Today, a poem to bring the word of the day to us.
“Forgetfulness”
by Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
“Forget” is an important, if not often used word in the Bible.
Moses, as he preaches his way through Deuteronomy,
seems to be very concerned:
Concerned that we don’t forget the things that we have seen,
Concerned that we don’t forget the covenant with the Lord,
Concerned that we don’t forget the Lord who gave it,
Concerned that we will forget God by not keeping his commandments,
Concerned that we will forget God and serve other gods,
Concerned that we will forget the times that we have provoked God to wrath.
God is too important to forget.
God’s covenant faithfulness is too powerful to forget.
God’s generosity in blessing would make one ungrateful to forget.
God’s commandments provide protection to us
that it is in our best interest not to forget.
God with a capital G is to be remembered,
while gods with a little g need to be forgotten.
Then, at the end of his sermon, Moses gives the children of Israel
an odd little command:
he tells them to not forget to forget the Amalekites.
I’m serious.
Here it is:
“Therefore when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies on every hand, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget" (Dt 25:19).
So how do you remember if you’ve kept the instructions of Moses?
If you remember, have you forgotten what you were supposed to forget?
At first this question may seem absurd, and even frivolous.
But it’s not.
Let me explain.
Being human means that six things happen in our lives most every day:
1 - We do good things to other people,
2 - They do good things to us,
3 - Other people do good things to other people;
4 - We do bad things to other people,
5 - They do bad things to us,
6 - Other people do bad things to other people.
Now, certain things seem immediately and intuitively obvious:
We would like to wipe 4, 5, and 6 off the list.
Sometimes people think they’re doing 2 or 3 and yet they’re really doing 5 or 6.
Sometimes we think that we are doing 1, but really what we’re up to is number 4.
Since, to quote Novalee Nation, “we've all got meanness in us,” sometimes we even do 4-6 on purpose.
These six things are all part of being human.
The Amalekites were humans who had done some bad things to the children of Israel.
Things so bad that you wouldn’t want to talk about them in front of the children.
Moses told the children of Israel to forget that the Amalekites even existed, to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”
Somebody wrote it down so that the children of Israel wouldn’t forget the command to forget. Ironic, hunh.
Ironic because it points out the extreme difficulty of forgetting when
someone inflicts a trauma on us.
Ironic because it also points out the dangers of trying to bury the memory
in our subconscious as well.
So what were the children of Israel supposed to do with their pain
and their memories of it?
What are we supposed to do with our pain and our memories of it?
We can’t, and we shouldn’t, forget the pain caused by other people.
We can’t, and we shouldn’t, forget the other people.
We can and we should wipe out the power of that pain over our life. And, until they repent and repair the relationship, we should wipe out the power of those other people in our life.
Absolutely.
That doesn’t mean that we forget those other people.
That doesn’t mean that stop praying for those other people.
It might even help if we can love those other people,
because then we can start loving ourselves again.
Especially when we’re supposed to be a part of the same family.
“It takes two to tango,” our dads may have told us
as we tried to blame the fight on our sister or our brother.
And we believed it, because much of the time it is true.
So when we hate somebody else for something they have done to us
there remains a little nagging voice, whispering in our ear, that says,
“There might be, you know, just one half of one ten thousandth of a part
of possibility that I might have, possibly, contributed to the problem.”
So, maybe, just maybe, to be mad at,
or to hate somebody for something they have done
causes some of that anger, or loathing, or hate to stick to ourselves.
Which just kills us. Much worse than it affects anybody else.
Does that mean that we shouldn’t me mad, or angry, or even furious at someone
who wrongs us?
Absolutely not.
Pull out your Bible. Turn to Psalms.
It is full of psalms called laments.
Laments are songs where the children of God have been getting mugged by the “others”.
The children of God get tired of it, so they cry out to God.
Unfiltered. Uncensored. Unafraid. Inspired.
Here is a small sample:
"Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers; seek out their wickedness until you find none” (Ps 10:15).
“The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and his soul hates the lover of violence. On the wicked he will rain coals of fire and sulfur; a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup” (Ps 11:5-6).
“May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that makes great boasts, those who say, ‘With our tongues we will prevail; our lips are our own — who is our master?’” (Ps 12:3-4).
Notice that the children of God are not asking God to let them break arms,
rain coals, and cut off lips.
They’re asking God to do it.
They want God to “cry ‘Havoc’ and let loose the dogs of war.”
This is an extreme variant of number 6.
And then they do an amazing thing: they leave it up to God to do,
or not to do, what they have asked.
First, they describe in great detail exactly how they feel about their pain
to the Creator of the Universe,
then they describe in graphic detail the kind of pain
they want their enemies to experience,
and then they let it go.
Probably not after one lament;
maybe not even after one hundred.
But as long as they’ve got a hold on the pain and anger,
it has a hold on them.
As long as we have a hold on it,
it has a hold on us.
We can’t stop the memories in the present of the power of pain in our past,
But the pain will stop when we stop giving the memories of our past
power over the present.
Forget the Amalekites; God has removed us from their power.
Forget the Amalekites; God has dealt with them,
or is going to, soon, and very soon.
Forget the Amalekites.
I know that this sounds simplistic.
Perhaps it is; but perhaps sometimes we just make the answers too complex.
We tend to think that our problems are too complex for simple solutions.
And that may be.
Yet sometimes the truth is that we just have to keep doing the simple thing
until it finally works.
Sooner or later the children of God have to decide:
Decide to go gather straw and begin making brick again, or
start picking grapes, grapes in clusters as big as a man.
Decide to parse out every violation of the Law they have ever done, or
praise God for the grace that saved them from that indictment.
Decide to bathe in the river of wrongs done by the Pharaoh in Egypt
and themselves in the desert, or
cross the river and wipe out the power of the past
by embracing God’s power in the present.
What do we need to decide?
Our Father is trying to awaken us out of our nightmare to show us that
he has disposed of our monsters, chased off our fears.
Now we need to recognize his face, remember his strength,
see where we’re at, and decide to forget the monsters.
Remember to forget.
Grace, grace gives peace,
Ron
