The possibility of reconciled memory between peoples who have wronged and been wronged by one another is but another name for a church. - Stanley Hauerwas
I opened A Better Hope not quite at random this morning. I searched the table of contents and decided that, if I was going to read Hauerwas, I had better read something the title of which kind of irked me. The essay I chose was perfect in that regard: "Why Time Cannot and Should Not Heal the Wounds of History, But Time has been and can be Redeemed". Originally a presentation given in Northern Ireland at a conference entitled "A Time To Heal", Hauerwas offers the deeply theological, deeply cruciform idea that our most cherished desire as human beings - for community, even with those with whom we share a bloody past - must not and cannot be achieved through "forgetfulness". On the contrary, using examples from American history, the Balkan conflicts, and South Africa, Hauerwas is adamant that it is only through remembering, a remembering done in a certain context (the church) that real reconciliation is ever achieved. He calls the politics of this kind of real reconciliation, one that keeps alive the memories of mutual animosity and violence, that never quite erases the blood from our lives and lands, "illiberal".
The main point he is making is one that our too-often conflicted identities miss for its simplicity and clarity - it is God in the person of Jesus crucified and resurrected that redeems. Part of that redemption includes the redemption of time and memory. We learn to live together as we learn we pray together, he says at one point, and while that seems a facile statement in light of his insistence his essay that he wishes to overcome simplistic, superficial pieties, it really isn't. When we learn we pray to the same God, we are granting that we pray to the God who has made something that was formerly impossible - living together in the full knowledge of mutual hatreds - possible. It is God who redeems, who forgives, who makes not just the future possible, but the past as well.
His comments at the beginning of the essay are particularly interesting. Drawing on the American predicament of race, our peculiar modernist insistence that only through "forgetting" is reconciliation between black and white possible, is belied by the reality that we are a people for whom the past as history, sadly, insists it has no hold. Thus, the intertwining of our collective stories, black and white, as an American story is lost in a confused and well-meant but ultimately futile attempt to live forward without actually creating a vocabulary with which we can address one another in the fullness of our shared history. Thus, the endless cycle of resentment, guilt, fear, and rage becomes unbreakable precisely because, at a fundamental level, we continue to hope for a better future without acknowledging the on-going reality that the past still grips us.
I must confess that I picked up Hauerwas with reluctance. Part of me wants to hear what he has to say. Yet, part of me also finds him aggravating. Reading this essay, however, is a nice surprise precisely because I was inclined to reject it just from the title. Instead, I allowed myself to listen to his words, and to hear his insistence on the reality of God as the only true redeemer. As a critique of so much of the platitudinous liberalism that surrounds us, it is a marvelous theological statement. It is also humbling because it reminds us that we need to awaken from our dogmatic slumber, the dream that is the modern promise of a bright future with no past, in order to truly live as a people together.
