We Remember

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
November 25, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

The path that led us to where we are now informs all the possibilities of our continuing journey. We will explore how our memories, both those in our mind and those buried deeply within our DNA, ground as well as challenge our human potential.

Call to Worship

We Come to Love a Church
Andrew C Kennedy

We come to love a church,
the traditions, the history,
and especially the people associated with it.
And through these people,
young and old,
known and unknown,
we reach out —

Both backward into history
and forward into the future —

To link together the generations
in this imperfect, but blessed community
of memory and hope.

Reading

Joy Harjo, 1951

Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time.
Remember sundown and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too.
Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Sermon

Why is it that I can remember every word of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Wood on a Snowy Evening” even though I memorized it for a school assignment way back when I was in the second grade, and yet in the time it takes to walk from the living room to the kitchen in my house I often forget why it was I went to kitchen in the first place?

Well, that’s actually a more complicated question than it might seem, but, to oversimplify, the reason has to do with differences in how, where and what types of information get laid out in the brain for short versus longterm memories.

All of this month, our Life Span Faith Development programs have been exploring what it means to be a people of memory, which for the most part involves long-term memory.

This morning, I would like to also explore this with you here in worship because I believe that memory and how we construct, and sometimes deconstruct and then reconstruct it, is deeply spiritual in nature.

It is a huge topic. Whole sermons could and actually have been written just on dealing with traumatic or painful memories, for instance.

This morning though, we will be focusing on three areas:

how we construct memory as individuals,
socially, communally, culturally constructed memory.
and finally current research on the potential that memory may be transmitted genetically and/or epigenetically across generations.

At the individual level, what science is discovering is that we do not lay down memories like a computer records factual pieces of data onto a disk.

Rather, especially with long-term memory, our brains weave our memories into a narrative, a story that we are constantly creating to make sense of our world, create meaning in life and maintain a sense of an individual identity or self.

And we do not in reality lay down our longterm memories entirely as individuals but often in relationship with others and our environment, as we move through life experiences moment by moment.

This is the first of the reasons that I believe that memory is an essential and profound aspect of our spirituality. It is relational, and it helps us find meaning and create an ongoing story about who we are and how we fit in our world.

That we construct our memories in this way explains why the loss of memory associated with conditions like Alzheimer’s can be so devastating and so heartbreaking. It takes away people’s ability to make sense of their world, isolates them and disintegrates their sense of self and meaning in life. Several studies have found that being touched by loved ones, familiar music and being offered ritual-like communal activities can sometimes help such folks at least partially reconstruct their personal narratives and make greater sense of their world.

It also helps explain why our memories can be factually incorrect sometimes; how we can in fact have memories that seem real but that in reality never actually happened to us; and how different people experiencing the same event can come away with very different memories of that same event.

Let me give you a few examples.

How many of you have ever discussed a childhood memory with siblings, family members or childhood friends only to find yourself arguing over very different memories of the same event?

This happens to me all of the time with my younger sister, and she is constantly getting it wrong.

This is likely because neither of us laid down pure factual data – we each were creating our own narrative and so we each laid down a memory that made sense within that narrative.

In his book, “Uncle Tungsten,” Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and best-best-selling author wrote the following about memories his from childhood, living through the bombings of London by Germany in the winter of 1940-1941:

“One night, a thousand-pound bomb fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat) – many of us in our pajamas – walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?)…

On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire-indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions.”

Sacks was shocked, when later one his brothers read what he had written and told him that his memory of the first bomb was correct but that, in fact, when the second bomb had fallen they had both been away at boarding school.

How could he have such a detailed memory of an event, complete with images in his mind’s eye of his family members fighting the fire and the burning molten metal, if he did not actually experience it, Sacks asked himself.

It turned out that another of his brothers who had been there for the second bombing incident had written them a vivid and detailed letter about it, and that Sacks had been enthralled by the story – so much so that the images and details it aroused in his mind became laid down as a memory of having actually been there. And as a young child, it would have neatly extended the already existing narrative created by his memory of having actually been there for the first bombing.

Subsequent studies using brain imaging technology have found that scans of memories from actual experiences and scans of memories our brains have created will show exactly the same brain patterns.

Some of you may remember when Brian Williams, the news anchor, got into trouble after going on David Letterman and falsely claiming that he had been on a helicopter hit by ground fire in Iraq. He was accused of falsifying this story, lying, in effort at self-aggrandizement.

Now, we can never know for sure what went on in Mr. William’s brain, but many memory researchers believed a very similar thing may have happened to him. He was in a helicopter in Iraq when the incident happened, just not the one that got struck, and he had accurately reported the incident two years earlier. Overtime, though, as he had interviewed the people who were actually in the helicopter and learned the vivid details, it is possible his brain conflated his actual experience with the intense images generated by his knowledge of the flight that was struck.

So, by the time Mr. Williams went onto David Letterman, it is possible that his brain had constructed a memory that seemed every bit as real to him as having been at that second bombing had seemed to Oliver Sacks.

I think there is an aspect of the spiritual here also – a spiritual lesson about checking our recollections to make sure that the story we are telling ourselves is true – that our ongoing narratives have not distorted a memory, especially in ways that could be harmful.

For example, there are now numerous incidences of African American males spending years or even decades in prison, put there based upon the eye witness testimony of white people, only to be exonerated when DNA testing became available.

