I Need to Forget: But What If Machines Won't Let Me?

“To be able to forget means sanity.” --Jack London

Some things I need to forget. I want to forget.

The name and the memory of the bully who terrorized me in the 8^th grade. I’d love to let that go.  The moment my heart got broken by someone I loved when she told me she no longer loved me. That still hurts almost twenty years later. The second a car smashed into the side of a vehicle I was a passenger in; the slow motion memory of glass shattering and then the eerie silence, save for the “tick, tick tick” of the motor now stilled. Just calling that memory forth again makes me shudder. It’s not that I could ever really, really fully forget those painful memories but time and a self- protective psyche has done a pretty good job of that for me. I’m thankful I can forget.

Because some things I need to forget. I want to forget. 

My grocery list for last Tuesday: soup, bread, gummi bears and masking tape.  No reason to retain that clutter. I do not want to remember the sharp insult a friend hurled my way last week, a cold word he quickly regretted. To move on and forgive him, I need to forget.  The name of the man who wrote the theme song for the “Gilligan’s Island” TV show—Sherwood Schwartz, of course!  Save for my weekly trivia match, why hang on to that memory morsel?

To remember. To forget. 

This is what makes us human.  To live and accumulate the memories of life, memories that pile up like so much baggage in the brain.  To live and let go of memories: because they are too hard or too random or too tender or too disposable. I am grateful for memory. Of that there is no doubt. Memory makes me, me. Memory reminds to be thankful to God for all I’ve been blessed to experience. Memories of yesterday give me context to understand today.

And so, I thank God for the memory of my very first kiss with Lisa, in the eighth grade…the memory of the June day I said goodbye to my beloved grandfather, stood by his grave and wept as my niece placed her hand on my back and comforted me…the memory of my very first baptism, thirty years ago, how I clutched with care that tiny little life in my embrace. But so too I thank God I can forget.  Pain. Trauma. Mistakes. Embarrassments. Shame.

Here’s the odd thing about remembering and forgetting in 2020. In the digital age, collectively and individually, we can remember more now than ever before in human existence.  Remembering is now done for us. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook collectively store and remember more than 1,200 petabytes of cultural and personal memory. Text messages and emails and news and videos and photos and books and public records: anything that can be digitized.

How much memory is thus remembered?

Just one petabyte equals 20 million four drawer filing cabinets filled with text or 10 billion photos. Fifty petabytes equals the entire written works of humankind from the beginning of recorded history. So, even if we don’t want to remember, we kind of have no choice.  Machines do it for us.

Forget something? A name? A song? A past action? Pull out the phone and google it or retrieve a long ago photo or look up a decades old news story or dig out of storage an email you wrote twenty years ago.  In a very real way, we can’t forget now, and like all radical shifts in human and technological development, that’s potentially great and cool and that’s really weird and troubling.

It makes me wonder: when machines remember for us, will we eventually forget how to tell stories to each other? Spend less time at family reunions or the local bar or over dinner, sharing memories in our own voices? At church, will we eschew an oral tradition of preaching and teaching, and instead just pass around a hand held tablet? When machines remember for us, is it impossible for us to ever escape our past, to jettison that which we’d rather just not remember, and wish the world would forget too?  When machines remember for us, will we let them decide what the most important memories are in our lives, what memories to hold onto, what memories to erase?  

When machines remember for us, will we be able to exercise that most basic of God-given human rights and humans needs? To sometimes just forget. Here’s a challenge: think on that question but do so without any machine assistance. Instead use your mind, use your thoughts and use your memories.

To remember. To forget.  Who decides?

     

             

 

   

   

Why Must We Grieve Sometimes? Because We Dare To Love.

“Grief never ends. But it changes. It is a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness nor a lack of faith: it is the price of love.”               --Queen Elizabeth I

February is a cruel month. 

At least for me, when it comes to grief, that most human and haunting and heartbreaking and humbling of emotions. Grief: the sad and sharp feeling of losing someone that you love. We all grieve. It is inescapable, like the chill winds of February. 

Seven years ago, on February 14^th , my dear friend and mentor Sue, died at 68; two days later on the 16th, my kind and gentle cousin Kathy, died at 49; and then six years later, twelve months ago, my beloved co-worker Jose, died at 60 on the 17^th.  All succumbed to cancer. All left this world and the life of their loved ones and my life, much too soon.

So, now when I get to this time of the year, I stumble a bit in my grief. Walk through the door at church expecting to see Jose sitting at the front desk with a big smile to greet me, but she is not there. I run into a huge work problem and I still want to pick up the phone to call Sue for help, but, of course, there is no one at the other end to answer. Or I see Kathy’s photo appear on my Facebook timeline and I wonder how her kids are doing, her husband and siblings and Mom too. They miss her so, so much.

That’s the thing about grief. It is at once so personal and intimate. No one can tell me how to grieve nor can I tell you how to grieve. Grief and how we experience it, how we live in and through it; like a fingerprint, it is unique, one of a kind. I grieve by going quiet. I grieve mostly alone, lost in memory and gratitude and sometimes even regret. Did I tell her enough times how much she made my life so good? Did I thank her enough for how she so shaped who I am today?

But grief is also that most shared of human realities. Death never takes a holiday.  We are all created by our infinite God as finite beings, each of us marked with a personal end date, known only by our Creator, and so everyone we love, and me and you too: we will all die one day. That’s not morbid. That is fact.

