This Here Flesh Notes Ch 14 Memory

Ch 14 Memory Notes

“I hope when God brings heaven down, they bring with them the storytelling circles of old-that we would all gather around the fire listening to the ancestors, singing familiar songs. I don’t want to make it to the promised land if it means I forget the wilderness” p. 172

“Memory is frail. It requires a dictate touch, a tenderness…Sometimes it is only in the hands of another a memory of another that a memory can be fully encountered…This is the beauty of collective memory.” p. 174

“I think the whole Bible is predicated on collective remembrance. You have feast and fast days, storytelling’s and most conspicuously, the Eucharist. Z shared table and shared loaf. Take, eat, drink. The Christian story hinges on ceremony of communal remembrance.” p. 174

Road to Emmaus 

“The truest memory is rarely the one that survives” p. 175

“Why do we need to remember truthfully? Because every untruthful memory is unjust memory, especially when it concerns relationships, fraught relationships of violence’ Miorslav Volf said, In this way, communal storytelling can be an act of justice.” p. 176

“When a person or group has no artifacts to reconstruct their stories, things slip away across generations. People slip away.” p. 178

“we must learn to create our own artifacts.” p. 178 White people have a lot of these, perhaps over and above storytelling

“Bible says Samuel erected a large stone so everyone would remember God had protected them.” p. 178

Hagar Genesis 16:13 The God who sees 

“Traditionally, Western Christianity has replaced Christian habits of storytelling with singular and all-encompassing testimonies of a person’s conversion to faith. This is sad to me. We must recover a habit of very specific story exchange and shared memory if we are to have robust liberation.” p. 181