had after school band practice at the American School in London.  I'd see the memorial gardens when I took the walking path to the Hampstead Heath extension, and the place always seemed beautiful in a sad sort of way.

"Hey," I'd said once and said again, "I know that place."

I recalled, thirty years ago, marvelling that Merton had spent a meaningful moment in a place that I knew intimately.   As a young man, it stirred memories of when I was a boy.  As a middle-aged man?  It was a peculiar metamnemonic moment, a memory of my own act of remembering, mingled with the remembered story of another soul.

Human memory is not like stored data, but ever in flux, shared in such gloriously imprecise and idiosyncratic ways, layered and relayered with feeling and image and meaning.  

Take Up And Read

My annual week at the beach is now just a warm hum in my memory and a faint umber in my flesh.  Beyond the playing in sand and surf, the beach has always meant one thing to me: reading.

This year, my seven days at the beach involved reading, and a blessed break from the march of churchy books I've been reading for my doctorate.  It five novels, around 1,500 pages or so of storytelling goodness.  

Three of the novels were recent offerings from the publisher that, God willin' and the crick don't rise, will soon be working with me on getting my own novel to print.

Those were intimidating, at first, serious books written by clearly gifted authors.  I'm going to be in the company of these folks?  Sure, I've self-published and ePublished.  But looking at that stack of books, hardbacks one and all, was peculiar.  They bore the labels from the library, that place of deep magic remembered from childhood.  I felt a bit like a clueless, as-yet-unsorted muggle-born, wandering into Hogwarts and gawking at the towering, godlike seventh-years as they bent reality to their whims.  

It took me four days to read them, and then I moved to one I'd loaded onto my Kindle.  It was by Stephen King, just because, well, it had been a while.  Darned fine yarn, as it so happened.  And the last was one my wife had read on my Kindle, and came with her recommendation.  It did not disappoint.

I inhaled them, as I do with books, as I always have.  I breathe them in, and whole days disappear as I lose myself in the worlds they create.

What struck me, as I packed up my books from a week of intense, blissful reading, was the book that I had brought and not read.  I'd brought my study bible, as I do, everywhere I go.  But I'd not cracked it, nor had I been tempted to crack it.

It's not that I haven't read it recently, of course, or that I don't read it as part of my usual weekly discipline.  Reading and studying scripture is a part of my every week, as I first meditate over the selected readings, seeking one that seems to resonate or harmonize with my soul and the things of the world.  I refresh my understanding of a text, reading through commentaries in preparation for interpreting it in worship.   I find that fascinating, because the text--as the Spirit moves in it--is always different in different contexts.  It's why, after over ten years of interpreting from the many and various books of the Bible, I still find the process of preparing the Sunday sermon a life-giving place.  It is a task I enjoy, like the good feel of a well-made tool in your hand, or the good sweat that comes from working the earth when preparing for a planting.

But what struck me, in that week of reading other stories, was just how important it is to know other tales.  Bringing the ancient and sacred texts of our tradition alive requires an immersion in other stories--in books, in film, in the stories shared by those around us.  Relating those living stories to that life-giving story, understanding that dance, that exchange?

It makes that One Story--the one we know, and in which we are free to participate--more meaningful, more filled with purpose.