Last year, an article called “Our Buried Sentiments” appeared in Touchstone and discussed public outrage at desecration of the dead. The article is brief, beautifully written, and thought-provoking, and you really should click over and read it now.
(I’ll wait, really…go…)
The idea that a culture defines itself by how it memorializes its ancestors is an interesting concept, because Western culture, and the U.S. specifically, has difficulty remembering histories that preceded it’s own “melting pot.” Yet, we still universally recognize (at least the author argues, and I’m inclined to agree), that our ancestors deserve respect, and that we also owe that respect to ourselves, as we stand on their shoulders to become whatever we are.
I’ve rambled a lot in the last year or so here about similar realizations within the microcosm of my own family. I was always one to eschew the past in favor of working toward the future, but I’ve come to realize (call it wisdom or maturity or just finally growing up) that my future springs from my present, and I would not have my present had I not had a family building a foundation in the past.
Our country is very young…naively young, I think, and we tend to not want to dwell in the old when we can build the shiny and new. That’s not a problem confined to the youthful U.S., incidentally, but this is the only country in which I’ve lived, so I can’t speak for others. History is taught in a way to make ourselves look good, and thus often distorted, leaving generations (my own included) ignorant of the past…and thus doomed to repeat it should we not find the motivation to educate ourselves. One of the ways we learn the past is by taking advantage of listening to those who lived it tell their stories, while they’re still here to tell them.
I know more about the Vietnam conflict from listening to my father’s stories of his tour there than I ever will from reading a textbook. The Vietnam Memorial carries significantly more weight for me because I have the opportunity to talk to my father about that era. There’s something different in hearing about the events from someone who lived them. Yet, as the author of the article you hopefully read a few moments ago points out, we shun not only death, but the elderly, pushing them away from us in the hopes of ridding ourselves of the visible signs of decay that accompanies our mortal existence. In doing so, we rob ourselves of our own history, leaving us stumbling blindly through the dark, self-assured and refusing to listen to anyone who might have been there before us, functioning as if we know the entire plot of the story even though we can only see the first-person perspective of a single character.
I have to pause, though, and consider those who simply aren’t fortunate enough to have a family that they ever had an opportunity to talk with about the past…a family vanished or fractured for whichever of the myriad of tragic reasons a family can be so. I wonder if our rush to anesthetize ourselves from old age corresponds with too readily accepting as normal the situations that can rob someone of their family moorings. The family unit progressively breaks down in our willingness to cheaply re-define it.
I was so young and naive to avoid discussion of my past. So often today, Karen asks me questions about my parents or grandparents that I should know from childhood, but don’t, because I could never be bothered to listen when the stories were told. Now, I have to take snatches of time visiting with family to catch up, to learn things I should already have known. That’s a huge mistake from which to have to recover, one that could have been so easily avoided had I just embraced what had come before me instead of cringing at the thought of it in my youthful rush to exclusively embrace the new.
Our society makes the same mistake. One of the values that religious practice brings to a culture is the discipline of confronting death as part of life. In doing so, the practitioners stay connected with their past. There’s something we can learn from this. When we bury our past without knowing what we bury, I’m afraid we’re burying ourselves, as well.