The Janus of January and the Minerva of Memory

The month of January takes its name from Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, gates, and doorways. With one face looking ahead and the other gazing back, Janus was also the god of the future and the past. It would seem that the god of the past should also be the god of memory, but for the Romans, that wasn’t the case: the goddess of memory was Minerva.

Whatever arcane theological motives lay behind the divisions and what difference it made, only the Romans would know for certain (and perhaps not even they understood). Pagan deities aside, the Romans had seen something rightly: that the past and memory are two related but different realities.

The Difference Between the Past and Memory

We could say that “the past”, broadly considered, refers to people, things, or events that have objectively taken place in history, whereas “memory” entails the subjective experience of those same things: what it meant for me, my family, my people. From this, two truths quickly follow:

The first truth is that memory does not perfectly represent the past nor does everything in the past make its way into memory. Ordinary experience verifies this constantly: for instance, I have the habit of misplacing my rosaries. Although I find them, always in the place I left them last, I have no memory of doing so. Certainly, at some point in the past I set my rosary on my desk, or on my nightstand, but I don’t remember doing it. More dramatically, I don’t have a memory of being born, but it certainly took place in the past!

The Elderly Couple and their Son

These are rather benign examples, but more striking ones can be found. First, in college, as I worked at a pharmacy and often delivered medications to patients, I recall one elderly couple who would always greet me with enormous smiles. This was not unusual as the same routine followed week after week: they always told me that their son was on his way to come visit, that he was very smart (this detail was always emphasized), and that they had prepared lunch for him.

Given their age, their community, and their general mental state, I would always smile and tell them to greet him for me, assuming that their son probably never came to visit. Indeed, that assumption was far more correct than I knew, as one of my coworkers casually discovered.

In passing, after making a comment about the son (the wife in the couple was constantly trying to set this coworker up with him), my coworker quietly remarked: “Their son is dead. He died many years ago in a car accident, and they could never accept it.” Now, in their twilight years, the couple lived disconnected from the past, not because of Alzheimer’s, but, in a sense, by choice or denial. What twisted webs our memory weaves!

Katyn Forest

More sinister, however, is when someone manipulates the past with the hope of bringing the memory under its sway. The 1940 massacre of Polish soldiers and citizens in Katyn, Russia, perpetrated by the Soviet Union, was uncovered by the Nazis as they invaded and stumbled upon the mass graves. The Nazis took advantage of the find, and promptly used it as propaganda against the Soviets.

When the tide of the war turned, however, and the Soviet army recovered the territory, the “find” was found again, and blamed on the Nazis. The story that the massacre was perpetrated by the Nazis remained the official explanation of events, even though many remembered the earlier discovery and knew otherwise. It was only recently that the Russian government admitted that the massacre was perpetrated by Soviet forces; the attempt to change the past failed because of those who remembered.

Not all attempts to re-write the past are as sinister in their motivation; nevertheless, the past is not simply Playdoh we can mold to our liking. There is an objective reality to it, and, although the subjective aspects are important and must be understood, there is something solid and real about facts of the past.

The Second Truth

The second, obvious, truth is that only living beings have a memory. Everything can, and does, have a past: the rock in my garden has a past, as does the abbey I live in. But the rock remembers nothing; the abbey buildings and property recall none of the thousands of monks who have passed through it over many centuries. It has no recollection of the most famous person to die here: Saint Thomas Aquinas. It is only we, the human caretakers, who recall.

Furthermore, even if plants and other animals have some sort of memory, the human memory is far richer, broader, and encompassing. Certainly, it is a blessing for us to have such a gift, but what is to be done when the memory becomes the repository of a painful past?

Forgiveness

It is in forgiveness that the difference between the past and memory becomes clear; it is here that so many people find difficulties and a place where modern society would find a solution for its current crises.

Often people associate forgiveness with the dictum: “Forgive and forget.” Incidentally, Christ’s command in the Bible is simply to “forgive”; the “forget” part is omitted. Now, if someone were to understand forget as “to not hold grudges,” the phrase could be admitted. However, on the one hand, if you hold grudges, then you really haven’t forgiven; on the other, the number of people who come to confession or spiritual direction and say they have forgiven but “cannot forget” leads me to think most people think “forget” means simply “remember no more” or “pretend like nothing happened.”