To want to avoid death and grief—of course we desire this and yet: to grieve means we loved another. To grieve means we are challenged to look at the quality of the one life we live right now. Are we fully alive to this one God given day? Right now? To grieve can push us to live with more courage and more appreciation for the next breath we take, and the next gorgeous sunrise we witness on a cold and clear morning, and the next hug we receive from a tiny toddler or an aging parent or an old friend.  What if that was our last embrace?

Let not this precious life pass me by!

Grief can bring out sloppy and thoughtless theology and faith claims. Take it from me, one who does grief and death and dying for a living. So, no, your loved one did not die because God “needed another angel”. God is not thus so calculating or cruel or mean. And please don’t tell me that my loved one is in “a better place”.  That may be so, but while those seeming words of assurance might comfort you, do not assume they will help me, the bereaved. You see--I still want them to be in this place.

Some advice: when you are called upon to comfort one who mourns, always speak less and listen more. Be a sure and steady presence. Allow for the quiet between two souls. Ask open ended questions. How can I help? What can I do? A hot casserole and a kind card and a bunch of flowers and a phone call to check in are always ever so much better than spiritual platitudes or unthinking religious clichés. 

Yet so too, at its best, faith can help us in the grieving process. Me? I imagine Sue and Kathy and Jose are now somehow, somewhere, beyond the pale, yet still cheering me on in my one life, eternal witnesses to all of the living and to all those whom they loved. I absolutely know that they live on in the lives of those who loved them. People may die. Love never dies. I imagine that each of us has a little piece of infinity within, a spark that will continue on in the universe, forever.

And so, we will all grieve at some time, maybe even right now, this February. My prayer for all who mourn is this: may you know comfort. May you know kindness. May you weep fully. May you laugh at cherished stories. May you walk on, even as you are aware that someone is missing.

To grieve it to be human. To grieve is to remember one unshakable truth. We loved. We were loved. We must still love.

   

In An Age of Political Contempt: Dare We Love Our Enemy?

Contempt (noun) 1. The act of despising  2. lack of respect or reverence for something [or someone]                 

--Merriam-Webster.com

As prayer breakfasts go, well, it wasn’t very prayerful.   

I speak of last week’s National Prayer Breakfast, an annual gathering of more than 3,000 guests in the nation’s capital, first started in 1951, and ostensibly hosted by the President of the United States. Participants include members of the United States Congress and the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps in Washington, D.C., and invited guests from all over the world, along with religious leaders. The expectation at the breakfast is that those in attendance will be non-partisan, mutually supportive, ecumenical and yes, civil to each other.

Oh, if that had been only so.    

First the overcooked part of the event, the burnt toast you might say. Apparently so caught up in being giddy about his day-before acquittal on two articles of impeachment by the United States Senate, the current occupant of the Oval Office—well, he kind of missed the whole “prayerful” thing. You know, love one another. Love your neighbor. The usual God stuff. 

Anyhooo—in the midst of all that prayerfulness and orange juice, the commander in chief skewered and insulted two attendees for their practices of faith. One was critiqued for voting his God informed conscience on impeachment, the other lambasted for daring to say she prays for the President.  Which makes me wonder—maybe it’s time to put up huge signs in the breakfast ballroom—like, “PLEASE BE NICE!” or “LET’S ALL SING KUM BAH YA!” or “FREE HUGS!!” To remind all those religious bigwigs and politicians that the breakfast is supposed to be a contempt free zone, a once a year event with the crazy hope of bringing folks together in the name of God. 

Yup, there’s that pesky God again. Always getting in the way of human contempt.   

Thankfully, Arthur Brooks, a social scientist and faculty member at Harvard University, gave the keynote speech that morning: “America’s Crisis of Contempt”. Talk about great timing! Brooks’ thesis is simple: in his words, “…polarization is tearing our society apart.” He continues: “In the words of the 19^th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is ‘the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.’ In politics today we treat each other as worthless, which is why our fights are so bitter and cooperation feels nearly impossible.”

Be it a Presidential contemptuous tweet or a nationally televised speech shredding moment, we don’t have to look too far to realize how spot on Brooks’ analysis is about the current state of how the folks we elect talk to each other, see each other, and treat each other. How we as citizens, too, can do the same things to our neighbors, if they dare to be in a different place than us on the political or social spectrum.

Brooks suggests a simple solution from his religious tradition—actually it’s not so simple, nor easy to practice. It’s radical. Here’s the advice: love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. And always answer contempt with love. Not more contempt. Not hate. Not violence. Not dismissiveness or anger.

Just love. Always love. Who’d a thunk it!?

I wonder if Brooks’ speech was met with thunderous self-congratulatory applause or some polite claps and nervous coughs.  I wonder if when Brooks lamented our current atmosphere of contempt, the pols and the pious thought not of themselves, but of their enemies. I wonder if anybody really listened to Brooks, or if they just dug into the runny scrambled eggs and swilled lukewarm coffee and stared at their phones, gleefully waiting for the next toxic tweet.

Politics in America has become a blood sport.  Winner take all. No compromise. No moderating tenor to the debates or legislating. It is all out war. Thank God for the rare voice like Brooks’ that actually speaks with the courage of his convictions and names God’s love as their guide, without irony or apology. I hear there was actually one other voice like that last week in D.C. Maybe that guy should host next year’s breakfast.

Or better yet, dis-invite from the prayer breakfast all the holier than thou types—the preening preachers and pontificating politicians--and instead welcome in the hungry and the homeless who live on the streets of that city. Then treat them to a big breakfast, a huge spread and leave contempt off the menu.

Something tells me that is a breakfast God might actually attend.

Anyhoo….

   

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