Church and Thinking
Aaron (12:19:38 AM): midnight message =)
I think that’s a good enough introduction. Today I woke up to go to church, it being Sunday. Though the message I’m sure was good, I must admit to falling nearly asleep, such that I don’t remember much of what was said. I do feel better for having heard it, though it’s probably hiding somewhere in my subconscious. Sunday school was interesting. Supposedly we were to talk about the stories of our lives, which is strangely relevant because I’m currently writing the story of a character’s life in a book that I read for Core 102 (for my writing class). Hopefully I’ll be able to pull off an intriguing “interpretive lens,” as we’re supposed to do.
Anyway, I saw my life plotted on a piece of paper in front of me and it looked strange just sitting there. I think what was particularly striking was not the final product, but how it got there. Because I didn’t fill it in chronologically. I went nearly reverse chronologically, but there were things I couldn’t remember until they were connected with other things. For example, I can’t remember friends until I connect them with how they came friends. Friends from school were written after writing down the school. I guess it’s reflective of the way that there are entirely separate regions of my life, in terms of time, that really don’t flow into each other. They have to be connected in their own unique way. Unfortunately I’ll have to think about this more before I can tell you what that actually means in terms of concrete words.
Speaking of thinking, I realize that I spent most of my time today doing just that. Thinking. I mark it down to thinking, but I really hope I’m actually accomplishing something. It takes a lot for me to sort out thoughts. And I really can’t form them into words. I like to think that my thoughts are just too complex. Yet I can’t remember simple facts. I mark that down to bad memory. And while I’d like to improve it, the only aspect of life in which it bothers me is remembering people’s names. Oh, and school of course (where studying is about memorization). I think that, on the other hand, I can easily grasp concepts and thus understand fundamentally how things work. And that matters much more to me than memorizing facts.
There was an interesting article in the Sunday LA Times written by a guy who eventually married a Japanese girl whose parents lived through WWII with mom in the American Japanese internment camps and dad was a veteran in the much decorated US-Japanese regiments in Germany.
The parents and others of that era rarely spoke of their experiences. Tthat silence resulted in many forgotten memories, like a rusty pump, and fragments would burst forth as connections were made.
This was the anti-thesis of the Jewish experience (writer seemed to be Jewish descent) where every adventure under German oppression was recounted in an oral history that the whole family knew and recounted every detail.
The interesting consequence for the japanese daugther was that the kids never really knew or felt the anguish of the parents and they led normal lives, fully integrated into American culture.
The Jewish writer felt that the remembrance of past wrongs in his family results in sense of urgency to overcome the victim mentality and had strong impact on their personal identities as a Jew.
What we remember and how we choose to remember it affects who we are. Its a choice as to how much effort we make to remember.
It is actually difficult to reflect