Giving Your Life
M8
Jer. 31:31-4
Ps 51:1-13
Heb. 5:5-10
Jn. 12:20-33
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” John 12.
This poem is called “Ask Me,” by William Stafford (1914-1993):
“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”
Is what you have done your life? What difference have those who love you and hate you made?
Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12). He puts into question what it means to live or die. He makes us less certain what our life really is. I believe that it takes someone with the power of Jesus to dispel our most persistent illusions. Some fantasies can be so widespread within a culture that it can take generations to understand the truth.
Between the years 1570 and 1630 Western Europeans burned between thirty and fifty thousand people to death as witches (only a comparatively tiny number of heretics were burned during this same period). In Trier, Germany 368 witches were burned in twenty-two villages over only a six-year period. In two of these villages the persecution did not stop until there was only one woman left.
Amazingly enough during the preceding so-called Dark Ages there was little or no witch persecution and canon law even specified that “whoever believes in witches is an infidel and pagan” and “unchristian.” Then in the fifteenth century these convictions changed. A professor at the University of the Sorbonne wrote in 1601 that the existence of witches could be disbelieved only by those of unsound mind.”
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary features of this cultural hysteria is that historians can find no evidence to suggest that ritual devil worship actually happened in Western Europe. The historian Margaret Miles convincingly writes that, “Witchcraft seems to have been neither a religion nor an organization, but a massive collective fantasy.”
Why did this happen? The recent invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate thousands of pamphlets which included details about what witches did and how they were punished. These broadsheets told people that witches caused disease, impotence, accidents and crop failures. Because more than eighty percent of the people who were burned to death were women, misogyny probably was a contributing factor in the persecutions. Historians also believe that a connection existed between the use of judicial torture and the intensity of this hysteria. England was the only country that did not use torture for either crime or witchcraft and persecution was less a part of life there.
But these reasons cannot explain the deep anxiety in the mind of that generation. I wonder what behavior we take completely for granted but that may seem equally baffling to future historians. What is our massive collective fantasy? What fears inform our actions and what do they tell us about our life and our commitments? (I wonder which of our attitudes concerning drugs, children, terrorism, healthcare, immigration, globalization, incarceration, work, etc. will make sense to another generation).
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus became famous as a defense witness in court trials of people who were accused of sexual abuse on the basis of repressed memories. She points out that there is no scientific evidence that what we call repression really exists. Scientists study various kinds of amnesia closely. Some people may forget what happened in a traumatic traffic accident, but they are conscious that a memory is missing. Those who believe in repression claim that we can have no sensation of having forgotten some of the memories that are most important to who we are. They also seem to overestimate the reliability of our memory.
On August 18, 1967 at Boston’s Fenway Park Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was at the plate facing California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. On the first pitch Hamilton threw a fastball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face. Conigliaro never completely recovered from his injury. He left baseball in 1975 and died at the age of forty-five. That moment changed Jack Hamilton forever too.
In 1990 when Conigliaro died, Hamilton gave an interview with the New York Times in which he recalled what happened that day. “I’ve had to live with it,” He said,”I think about it a lot. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in the batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” Hamilton remembers visiting him in the hospital that afternoon. He also remembers wondering whether he should return to Fenway for the next series of games that season.
Although Hamilton probably thought about this day many times his recollections were almost completely wrong. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning but in the fourth. The score was not 2-1 but 0-0. Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter but the sixth. It wasn’t even a day game so Hamilton couldn’t have visited him in the hospital that afternoon, and there were no other games in Boston that year for him to wonder about whether or not he should go back there.
It should come as no surprise to us that our memories are unreliable, that we can get important details wrong. A cognitive psychologist asked forty-four students the question, “How did you first hear the news of the space ship Challenger explosion.” He asked them the morning after the explosion and then two and a half years later. Although they described the memories as vivid during this second interview, none of their memories were completely accurate and one third of their memories were what the researcher called “wildly inaccurate.” Many of these students couldn’t believe that their revised memories were wrong. “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” said one student, “but I still remember everything the way I told you [just now]. I can’t help it.”
Not only can we be completely wrong about past events, we can remember things that never even happened. Psychologists have studied the ways that false memories can be inadvertently and intentionally implanted in someone else’s mind. One student did this by asking his fourteen-year-old younger brother to write a paragraph each day on four events that he described. Three of the events actually happened as part of the family’s history and one was a fictitious story about being lost at a mall. By the end of the week the younger brother could describe details about something that never happened.
Earlier I mentioned Elizabeth Loftus as a psychologist who studies memory. She is not an uncontroversial figure. Some people absolutely hate her. It may be partly because they believe she defends criminals, but even this is not enough to explain the vehemence of their response to her work. I have a theory. I think that it is partly because her research undermines some deeply held assumptions about who we think we are.
