Scott Tsao’s Reviews > The Spiritual Practice of Remembering > Status Update

WIthout our ancestors, we can't really know what it is to be human. …to be human is to bury our dead--and, even more important, to remember where they are. …being human means possessing a deep, rich soil, layers and layers of all that has gone on before we were born. This is the kind of soil that makes life out of dead things, that...

…and rail against them within the framework of our common tradition, that extended argument constantly unfolding across both space and time. Even though they do not literally talk back, it is still possible to learn to hear their voices clearly.

Our ancestors are on the one hand terribly alien to us, yet we are also profoundly connected to them. They confront us with the full span of human diversity, in beautiful, frustrating, and challenging ways. We do not need to excuse them for their various sins and omissions, treating them as if they came from some wildly exotic civilization. We have the right--and the responsibility--to disagree and complain...

For all our worries about divine providence and God's will, the really hard part about history is accepting the humanness of the past and its people. … All of us live somewhere between fear and hope, sharing the precariousness of life on planet earth. But we learn to understand our situation within different cultural ground rules and different physical limits.

…enlightenment than our ancestors. We are simply part of the same communion of saints, God's people spread across time and space, who need each other to "perfect" our faith. We are not isolated from the past or forever stranded in the present -- we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. … In a profound sense, memory is a process of "re-collecting" and "remembering" scattered people.

Christian faith offers points of connection with our ancestors. In fact, our religious traditions come with an endless array of talking partners, people from the past who might challenge or delight us, frustrate or anger us -- but are still speaking the same language of faith. None of us in this old, old conversation have more or better truth than the other; we are not hight on the chronological ladder of...

In a sense history is always about the imagination, since there is no way to travel to the past as we would to a foreign country. But there is a thin line between approaching people and events through imagination and assuming that they are in fact imaginary. The first assumes that the past was "real," with a separate integrity all its own; the second that there is no past at all beyond what we choose to see.

...of seeing more clearly the strengths and weaknesses of our Christian faith as it has been shaped by the demands of the early twenty-first century.

In the end, history is not about sorting the good people from the bad, or the real believers from the frauds, as if we had a God’s-eye view across time and space. It is not about finding allies to support our personal judgments or the particular causes of our time. Historical perspective is a way of knowing ourselves, ...