Burning Smell
Tonight I am going to invite my group to consider the Gospel, again. That's right, that's what we do all the time, week after week, day after day, at work, at home, always. Christ's Good News; Christ The Good News; Christ the turning point in human history that defines everything that came before and comes after Him. In Christ the Krisis breaks forth.
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Dear Kate,
Today's quote, some great theologian wrote that.
I wrote that, channeling Barth, six years ago, when leading a Small Group in a big church.
The piece begins like this:
What is there to remember? What must we recollect, reconstruct in our imagination?
I have not lived through the War, and the same goes for many of us. And to our kids, the idea of hatred and carnage of such massive scale does not touch even the fringe of their consciousness (though fear is never too far from their heart; just look at all the action movies and torture porn young people crave after).
We have no actual experience to "recall." We have historical facts and insights to re-imagine as they are passed on from our ancestors.
What is there to remember? What must we recollect, reconstruct in our imagination? I've been considering these questions and many others for months now.
Tonight I will be leading my Small Group, and I am asking for wisdom to guide the group into re-imagining. I know I can only go so far. One of the most common lines I've read from people recounting the War is this: You need to be there to see it, to believe it. To smell it. Many veterans mentioned about smelling. You know why? It's one of the most repugnant things about the War that does not come through in video or audio archive footage. You need to be there..."
There, six years ago, and before that too, when I would read my way like a pilgrimage to Remembrance Day, bring home documentaries and movies from the library to watch with my kids, to imagine smelling for ourselves what was smelled on our behalf so that we don't have to smell it now.
Have I accomplished anything, as a leader, a father, a Christian? No cynicism and no self-pity: the answer is adamantly No.
Yesterday at church some "peace buttons" were promoted, on which they claim "to remember is to work for peace." A warm thought. It doesn't inconvenience me, and as probably how we think peace must be, harms no one. I have something to say about this button and this slogan, but not today.
Today I want to say what remembrance is not.
Remembrance is to remember. If we don't want to remember, if we are in the business of disremembering, dismembering our past, disembodying from our present, then we shall expect no meaningful future.
Remembrance can never be not remembering.
Wear a warm-fuzzy button if we like to make ourselves look good, even deceive ourselves to think it would make God look good. But if we have no intention to recollect, to wrestle with angels and demons from our past, we should at least have the decency to shut up and just go watch the latest superhero movie, witness good and evil battling it out in an imaginary realm, jerking off to the morality porn for some temporary relief to our pent-up humanity.
Not incidentally, that's what we are doing. Young people gathered together, have nothing to speak to each other but the shows they've watched, their escapade from reality. Adults join in too, not to be denied, to appease the disdain of the next generation, to appear peaceable in their eyes. Don't trust anyone who speaks much about the burning of forests but nothing about the burning of churches. "There is no worse flaw in man's character than that of wanting to belong."
I don't mind the buttons, if only we would remember together. God places Himself in our history, our crisis. To not remember what happened is to say on the cross nothing happened.
Yours, Alex
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