In modern times there are so many subtle ways of not believing in God. One of them is to understand ourselves as a kind of videotape that summarizes our past, to think that in a significant sense we are our memories. If this is the implicit picture that someone has of himself, a psychologist’s claims that the tape is unreliable can seem like an attack on his identity.
For me this way of understanding our selves is in contrast with the Bible. According to Christian tradition we do not have an existence that is independent of God. Who we are does not derive from who we were. Our life is not something that came about accidentally because of the lust or love of two other human beings a long time ago. We don’t earn our life. Instead we constantly derive our life from God. Who we are is a gift from God that we receive every day.
In the Old Testament God speaks to us. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31). Our existence is a constant expression of God’s love. At the deepest level of who we are is not a memory but God.
I’m having a hard time saying it, but what this means is that you are fundamentally safe. You do not need to worry about losing your job, your spouse, your health, the respect of the other kids in school. The self that you are is not something that you achieve through some kind of work. It is not something that comes into existence because of what you think. This self is safe from the world
Perhaps what Jesus means is that the part of ourselves we are so afraid of losing isn’t really us anyway. When the Greeks come, they want the same thing that I do. They tell Philip that they want to see Jesus. He says to them, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
The novelist Ernest Hemmingway writes about a father in Spain who wanted to be reconciled to his runaway son. The father takes out an advertisement in the Madrid paper El Liberal. It says, “Paco, meet me noon on Tuesday at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven! Love, Papa.” Paco was a common name in those days. When the father showed up he found eight hundred young men looking for their fathers.
The way that Jesus speaks through the Bible is like this. Right here we have a whole church full of Pacos, of children returning to their father. We are not our memories, our thoughts or even our actions. Like California pitcher Jack Hamilton and the witch hunters of the sixteenth century we will make minor mistakes and some terrible life-changing ones.
But none of this changes the truth. You can ask me if what I have done is my life or about the influence of people who have loved and hated me. But that is not what I am. We are children of God who Jesus calls to return. And one day he will lift us all up into the fullness of divine joy.
___________________
Published in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (NY: McGraw Hill, 2004), 530.
Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 296-7.
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchem, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 75.
Ibid., 91-2.
Ibid., 97-8.
Thomas Tewell, “The Things We Dare Not Remember,” Thirty Good Minutes, 16 November 2003. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/tewell_4707.htm
Jer. 31:31-4
Ps 51:1-13
Heb. 5:5-10
Jn. 12:20-33
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” John 12.
This poem is called “Ask Me,” by William Stafford (1914-1993):
“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”
Is what you have done your life? What difference have those who love you and hate you made?
Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12). He puts into question what it means to live or die. He makes us less certain what our life really is. I believe that it takes someone with the power of Jesus to dispel our most persistent illusions. Some fantasies can be so widespread within a culture that it can take generations to understand the truth.
Between the years 1570 and 1630 Western Europeans burned between thirty and fifty thousand people to death as witches (only a comparatively tiny number of heretics were burned during this same period). In Trier, Germany 368 witches were burned in twenty-two villages over only a six-year period. In two of these villages the persecution did not stop until there was only one woman left.
Amazingly enough during the preceding so-called Dark Ages there was little or no witch persecution and canon law even specified that “whoever believes in witches is an infidel and pagan” and “unchristian.” Then in the fifteenth century these convictions changed. A professor at the University of the Sorbonne wrote in 1601 that the existence of witches could be disbelieved only by those of unsound mind.”
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary features of this cultural hysteria is that historians can find no evidence to suggest that ritual devil worship actually happened in Western Europe. The historian Margaret Miles convincingly writes that, “Witchcraft seems to have been neither a religion nor an organization, but a massive collective fantasy.”
Why did this happen? The recent invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate thousands of pamphlets which included details about what witches did and how they were punished. These broadsheets told people that witches caused disease, impotence, accidents and crop failures. Because more than eighty percent of the people who were burned to death were women, misogyny probably was a contributing factor in the persecutions. Historians also believe that a connection existed between the use of judicial torture and the intensity of this hysteria. England was the only country that did not use torture for either crime or witchcraft and persecution was less a part of life there.
But these reasons cannot explain the deep anxiety in the mind of that generation. I wonder what behavior we take completely for granted but that may seem equally baffling to future historians. What is our massive collective fantasy? What fears inform our actions and what do they tell us about our life and our commitments? (I wonder which of our attitudes concerning drugs, children, terrorism, healthcare, immigration, globalization, incarceration, work, etc. will make sense to another generation).