White people have been fed a narrative about who is most likely to commit crimes and that narrative can construct incorrect memories that have the potential to devastate black and brown lives.

And that leads us to social, communal, cultural memory, because the things we choose to remember as communities and societies and the ways in which we choose to remember them also can have profound effects upon our lives and those of other people.

We construct cultural memory as a group or society though the stories and histories we tell or choose not to tell; through the rituals, traditions and holidays we observe and prioritize and those we do not; through the arts, music, theatre, religious practices and the very use of what language, symbols and words we chose to employ.

And like with individual memory, it is important that we examine, question and sometimes deconstruct and then reconstruct what narratives we are following and reinforcing as we pass on cultural memory.

For instance, the ways in which we have minimized the brutality and savageness of the genocide committed against native Americans; our white washing of the cruelty and monstrousness of slavery and the subsequent treatment of African Americans in the U.S.; our avoiding the images of the lynchings of black and brown Americans and on and on and on; these create an incomplete and false narrative, an untrue story, a cultural memory that is steeped in denial and allows the continued supremacy of white culture and people over all others.

We fail to teach how white elites encoded the concept of race into law to slightly privilege indentured white people over enslaved African Americans so that they would not join together to rebel against such oppressive systems.

In our own state of Texas, it will only be in the next school year that our children will be finally be taught that slavery was the primary cause of the civil war rather than sectionalism and states’ rights.

Within Unitarian Universalism, we can also fall prey to this. For instance, we often pass on a cultural memory about our how Unitarian, Transcendentalist forebearer, Theodore Parker, was such a leading and passionate abolitionist. We less often convey that he also believed whites to be the superior race, called African Americans docile and lacking in intelligence and referred to the Mexican people as “A wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, character, who must eventually give way as the Indians did.”

And this is just one of many such examples.

This is a spiritual issue. We have a moral obligation to do our best to ensure that the cultural memories we are transmitting are not continuing harmful narratives – a real and daunting challenge as we are often caught within those same false narratives ourselves.

Now, I want to switch gears and touch briefly on some of the science being investigated regarding whether a transmission of another kind of memory may be possible epigenetically or even genetically. Some of the research is still pretty early on, and some of it is the subject of much scientific debate. Still, I think it also has potential spiritual implications involving ancestry and heritage.

Epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. Some research indicates that in animals, emotional “memory”, such as a propensity toward anxiety or the opposite, a tendency toward calmness and resilience, can be passed down epigenetically through several generations by the transmission of chemicals, methyl groups, that attach to the DNA and regulate gene expression. Some studies claim to have found this in humans also now.

Over much longer time periods, some researchers are exploring whether a kind of memory might also be encoded through alterations to the DNA itself.

Because my life is ruled by three terribly spoiled Basenji dogs, I was fascinated by the study of how humans and dogs have co-evolved over likely tens of thousands of years. Dogs and humans now seem to be born with an ability to read and interpret correctly each other facial expressions and vocal tones. When humans and their dogs interact, both species release oxytocin, the same bonding hormone released when humans interact with their new born children.

I was also fascinated by research with savants, people seemingly born with musical genius, artistic brilliance or even complicated mathematical skills who display such abilities without any training and at too early an age for their abilities to have been learned.

Likewise, scientists are studying people who after experiencing a head injury suddenly develop prodigious musical, artistic or mathematical ability, again without ever having had formal training in these areas. Is this evidence of some kind of genetic memory? We will have to stay tuned as the exploration continues.

I’ll close by sharing with you an experience I had recently that I think illustrates a number of these concepts about memory and demonstrates just how powerful memory can be.

Many of you have heard me talk before about how important my maternal grandparents were in my life and the love they gave me as they helped my mom raise me.

My grandparents, Leo and Ann, often took us on camping trips with them, and I have wonderful memories of being with them in the piney woods of East Texas and elsewhere.

They loved to travel and drove all cross the U.S., stopping to spend time in forests, including many a pine forest.

And, like Oliver Sacks had from his brother’s letter, I have these secondary memories from the images I created in my mind when they would return from one of their trips and share with us vivid descriptions from their adventures.

Last month, I spent a week exploring the white mountains of Arizona. One morning, I got up very early and drove way up into the mountains to a nature park called Wood Canyon Lake.

As drove into the park, I found myself in the middle of a beautiful pine forest. It was rocky, and small patches of snow reflected the morning sunlight, which was steaming through the trees at a slightly sideways angle because it was still so early.

And suddenly, I had this experience that was as if Leo and Ann were present there in my rental car with me.

I was such a powerful experience that I had to pull the car over and stop, and I struggle even now to put it adequately into words.

I can tell you though, that my grandparents had built their clothing closet out of cedar, so they had always carried a slight smell of cedar with them, and that faint aroma of cedar came back to me again under the beautiful canopy of pine trees.

And there had always been a way that I felt when I was with my grandparents that I never felt any other time. And that feeling swept over me again – an unexpected blessing and reminder of being worthy of their great love.

This is the spiritual power of memory. I got to spend a few moments with my grandparents once more, even if only through that great power of recollection.

And the ethics and values that they instilled in me were renewed and reignited.

My beloveds, this is one more aspect of the spiritual power of memory.

Not only can we remember, and when necessary, deconstruct and then reconstruct memory in ways that are more life giving, so too, like my grandparents, can we construct much of how we will be remembered.

May ours be a legacy of love, justice and stories truthfully told. Amen.

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