Rev. Joseph Boyd
When I worked as a chaplain in a nursing home, I visited a woman every week named Marie. She had Alzheimer’s. I would walk in the room, and she would forget that I had seen her the week before. Marie had pictures of her family on the wall…she would tell me how proud she was of her granddaughter who had the guts to move to New York City to pursue her dream of being a dancer. She was worried about her…concerned that the city was a dangerous place for a young woman. She was glad she didn’t have to live there. Marie forgot that she lived in a room in the heart of Manhattan. In her mind, she was in her house in iowa, and I was stopping by her house for a visit. Sometimes she would think I was her father, sometimes her husband. I was trained that it was cruel to correct her misconception…I was instructed to go along with whoever she thought I was without encouraging it or deny it. Although the person she believed me to be was different every time, she always asked me the same question. Even though she asked me the same question every time, it felt new and fresh, and I felt it every time she asked it. She would ask me as both her husband and father – Would you hold me?
I would explain to her that I wasn’t allowed to hold her, but I could certainly hold her hand while we spoke, and she settled for that. I would hold Marie’s hand while we spoke for 15 minutes or so, and then I’d get up to leave. She told me to come by again soon, and I told her I would.
As I visited with Marie, I was impressed that she seemed so certain of her world, and who she was. And her need was always present, even if the circumstances changed, even if she thought i was a different person week to week – Will you hold me?
I have felt a temptation at certain times to forget who I was….to move on, start from scratch, be a blank slate. I’ve done this through moves, through new relationships, new jobs. It is only recently that I’ve attempted to remember who I was…who I remembered myself to be as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, and integrate into my present life. But remembering is tricky business. In the process of remembering we are building on the past, not uncovering it. Our remembering gives our past texture, color, even meaning – remembering is a process of moving forward not backward.
Forgetting who we were is often an act of survival, a protection of our present from complexity, confusion, challenge.
As humans, and especially as Americans, we crave simple narratives. We crave to know what is really going on. We yearn to know who we are.
My story is an American story. I come from people on both sides of my family who willingly engaged in a process of forgetting in order to become who they believed they could be in America. My mother’s family is East Indian, and they were taken to Fiji by the British to work as indentured servants, cultivating and picking sugar cane for the British Empire. My mother was the first person in her family to immigrate to the United States, coming through Canada. I remember asking my mother why she never taught me how to speak Hindi, her first language and she told me – that would not help you in this country, it would only hold you back. My mother had a plan for me – I would be an American without any of the trappings she struggled with – she vowed I would never be perceived as a foreigner. My father is Caucasian whose family came to this country to help found Jamestown, a colony in Virginia during the 17th century. One of my relatives is John Rolfe who was responsible for bringing the tobacco plant as we know it now into the United States. My father’s family stayed in the South, most of them working as farmers or laborers.
Both my mother’s family and my father’s family moved to Oregon, the place of my birth for a job opportunity. They didn’t know anybody there, didn’t have any roots or connections. They came for the opportunity.
When I was at Standing Rock, a common question that was asked was – Where are you from? At first I and many others would answer with the place we lived in now, or for some it was the place in their life they identified with most. But we were quickly corrected, and given clarification. The question of “Where are you from?” is really asking: where did your people originally come from? I realized that answer for me is a place and culture I have a marginal connection with. Both sides of my family are immigrants, and it seems that each generation has brought about a new migration. I have continued that tradition by moving to Youngstown – another migration where nobody on either side of my family has laid foot yet. As I was driving away from Standing Rock, I became aware that who I was through both sides of my family is a large part of who I am today. Like my ancestors, I have moved without much grief or hesitation for the opportunity. Yes, there are places I love, places with many people I care about, but like my ancestors, this has not meant I would choose to stay because of this.
Given the advancement of technology and an increasingly mobile and connected world, I have moved several times to far and distinct places within my short lifetime. I have already moved more times than both my parents have in their entire lifetime.
It can feel easier at times to forget who we were. It is a difficult path to not run away from truths from the past that contradict our hopes, while respecting that ultimately by remembering we are constructing, writing anew who we were, what we were about. A history professor I had said that in writing history we learn far more about ourselves that we do about the time period we are studying. We learn what our values are, what our biases are, what we are trying to cultivate, what we are attempting to let die. Writing history holds up the clearest mirror to our present. In forgetting who we were, we blind ourselves to who we are.
