More about remembering - again, Walter Brueggemann.
...remembering also is not without its hazards. Indeed, the very psalm that exhibits the most resolved remembering is also the psalm that most craves vengeance:
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock! (Psalm 137:8-9)
These militant rememberers summon God also to remember, assuming that divine remembrance will lead to divine retaliation that takes the form of divine violence. Having done ample time in Babylon, Miroslav Volf ponders the cost and danger of remembering too much too long. He offers a compelling riff on the fact that forgiveness is linked to forgetting, just as vengeance is linked to remembering too long. In the first instance, makers of empire forget and practitioners of local tradition remember, for how else to maintain local tradition? In the elongated process, however, the matter is reversed. Empires remember everything; witness the oceans of records left by totalitarian regimes in which eery affront and every enemy on the enemy's list is preserved to perpetuity. Given such institutional, bureaucratic remembering, the local tradition of faith refuses the imperial practice: keep no police records in its heart. While Volf does not use our particular images, surely he would say that forgetting is the condition of refusing empire.
Witness the experience of South Africa. The imperial practice of keeping records was discarded so that a new life would begin. The horror of the past would be faced and acknowledged - but then - there would be movement forward without the baggage of the past that can eat at our hearts and cause people to rise up to be the perpetrators of violence that was once done at the hand of the empire. They were able - to a point - to remember just enough and then to let go for the sake of something greater than vengeance. I find that incredible. As Volf notes though 'forgetting is the condition of refusing empire.' Even with how hard it is to forget and to forgive, there is no way out of the cycle of violence than just that. Holding on to that which breaks our hearts and our lives will merely break down our spirit of peace and joy and love that is a part of God' beloved people. So, we give up what is to be a gift of new life for life that hangs on to a hell of a life. Unfortunate, but real for all of us. Together, the local tradition - the church let's say, must be encouragement to refuse empire.
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