The Spiritual Practice of Remembering Quotes

“In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes.
We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music.
We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“We also believe that from our end of this undulating time line, we have a certain omnipotence. We can see the mistakes and blunders of the past far more clearly than the people who were living through them. (p. 77)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“Our ancestors have a lot to teach us. This is not because they were wiser or more devout than we are or “better” Christians, though we can’t rule out such possibilities. It is because they can point us toward what is essential. (p. 50)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“There is a good reason why you cannot imagine one of the Pilgrim Fathers kicking back at Six Flags, or Daniel Boone going down a water slide. It is not that their lives were busier than ours, or that they were more serious people. We are all busy in our own ways, whether we are hunting down dinner in a forest or laboring through the crowds at our local market. The difference is in our attitudes towards leisure time.

Today reading a novel or going to see a play is just a way to pass the time, and a fairly admirable one at that, given the alternatives of video games and reality television. Two hundred years ago, however, a decent man or woman would not have wasted God-given time with people and events that had never taken place, and in a manner designed to artfully stimulate the emotions. The theater is “wholly useless,” a minister told his flock in 1825. “Can it teach the mechanic industry, or the merchant more economy and skill?” Surely not, he declared. Even at its very best, the theater is “mere recreation.”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“Writer Miroslav Volf explains this more poetically. We experience time, he says, the way we hear a beautiful note from cello. It may sound like a single pitch, but in reality it is a complete tone, including other voices from the string’s half-length, eighth-length, and so on. “It is similar with the music of our lives,” says Volf. “At any given time we do not hear only the simple, solitary tone of the present; rather, in that present resonate many sounds of past actualities and future possibilities. This is how our present acquires depth.” In other words, our present-day lives are constantly echoing those of others. (p. 113)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“Christian remembering is not a set of duties or list of skills to master–it is an intention, one that begins with the simple grace of noticing.

Once you begin to look, the past is everywhere; the roads that our ancestors built and the trees they planted, their songs and books and pictures and monuments. . . . Their inventions make us more comfortable on a hot day and happier when the weather gets cold. Their tastes and style, their sense of order and place, define our surroundings. Whether we realize it or not, we are living in a world they built and are bound to their decisions–as our children and their children’s children will be to ours. (pp. 128-129)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“Writer Miroslav Volf explains this more poetically. We experience time, he says, the way we hear a beautiful note from cello. It may sound like a single pitch, but in reality it is a complete tone, including other voices from the string’s half-length, eighth-length, and so on. “It is similar with the music of our lives,” says Volf. “At any given time we do not year only the simple, solitary tone of the present; rather, in that present resonate many sounds of past actualities and future possibilities. This is how our present acquires depth.” In other words, our present-day lives are constantly echoing those of others. (p. 113)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“There’s a great mystery in that cemetery, even deeper than the painful or tragic events that populated it. Inside its stone walls are the citizens of my town: they built the stores and mapped out the roads, put up electric lights, founded the hospital, and organized the public library. A few probably lived in my home at one time. They have made my life possible in more ways than I can count, yet we are entire strangers. . . .

I do not take these silent neighbors for granted either. Sometimes, when all of the library staff have gone home, the lights are off, and I’m working alone at my desk, I think about them . . . . But most of the time, my feeling is more sadness than fear. It is hard to think about people who have lived full and eventful lives, only to end up as a faded name on a monument; it is even harder to realize that this will eventually happen to me and to all the people I love. My library shelves are full of forgotten books written by unknown people. It is an amazing fact, one that I sometimes contemplate with awe, that all of these books are connections with people now on the other side of mystery, surviving only as a name on a tattered binding. That’s one reason why I sometimes pause and say their names out loud, just to give the universe a chance to hear an old and beloved combination of words one more time. (pp. 100-101)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more
profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase
from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy
Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about
Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of
family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane
trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now
a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a
potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his
home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders
about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a
confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they
are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing
one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated
blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions,
choices and chances, errors and hopes.
We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music.
We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“The past is not a still photograph but a movie, and it is very difficult to mark one cel of film as the most important. In other words, more times than not the founders of a tradition are hard to identify. Certainly they did not wake up one morning and decided to start something utterly brand new–most often they thought they were insiders making a few adjustments to fix some important problems. Martin Luther never called himself a Lutheran, Menno Simons a Mennonite, or John Calvin a Calvinist. (pp 90-91)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“Most people know at some level that the old ways are important, and they may even yearn for a way of life before the onset of plastic toys, television jingles, and junk food. The old ways seem to promise something more authentic and substantial than the endless vista of strip malls and fast-food restaurants we have created. But tradition is a complicated yearning. As much as it promises belonging and stability, it can also be deeply irritating, especially when it begins to impinge on individual freedom. It comes with a cost. (p. 80)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“There is a good reason why you cannot imagine one of the Pilgrim Fathers kicking back at Six Flags, or Daniel Boone going down a water slide. It is not that their lives were busier than ours, or that they were more serious people. We are all busy in our own ways, whether we are hunting down dinner in a forest or laboring through the crowds at our local market. The difference is in our attitudes towards leisure time.

