Memory Eternal
Essay Posted May 29, 2007 by James E. Nelson
The last couple of weeks have been extraordinarily windy but it’s spring, the season of wind, so I’m only complaining a little bit. Last spring we moved out onto the river plain, which is very wide at this part of the Missouri River. We used to be nestled into the hills in Sioux City where the prevailing winds tended to blow over the top of us. Now they gather strength in the wide open flood plain of the Missouri and blow right through our yard before encountering the bluffs to the north of our house.
What I observe in our South Sioux City backyard is that the normal wind is a whisper with two distinct voices. The first I will call a rattle, although that description is more appropriate to an autumn wind when the leaves are crackly dry. It is the sound of leaves, needles, and branches bumping against each other. It is a beat without rhythm. Each leaf follows its own inscrutable pattern, so the beat is reduced to a steady patter of leaf against leaf and branch. The other sound is a whoosh. It is a whistle without the discipline of reeds to give it pitch and tone, so the unformed whistle is depleted to music without song. Together it is an elemental sound, always present but always unformed. Like the dark emptiness of Genesis 1, it is a wandering force waiting to be called upon and ordered.
And in the spring, the elemental whisper of the wind becomes a roar. Forces far beyond our control draw the wind this way and that with great speed and power. Far from becoming ordered, the wind is even more chaotic, and at times can be frightening. When the ambient sounds of whispers are magnified and multiplied so that the once quiet background babble begins to rise up and enclose, to tug and tear at both body and soul, the gentle breeze is transformed into a fearful furor.
I spent a long-ago summer as a hired farm hand and lived in a single-wide just past the end of the road on the wide open Montana prairie. Surrounded by cattle and beyond the shadows of the distant Larb Hills, the wind was rarely gentle. It was rather a persistent presence, only giving up it’s need to be attended to in the evening, around sunset, when the whole world, except for the hovering mosquitos and barn swallows and bats darting overhead, paused to take it all in and ponder the accomplishments of the day.
On the western plains, the wind was less the whisper of a ghostly touch and more a companion to the daily tasks. It dried the sweat from the working brow and cleared the dust stirred up by tractor, plow, and bailer. At times it was friend, stirring the air on a hot and difficult day; at times it was foe, driving a lightning fire before it so that wheat fields only days from harvest were consumed as if some ancient demigod required a burnt offering because humans had turned under the prairie grass.
And this brings us to the nub of this meditation on the wind. It is so impersonal, so indifferent to the world that it rustles and moves. And we humans detest indifference, for we (in our ancient sinfulness) assume that all this was made for us. Our sin breeds a sort of arrogance that turns our place in the world upside down. We transpose the first question of The Shorter Catechism and ask, “What is the chief end of God?” and in turn assume that “the chief end of God is to glorify man and enjoy him forever” (from Belden Lane). Humans detest indifference and we seek a purpose, a personal presence, a benevolent or malevolent force that either cares about us or despises us. But being sinful, and having been begotten by sinful generations, we have forgotten God. In this forgetful condition, our ego hears the wind, feels its fingers groping our skin and we seek some meaning in it beyond indifference: the ghostly whisper of Gaia or the displeasure of a previously unknown demigod. This is the story of the millennia.
In the Orthodox Church we pray for the dead. It seems an odd thing to many people. Why would you pray for someone who is gone? But we pray precisely because they are not gone. In an indifferent world, we cry out for personal interest. Specifically, we pray that their memory be eternal. And the prayer is not that their friends and family will never forget; it is not even that the church will remember them eternally. No, the prayer is that God will never forget, that God will remember their lives, their faith, their service, their transformation for ever and ever unto ages of ages.
The detractors of such prayers will point out the obvious. Of course God will never forget. God is God, after all. It should go without saying.
But the converse is also true. Humans are human after all, and we long for meaning in an indifferent world. And more to the point, we also quickly forget. Long before the names and dates have worn to a flat, rough nothingness on the granite and marble tombstones, we wander through the cemetery and wonder who these bones belonged to and what their story might be. The cares of this world—or sometimes sheer indifference—causes memory to fade and meaning to be lost.
So it is that we call upon God to never forget precisely because we know we will. We call upon God to give a damn, because the wind is indifferent and the alternative is damnation to the obscure forgetfulness of a hell where “their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched” (Mark 9:48). Or maybe our worry isn't even the fires of hell, but just the cold indifference of ground: “The womb forgets them; the worm finds them sweet; they are no longer remembered” (Job 24:20). We know our own forgetfulness; we confess our exceedingly wicked indifference. This is why we call on God to remember us eternally. It’s not so much a request of God as it is a confession of our own sinfulness. When groped by and defiled by an indifferent wind it’s difficult to be confident and comforted by the eternal paradise of heaven which we cannot see and can’t even conceive, so we cry out, “I believe. Help me in my unbelief.” We call for God’s memory eternal in the face of our own forgetfulness and the indifference of the wind.
Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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