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus became famous as a defense witness in court trials of people who were accused of sexual abuse on the basis of repressed memories. She points out that there is no scientific evidence that what we call repression really exists. Scientists study various kinds of amnesia closely. Some people may forget what happened in a traumatic traffic accident, but they are conscious that a memory is missing. Those who believe in repression claim that we can have no sensation of having forgotten some of the memories that are most important to who we are. They also seem to overestimate the reliability of our memory.
On August 18, 1967 at Boston’s Fenway Park Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was at the plate facing California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. On the first pitch Hamilton threw a fastball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face. Conigliaro never completely recovered from his injury. He left baseball in 1975 and died at the age of forty-five. That moment changed Jack Hamilton forever too.
In 1990 when Conigliaro died, Hamilton gave an interview with the New York Times in which he recalled what happened that day. “I’ve had to live with it,” He said,”I think about it a lot. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in the batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” Hamilton remembers visiting him in the hospital that afternoon. He also remembers wondering whether he should return to Fenway for the next series of games that season.
Although Hamilton probably thought about this day many times his recollections were almost completely wrong. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning but in the fourth. The score was not 2-1 but 0-0. Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter but the sixth. It wasn’t even a day game so Hamilton couldn’t have visited him in the hospital that afternoon, and there were no other games in Boston that year for him to wonder about whether or not he should go back there.
It should come as no surprise to us that our memories are unreliable, that we can get important details wrong. A cognitive psychologist asked forty-four students the question, “How did you first hear the news of the space ship Challenger explosion.” He asked them the morning after the explosion and then two and a half years later. Although they described the memories as vivid during this second interview, none of their memories were completely accurate and one third of their memories were what the researcher called “wildly inaccurate.” Many of these students couldn’t believe that their revised memories were wrong. “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” said one student, “but I still remember everything the way I told you [just now]. I can’t help it.”
Not only can we be completely wrong about past events, we can remember things that never even happened. Psychologists have studied the ways that false memories can be inadvertently and intentionally implanted in someone else’s mind. One student did this by asking his fourteen-year-old younger brother to write a paragraph each day on four events that he described. Three of the events actually happened as part of the family’s history and one was a fictitious story about being lost at a mall. By the end of the week the younger brother could describe details about something that never happened.
Earlier I mentioned Elizabeth Loftus as a psychologist who studies memory. She is not an uncontroversial figure. Some people absolutely hate her. It may be partly because they believe she defends criminals, but even this is not enough to explain the vehemence of their response to her work. I have a theory. I think that it is partly because her research undermines some deeply held assumptions about who we think we are.
In modern times there are so many subtle ways of not believing in God. One of them is to understand ourselves as a kind of videotape that summarizes our past, to think that in a significant sense we are our memories. If this is the implicit picture that someone has of himself, a psychologist’s claims that the tape is unreliable can seem like an attack on his identity.
For me this way of understanding our selves is in contrast with the Bible. According to Christian tradition we do not have an existence that is independent of God. Who we are does not derive from who we were. Our life is not something that came about accidentally because of the lust or love of two other human beings a long time ago. We don’t earn our life. Instead we constantly derive our life from God. Who we are is a gift from God that we receive every day.
In the Old Testament God speaks to us. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31). Our existence is a constant expression of God’s love. At the deepest level of who we are is not a memory but God.
I’m having a hard time saying it, but what this means is that you are fundamentally safe. You do not need to worry about losing your job, your spouse, your health, the respect of the other kids in school. The self that you are is not something that you achieve through some kind of work. It is not something that comes into existence because of what you think. This self is safe from the world
Perhaps what Jesus means is that the part of ourselves we are so afraid of losing isn’t really us anyway. When the Greeks come, they want the same thing that I do. They tell Philip that they want to see Jesus. He says to them, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
The novelist Ernest Hemmingway writes about a father in Spain who wanted to be reconciled to his runaway son. The father takes out an advertisement in the Madrid paper El Liberal. It says, “Paco, meet me noon on Tuesday at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven! Love, Papa.” Paco was a common name in those days. When the father showed up he found eight hundred young men looking for their fathers.
The way that Jesus speaks through the Bible is like this. Right here we have a whole church full of Pacos, of children returning to their father. We are not our memories, our thoughts or even our actions. Like California pitcher Jack Hamilton and the witch hunters of the sixteenth century we will make minor mistakes and some terrible life-changing ones.
But none of this changes the truth. You can ask me if what I have done is my life or about the influence of people who have loved and hated me. But that is not what I am. We are children of God who Jesus calls to return. And one day he will lift us all up into the fullness of divine joy.
___________________
Published in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (NY: McGraw Hill, 2004), 530.
Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 296-7.
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchem, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 75.
Ibid., 91-2.
Ibid., 97-8.
Thomas Tewell, “The Things We Dare Not Remember,” Thirty Good Minutes, 16 November 2003. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/tewell_4707.htm
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