GOOD OLE' WHAT'S-HIS-NAME. I'LL NEVER FORGET HIM

New Year’s Day there was a scene from a movie I was watching with my family and in the background was a sign that read, “We will never forget!” This was in reference to 9/11. Rather sarcastically my cousin said, “Yes we will.” I fear she may be right.

This summer my hometown honored all of the WWII vets that came from Barberton and gave them medals. They thought to hop on it since they felt negligent about not having done much for them as of yet and were aware of the Veteran’s Administration statistic that over 1,000 men from WWII die everyday in this country. It will not be all that long when those who were a part of that era will be gone and we will no longer have anyone to tell us about it first hand. Books and movies help, but they really rarely effect us in the we way or to the extent we need them to be for as Susan Sontang writes, “We can look all we want at a photograph, but if we can close the book and listen to music without hearing the whistle of a bomb dropping, ‘we can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes.’”

We as a people have notoriously short memories and time has a way of, if not personally, collectively healing wounds by placing destructive events further and further into the past, obliterating them from public consciousness and blunting the emotion of that which remains. In some ways this is good. It allows us to function. In some ways it is very bad as George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I suppose here is where we find the genius of the Catholic Church – the genius of God. Faith does not consist in building a monument to remember. Not only do we tell the story of salvation history over and over again, the actual story intrudes into our lives. At mass we are asked not only to participate by listening but by standing, kneeling, sitting, responding, smelling (although I’m not allowed to use incense any more) and seeing. We see the birth of Christ in our homes through the crèche and have a birthday celebration complete with decorations and gift giving. At lent (which is remarkably almost already upon us) we enter into the suffering that Christ needed to endure for the forgiveness of our sins through fasting, abstinence and penance. Sacraments are not nice neat little packages but messy, sense filled events that force us to live them, not just know them. Thus we eat, anoint, touch, vow, confess, and bathe.

Perhaps "We will never forget" is a better motto for a faith than a nation because we can’t. The story will not die with us because like our ancestors in faith we live it, are made part of that very history that gave us our freedom, why we must fight for our faith not to become something we tacitly celebrate but something we live and of which we become a part that we cannot shut the book on and turn up our music without hearing the nailing of a cross and realize how dreadful, how terrorizing sin is, and how normal it becomes.