This is precisely where forgiveness has its work. We balance two realities in our minds: there is something in the past, something objective, something evil, that was done, and then there is the subjective experience of it, the memory of the event. The past cannot be changed; it is there. Forgiveness cannot undo the past: the window I broke as a child was still broken after my parents forgave me. Where forgiveness works is with the memory.

John Paul II: Forgiveness and the Past

What does forgiveness do with both the past and the memory of it? In his 1997 message for the 30^th World Day of Peace, Pope Saint John Paul II offers a beautiful reflection:

The truth is that one cannot remain a prisoner of the past, for individuals and peoples need a sort of “healing of memories”, so that past evils will not come back again. This does not mean forgetting past events; it means re-examining them with a new attitude and learning precisely from the experience of suffering that only love can build up, whereas hatred produces devastation and ruin. The deadly cycle of revenge must be replaced by the new-found liberty of forgiveness.

One cannot remain a prisoner of the past. That doesn’t mean to forget, but rather to look over the past, and see it with the eyes of faith. Things can be evil in different ways: some things, like murder and child abuse, are always wrong. Sometimes circumstances or other factors play into another’s culpability. All this is “the past”: all its hurts and wrongs. It is not to be ignored or forgotten, but examined. This examination considers, not just the way we feel about something, but all the bits and pieces that play into that hurt.

How to View the Past

In the same message, while speaking about forgiveness between peoples and cultures (with words that apply even to individuals), the Pope explains what this examination of the past means:

We must learn to read the history of other peoples without facile and partisan bias, making an effort to understand their point of view. This is a real challenge also on the level of education and culture. This is a challenge for civilization! If we agree to set out on this journey, we shall come to see that mistakes are not all on one side. We shall see how history has sometimes been presented in a distorted and even manipulated way, with tragic results.

A correct reading of history will make it easier to accept and appreciate the social, cultural and religious differences between individuals, groups and peoples. This is the first step towards reconciliation, since respect for differences is an inherently necessary condition for genuine relationships between individuals and between groups. The suppression of differences can result in apparent peace, but it creates a volatile situation which is in fact the prelude to fresh outbreaks of violence.

To view the past rightly means to see it in its circumstances and details, the factors and cultures that were present then. Only then can forgiveness take place: it is the first step.

For Today – Peace and Justice

Without that first step, neither forgiveness nor the healing it brings can take place. You can tear down statues and ban flags; you can be against certain policies or ways of thinking, and you might be justified. But to classify certain groups as inherently racist, lazy, oppressive, or discriminatory, especially when these groups hail from past centuries, without seriously considering the objective past, is to impede and prevent the very first step to healing wounds.

A common cry we hear is “No justice, no peace!” which is a shortened form of the adage “If you want peace, work for justice.” I completely agree. However, justice means to give everyone their due: this requires “a correct reading of history.”

Perhaps the people we think are at fault are not really as to blame as we might think. Maybe, in their age and context, they did the best they could. Or, alternatively, maybe the person or persons to blame in fact did horrible things, knowing such things were wrong and doing them nonetheless. It is certainly possible, and yet, as C. S. Lewis comments in his essay on forgiveness, this is precisely the paradox:

One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one per cent of guilt that is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Towards the end of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Joke, one of the characters offers a profound insight: “To live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.” Is it any wonder that our society increasingly resembles hell, complete with burning fires and screams of despair?

The path out of hell is found in forgiveness, but it is a path that requires acknowledging and analyzing the past, and then the memory can be healed.

“For Christians, memory is too lofty and noble a sanctuary to be defiled by human sin. Certainly, sin can painfully damage the fabric of memory, but it cannot tear it asunder: that fabric is like the seamless garment of the Lord Jesus, which no one dared to divide” (John Paul II, Address to the Catholic Bishops of Greece, Friday, 4 May 2001).