Memory in Word and Deed:
Practices of faith in Orthodox communities.
PERSPECTIVES REMEMBRANCE
BY LENA MARIA LORENZ
In 1842, Charles Dickens described Washington, DC as a ‘city of magnificent intentions.’ One of those intentions had been to build a stage of remembrance: The National Mall. Physical objects are created to help the nation remember together and unite them through telling and living the history that everyone is part of. Initially, those objects of remembrance took primarily the shape of ‘classical’ static monuments, commemorating heroes and victories. A prime example for this is the Washington Monument, characterized by a vertical and grand structure, requiring a physical distance for the onlooker to see it. What such a monument offers is an encounter, a confrontation with the higher purpose, idea or value which it symbolically stands (literally, immovably stands!) for. It is a distinct portrayal of the unchangeable past for the present moment.
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By contrast, new memorials that emerged in recent decades offer opportunities to experience something from the past in a subjective and bodily way, allowing for de- and re-construction of memory that changes one’s prospect of the future. The first notable of those ‘counter-memorials’ (also called ‘non-memorials’) is also found on The National Mall: the Vietnam War Memorial (Washington, DC, 1982), which achieves individual healing through a holistic embrace of pain and providing a space for heavy feelings (as attested by studies and comments from visitors). International memorials that followed in that vein include the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain (London, 2004) and the Memorial for Murdered Jews in Europe (Berlin, 2005). Unlike the heroic celebratory character of the ‘classical’ monuments, ‘counter-memorials’ are often expressions of loss and grief. Designed predominantly along the horizontal (rather than vertical) axis and displaying multi-sensory features, they invite people into engagement (rather than standing at a distance).
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The two types of memorials can be broadly aligned with Henry Bergson’s (1959) distinction between ‘image memory’ and ‘habit memory.’ Image memory recalls the past through cognitive representation; habit memory relives the past in the present through bodily action. Image memory affords a sense of history; habit memory is created in community. Or, as one practising Orthodox Jew put it in a personal conversation with me recently, one is knowledge of facts of the past and the other is the memory that we live by through practice. While a set of doctrine or shared values (‘cognitive representation’) may seem to be the defining and distinguishing feature of faith, it is the shared practices (‘bodily action’) that binds a religious community together. Intellectual knowledge and embodied practices go, of course, hand in hand in most religions. But it is in the bodily inhabiting and doing that memory becomes meaningful and potent, establishing identity for the individual and a sense of rootedness in the communion of believers past and present. Members of the Jewish Orthodox community emphasise everyday religious practice when asked about memory:
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‘[In] Judaism … there's deep historical connections in everything that we do. In every single way … it's almost hard to separate broadly Jewish practice from history.’
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‘that for me is a meaningful reason why I have traditional practices because it does kind of connect me to … this kind of broader like chain of tradition and … the connection that I have with my practice … it feels like it reaches, reaches back into history.’
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In the Christian Orthodox community, crucial practices are the ritual of crossing oneself and bowing and being led through the movements of a liturgical service:
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‘these being physical movements and actions like I feel like helps again with the awakeness of it, of like feeling spiritually awake, but also like more physically aware of your form, and like of your senses of like physically bowing, like physically touching your head and your heart and your shoulders when you're crossing yourself … it's like bringing that kind of like grounding of the human body and of your senses and like experiencing it in a more physical way.’
‘Cross yourself the right time in the right way and it changes who you are. It changes what you know, it changes your relationship to the community.’
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‘that foundation structure that forms my personal identity … it's the cornerstone by which …everything else branches out, so to speak.’
With this witness to the power of lived memory in religious communities, what could practices of memory look like in the secular society that help binding the nation together? And what is the role of monuments – traditional and new – for a culture of remembrance? One woman from the Jewish Orthodox community looks at it this way:
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‘I don't think we have that level of like historical connection in our daily lives … there's monuments, … maybe the plaque somewhere that says like on this spot this happened, but I don't think we have like traditions that tie us into like anything that happened before in America, and like you can live in America and not know the history and be a great American. But it's really hard to be an active Jew and not understand the history, because that is what it means to like practice Judaism.’
It thus seems that faith communities with their long history of lore in word and deed are able to speak to what is lacking in national, historical remembrance, as highlighted by a young men in the Christian Orthodox community:
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‘the iconography … the prayer rules … that uncompromising sense of structure in light of like a
rapidly changing world … just like it's never changing. It's never going to, you know, compromise to whatever is going on, whatever is in vogue. … it's just that appeal that, like I'm worshiping in the same way as someone that's worshiping 200 years ago at the very beginning of the country, and you go back 500 years ago when North America was being settled. You know, and you go back a thousand years, … and so forth. And there's just something about being a part of that link … It's very appealing, especially with everything like, you know, changing whether that be like a pandemic or new administration. … It's just being part of something that's … never changing. This is, it is what it is, very, very appealing to me, to say the least … and being part of that tradition of being part of like eternity, I feel, is a very calming effect, so to speak.’
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​​My engagement with Jewish and Christian Orthodox congregations in the Washington, DC metro area therefore seeks to identify what secular culture may learn from faith communities about remembering well and maybe inspire a different way of practicing citizenship.