Today reading a novel or going to see a play is just a way to pass the time, and a fairly admirable one at that, given the alternatives of video games and reality television. Two hundred years ao, however, a decent man or woman would not have wasted God-given time with people and events that had never taken place, and in a manner designed to artfully stimulate the emotions. The theater is “wholly useless,” a minister told his flock in 1825. “Can it teach the mechanic industry, or the merchant more economy and skill?” Surely not, he declared. Even at its very best, the theater is “mere recreation.”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“Historical perspective should make us more humble and cautious about ourselves. People from the past were not the only ones operating with a cultural context–we have one too. Just like them we cannot imagine life any other way than it is: everyone assumes that “what is” is what was meant to be. And don’t forget the other side to this is the certainty that our own descendants will be shaking their heads in disbelief about all the impossible things we took for granted and the evils we accepted without protest–professional football perhaps, or maybe even amusement parks. (p. 49)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“She tells of an emotionally powerful event in her life: “sitting in a hospital waiting room after the sudden death of a dear friend. Everything about that time was surreal, of course, with people coming and going, some of them familiar–her family members and some of our mutual friends–and others who were complete strangers. These were the ones who confused me. Didn’t they know that I was the number one friend, the one who knew Ginny the best? But here they were, unaware of me and just as stricken by shock and loss.

All those people know different sides of my adventurous friend.. They had climbed rock walls or hiked the Rocky Mountains with her, sat in her writing classes, or taught with her at different times in her life. My friend Ginny was the writer and hiker, the scholar with the ironic sense of humor. I had written books and organized conferences with her, chatted for hours over cups of coffee and plates of Indian food. Their friend was someone else entirely, the Ginny who spent the summer in a chalet high up in the Alps reading French novels or Ginny the neighborhood mom. And unless I was prepared to share my friend with other people, I would never really know her. . . .

That experience of the familiar suddenly becoming strange . . . is why we need to know the stories of the past. (p. 48)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“We assume that our ancestors don't have all that much to teach us; afer all, they were “old-fashioned” and bigoted and they rarely washed or changed their clothes. They could not possibly be as thoughtful or self-aware as we are today. . . I daresay that for many people this is the main reason history seems irrelevant.”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering

“And so we visit the past as tourists. Sometimes this is literally so, when we take in Colonial Williamsburg and Plymouth Plantation, or travel around to Civil War battlefields. But it is also true in a metaphorical sense. The past has become a strange and distant country, full of odd people and mysterious customs. And thought seeing how these people built their homes or raised their children can broaden the mind, most of us don’t go back home determined to learn how to use an axe or a hickory stick. Knowledge about those strange customs might be interesting, but it is not essential–it does not change our way of doing things. In the end we will always prefer our own land in the present. At the end of the tour there is an air-conditioned car and a comfortable hotel room waiting, complete with cable television and refrigerated food.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoying the past this way–it can be a lot of fun, in fact. But it could be so much more. The thousands of people who visit Boston and have only a few days to walk the Freedom Trail, visit Fenway Park, and eat a lobster dinner cannot even scratch the surface of what the city is really like. They have not inhaled the comforting mixture of exhaust fumes and roasted cashews that hangs in the city subways on humid summer days, or learned to love the particular slant of the New England sun on a winter afternoon.

The same would be true of a Bostonian on a day trip to Chicago, Tokyo, Budapest, or Khartoum. The visit would be exciting, but would not make them cosmopolitan. Becoming something more than a casual time-tourist requires a willingness to be challenged and changed, just as living in India or Ghana or Peru will upend any American’s assumptions about money and wealth. (pp 26-27)”
― Margaret Bendroth, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering