We often treat the remembering of history as inoculation or as a subjective experience. But it is the very stuff of reconciliation.
As we are called to set aside this day to remember those killed by genocide and those whose lives are altered by it, we do so from this de-membered state of isolation. Which makes this endeavor particularly poignant.
At the root of remembrance is the word remember. A word most associated with the act of recalling something. We remember important dates when our phones beep and we go, Oh shoot! I’ve gotta remember to buy a card today!
—Remember, recall, bring to mind—
And we plead with one another to remember important moments Remember the Alamo and never forget them.
The act of remembering, with its active mindfulness, attentiveness to a moment, is presently active. Something experienced in the past, even the recent past, has a veneer of the out-of-presence to it. Something from a whole world ago.
To remember is to engage with a past in a willing refusal to let it fade.
Those who know the trauma of mourning know that dynamic well—wanting to always remember and always wanting that physical pain of longing to go away. We ask each other When will I get over it?
Remember, Restore
To remember as community is to engage in a mass re-engagement with our history — often a history we’d rather forget.
To remember something is not simply to think of it. It is an act of restoration. Making something whole. To re-member a thing that has been lost and would otherwise be forgotten restores it and brings it into the present.
When we remember, we choose to bring our past into the present. New action becomes necessary. Even if it is belated. We choose to make it present. And that action brings a new moral culpability to act.
This also reveals the true sinister intentions of willful forgetting. The refusal to remember our broken past is purposefully distancing. Forgetting the evils our brothers and sisters have wrought is an active attempt to avoid action—to avoid restoration.
Remembering genocide brings us a kind of moral culpability for restoring and re-membering ourselves to those communities broken by evil.
It is the act of forgetting that ultimately aids the persecutors of terror. In the scope of history, forgetting makes genocide “worth it” because the “winners” walk away with power. And when we forget how the power is attained, we judge them as morally equal.
Ultimately, it is only the victims; the dead and displaced; which are themselves forgotten.
A Crime Against Humanity
Genocide is perhaps the most grotesque of human crimes—a crime against humanity itself.
The murder and scale are often what draws our attention and moral outrage. But it is not the whole of the damage done. For it is more than mass murder. It is a terrorism of a people and the total destruction of existing communities.
The crime exceeds the loss of life alone. It de-members the people. It reduces the population and wrests control from the people and places it into the hands of tyrants.
Yesterday we remembered two of our saints: George, the famous dragon-slayer and patron of England and Toyohiko Kagawa, a pastor, pacifist, and activist. In Kagawa, we see an example of re-membering and its cause.
In 1940, Kagawa was arrested for an apology. A public apology to the victims of Japan’s invasion of China.
In recent years, we’ve seen the church apologize for its role in slavery and colonization. And Canada apologized to its indigenous population. These are not merely attempts at personal redemption. They are acts of intentional restoration.
While many fail to see the utility of apology, these are active attempts to restore what is broken. And yet decisions many today think are useless were treated by the Japanese as extremely dangerous. Sending a public official to jail over it.
The moral calculus of remembering our past is to re-engage with sin.
And the act of remembering makes the sin ours. Not because we were there, but because we are here, now.
This is particularly the case with genocide—incredible sin for which we rarely see honest atonement.
In this, perhaps only the Holocaust serves instructive. It was a most heinous sin to terrorize a population, imprison them, and ultimately murder them with such ruthless efficiency, totaling in the millions. But the constant remembering and atoning the German people have done for decades demonstrates the true moral clarity that remembering can bring.
They have allowed the remembering of their sin to transform the ongoing present. They remind each other constantly through memorials to remember the dead and to vilify evil. These public acts of remembering transformed the German people and their country’s vision.
For the rest of us, it is their national atonement that brings hope to every community with a sinful past. We know how to atone because they have shown us how for seven decades.
Other genocides, including the U.S. genocide of our indigenous populations, reveal a perpetual struggle because there is no attempt at atonement.
Genocide came with the founding of the country, yet resumed in the 19th Century. The breaking of treaties and persecution of Native Americans throughout the 20th and 21st centuries shows the collective un-atoned sin of forgetting.
We use forgetting as a tool to avoid present responsibility for both our inherited gains and continued oppression. Much as the wounds of a long-ended Civil War continue to fester by way of unatoned sin and rewarded animosity.
The Earth
Today’s activists invite us to remember what we are doing to our own planet. The millions who have already died due to pollution and climate change are just the harbingers of things to come.
And here, I invite you to remember what the church tells us to remember about genocide. It is not only about the loss of life, but those affected and displaced by genocide.
We must rapidly increase our commitments to refugees. More refugees are displaced by genocide today than at any time in human history. There is no escaping our moral responsibility to help eliminate the suffering of these millions of people.
But this problem will be exacerbated by factors beyond ten in the decades to come.
At present, the UN does not give climate refugees the same moral status as refugees fleeing violence and genocide. But by the end of the current century, scientists predict there could be as many as 1 billion climate refugees fleeing newly and entirely uninhabitable parts of our planet.
It is not direct acts of violence that are dislocating millions of people today and in the near future. But it is our violence toward the planet that is producing the exact same effects. Which includes the direct increase in genocidal violence. Particularly over access to resources. This is why many call this an ecological genocide.
The Future
If remembering brings a moral culpability to our present, it also awakens us to a moral responsibility for our future.
The circumstances are all the same. Either we take the responsibility or we avoid it and pretend it isn’t there. Even as it sits in our laps. A collective attempt to justify through forgetting. So we can look at each other and say How’d that get there? It’s not mine!
A list of the world’s worst genocides includes three present ones. The Darfur genocide, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, and the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL. These account for up to 550,000 dead and many millions more are displaced right now.
Remembering brings a responsibility to act that is ambiguous. Humans have long struggled with how to deal with genocide. Even offering exceptions to our moral responsibility to make peace so that we can bring justice to people terrorized.
I hate to say that there are no easy answers, even using just war theory. For these bring with them new sins and new needs to atone for the evil we feel forced to do.
And yet it seems that the most heroic act is in taking responsibility. Especially when the impulse is to pretend we have none.
The Courage
It is courageous to remember. The genocide of the indigenous populations. The enslavement and forced-migration of millions of people and the evil of slavery, of pride. The evil of destroying reconstruction in support of white supremacy. And the evils of Jim Crow and its more evil offspring: mass incarceration.
It is courageous to speak not only to our own sins, but to the sins of the world. To pray and to preach, to work to eliminate these evils and restore justice to those places reigned by injustice.
It is courageous to name the evils of the world and unite people against them; not through violence, but as a bulwark against future violence. For the sake of the kin-dom we all pray will come, to bring true peace in our time.
We are called to be courageous. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invites us to being responsive to the pain and suffering of others. Not just our friends, but the suffering of people all over the world. And in light of that, to be makers of peace. For that is what Jesus expects from the children of God.