Who were we? It was an interesting exercise we did with the help of someone who works with the UUA to trace the various ministers this church has had since its beginning. It has been a question for me in looking back on that list to see how I fit into this list – which aspects I’ve inherited that I wish to cultivate, and which ones I intend to let go off.
But a congregation is not just their minister – it’s the people who have committed their membership over the years – committing their time and money to this place since its founding. What was in their hearts when they first committed themselves to this place? Has our heart as an institution changed over the years, or has it been more or less consistent? Has it grown?
Our American heritage encourages us to forget who we were. Our tradition is innovation – innovation of the individual. It is a strong myth that each of us has the capacity to make a new life for herself, no matter what happened in the past. We can innovate. Our heritage is a creative one, but it can feel unsatisfactory – not because it lacks depth – but because we have forgotten its depth. Many of us come from ancestors who did not make it a priority to share the cultural tradition they inherited – they adapted to survive, and wished their children to have a different experience that what they had – so they omitted aspects of the past, difficult parts. Our American culture understands the past to be a thorn in our side, that with enough therapy and motivation, we can have the painful bits removed and yet remain whole, united.
The myth that has kept up this image of being united – being a united self, a united community, a united community is beginning to fray – it is no wonder that many people feel overwhelmed and bewildered. We yearn to be one. It is even in our own name – Uni – Unitarian and Universalist – each word begins with one, repeated for emphasis. The simplest way our name has been explained is One God, One Destiny. But we live in a different time now. Many of us doubt there is any kind of God, or even a destiny. Our paths feel so various, complicated, individual. At a time when our faith was being born in this country, the emphasis on the individual was a freeing idea – freedom of the individual conscience, the individual path, the right of the individual to write or rewrite their history. We now understand the limitations of this myth, the limitations of this kind of freedom. We are understanding that though we may feel like individuals who have the power to create our own lives, we all come from somewhere, from a people, and that past guides our creation whether we’re aware of it or not.
We can continue the story, but we can’t start over. We are not completely bound and controlled by the past, but we are living a fantasy if we think we can be completely free of it.
Part of the bewilderment at this moment in our country’s development is the underlying belief that we can be completely free of our past, that with each new generation, we are starting over.
Funny enough, I wonder if Youngstown needs the opposite reminder. Even though we can’t start over – in remembering who were, we can embody with pride ho we are. We can embrace our experience, without feeling limited by it. We can engage challenge with realism and sense, without despair that we can never get out from under this sense of loss and collapse. We can remember who we were with pride, not because we have all the answers, but because we’re still here.
In forgetting who were, we can forget that we’re still here, we forget all that we are. Our lives can lack texture, depth. In forgetting who were, we can lose touch with what we most truly need. Our needs as individuals, our needs as a church, and our needs as a country are one – they are connected. Our deepest need is to feel this connection – to be held – to be embraced – to know that we are not an individual story being told – but to know in the depth of our loneliness, in the depth of our forgetting – we are held – held in the depth of other’s loneliness, other’s forgetting.
It is not a sin to forget who we were. It is not a judgement of our ancestors, of our institutions, or our country. We don’t need to stand in judgement of a history we have largely forgotten. We must live in the world we are in. We must live even if we have forgotten who we were. We are being asked now to hold country that has purposefully forgotten itself. We are being asked to recognize those gaps in ourselves, the places we sense there is more to the story, but we’ve forgotten what the story was. We’ve forgotten how it began, and right now we’re in the middle of it. It’s a bewildering experience to realize you’ve forgotten something, especially if you feel the thing you’ve forgotten is really important.
The good news is that we’ve never lost anything. Forgetting the past doesn’t make the past go away…it doesn’t stop its legacy. Forgetting the past does not diminish us. The details of the past may be out of our reach, but the heart of it is never far from us. The past speaks to us through a messy combination of what we yearn for, and what we’re afraid of. The yearning to be held, the fear of being without tangible love. The yearning to be united, the fear of being fragmented. The yearning to be one people, the fear of being just another individual. Pay attention when you witness fear, even hatred. Pay attention to the yearning.
Our past is speaking to us. It’s reminding us of what is always present, always here, but forgotten. Our past is reminding us there is a vital deep life living through us, a life we have been taught to forget.