Offering: November 10, 2024
Dangerous memory
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Hi All, Just a quickie today, and no audio.
I’ve been revisiting Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine which is one of my favorite books. In it, Jantzen cites the work of theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who has advocated for two kinds of interpretive work, of suspicion and of reclamation.
When engaging a text, a “hermeneutic of suspicion” makes meaning by interrogating who it includes and/or serves, as well as who it excludes and/or harms. From there, a “hermeneutic of reclamation” works to change the ground in a way that would be generative for those who may have been left out or hurt by the text.
This is useful to me because it makes me think about how the work I love most is work that reclaims what Jantzen calls “dangerous memory.” Those meanings that have been rendered un-usual or outlaw.
Summarizing Fiorenza’s work, Jantzen writes:
“…such a reclamation is itself subversive: the memory of [those] who have been silenced and made invisible is a dangerous memory. Moreover, reclaiming their memory in a way that does justice to their struggles and our own involves a ‘creative actualization,’ a rewriting and revisioning of a lost or distorted past in order to develop a just future.”
“Dangerous memory” is a phrase I just love.
This week we learned who the next president will be. It is a piece of information that I would say triggers dangerous memory in me. But not all dangerous memories are traumatic ones.
When I think about dangerous memory I see a gazillion small gestures. Acts of consideration when so much makes care an impossible task.
I see reaching out when it’s hard, acknowledging harms caused, taking mercy upon ourselves and each other. I see working to not forget—and it does take work—how vulnerable we are with each other. Which is to say refusing to forget also, how powerful.
Dangerous memories are not only hard ones. They also include the ten thousand tendernesses which amount to a knowledge of miracles. To a living relationship with grace, which is when gorgeous things happen that had no business happening.
Dangerous memories include moments of being listened to so well you start thawing. Encounters with art works and stories that scaffold the chaos. Of witness which takes an account so precise tht gravity’s called into question.
These are also dangerous, iconoclastic memories. Surpluses of softness blasting out from a landscape that wants to be callous. They don’t belong, they don’t fit in, they shouldn’t be allowed. And they often occur on stolen-back, reclaimed time. Between shifts, up early, washing down bites of lunch.
There is a poem that to me exemplifies the reclamation of dangerous memory, and it is Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love.” It is one of my favorite poems ever. I read it a lot this past week.
It reads like a testimony to all the earthly gods, doing magic. Those nodding off on the bus home from work. Trading wrinkled bills for God Bless You’s in traffic. Pulling an hour as if from a hat, so the birthday cake or the dinner or the amends can get made. Those sifting the litter, trimming crusts off of pb&js, discerning what to say to the children. Those making budgets, doing unlikely things with thin air.
Here are a few lines:
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping
I really recommend reading it, and will see you next time.
Jessica
Hitting the like button is a great way to support these things! Thank you, <3