The Gift of Unwanted Memories

I’ve been thinking a lot about memories lately. It seems that in the stillness of quarantine life, many of us are reconnecting with thoughts and feelings that are normally buried beneath a flurry of activity. In the silence, unprocessed memories emerge. This is not necessarily a pleasant experience; we would often rather stay busy than have time to remember. Busyness suppresses pain. That’s why many of us are addicted to it. And when unwanted images or feelings encroach on our conscious minds, we are tempted to grasp for something—anything— to do that might distract us. 

In the year after my brother died, I experienced this on a nightly basis. When the activities of the day were behind me, all I had left was the quiet weight of reality. I dreaded those few moments of silence between the end of my audiobook and the beginning of sleep. Thankfully I had good grief counselors who told me that sometimes, distraction is a good thing. If an audiobook helps you fall sleep, listen. If The Great British Baking Show can give your mind a break, go for it. If going back to work or staying busy keeps you afloat, do it. Healing takes time, they told me. Don’t try to do it all at once. 

But the danger is that we stay in distraction mode. We become skilled at avoiding the pain of remembrance, and we prefer to forget. This has obvious consequences. At best, it stalls healing. At worst, we repeat the history we are hiding from. Unprocessed grief even has physical repercussions: our bodies will seek a way to resolve trauma whether or not we give them conscious permission to do so. So, distraction can be good but it cannot be ultimate. We must also learn to embrace grief. 

Enter the strange gift of quarantine. This forced slowing is an opportunity to acknowledge the unresolved sorrow we carry. To let it rise to the surface of our minds, to air it out like an old blanket. Our bodies and souls need space to revisit the painful parts of our stories. We do not need to be afraid of remembering, for this is how healing happens—not by shutting out the past, but by integrating with it. 

Toni Morrison said, “The act of imagination is bound up with memory.” Dante Stewart recently elaborated on this in a beautiful essay for Comment Magazine. He writes about his experience as a black American, describing the collective trauma of racial terror—in its historic and modern forms—handed down throughout generations and seen through the lens of the Cross. The story of an oppressed people and their crucified Savior remind us that history is ultimately a critique of corrupt power, and that love will triumph over evil. 

This story compels us not to suppress the terror of the past, lest we obscure any hope for a different future. Stewart writes, “Maybe that is why memory is so powerful: it is the unbreakable cord that binds the pains of the past to the problems of the present and the possibilities of the future. Memory has a particular way of allowing us to ponder the actual and imagine the possible.” 

Seen in this light, unwanted memories can actually be received as a gift. They might be painful, even traumatic. We might need varying degrees of specialized care as we process and heal from them. But our integrated connection to past sorrow can also help us to imagine a different future. Our experiences of loss, abuse, neglect, dysfunction and disease can become our inspiration for compassion, care, wholeness and hope. Instead of seeking to graduate from pain, we can allow our pain to animate our love. 

This week I spoke to a woman whose experience of domestic abuse has led her to pray fervently for families struggling in quarantine. I spoke to a pastor whose personal trauma has deepened his compassion for others. And I remember my father, haunted by his childhood, who used to tell me, “I love you. I didn’t hear that very often growing up, so I’d rather say it to you too much than not enough. I love you.” He died when I was fourteen. His extra “I love you’s” now mean more to me than either of us could have anticipated. 

Unwanted histories don’t automatically generate positive imagination. They can, in fact, produce the opposite. Deborah Feldman can attest to this. She was raised in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic community whose heavy handedness was largely the result of unresolved trauma. I recently watched (binged?) the Netflix miniseries that chronicles her story, an adaptation of her autobiography Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots. 

In an interview after the series, Deborah acknowledges that her story is similar to many who have left extreme religious sects, but I appreciate her reflectiveness about the Satmar community in which she was raised: founded in the years after WWII, most of the community’s residents are Holocaust survivors, or descendants of Holocaust survivors. “It was founded by people who are struggling with the most immense trauma we can imagine,” she says. In other words, they’re not just religious extremists; they are wounded people seeking to restore what was taken from them. 

Grief is a powerful force. The pain we carry as individuals, and sometimes as communities, is weighty enough to send us in the opposite direction we intend. We think we are running toward freedom from the past but find ourselves repeating it. The only power strong enough to wield our grief is grace— the costly grace of a God who suffered his own trauma for our sake. 

So we must stay alive to our painful histories and the unwanted memories they bring. But we must also filter them through the Cross of Christ. For it is only there that the brutality of sin finds its reckoning and its reversal. Our wounds will never be erased, but in light of the resurrection they can be reinterpreted. This is the meaning of redemption and the texture of new creation. To quote Morrison again, “the act of imagination is bound up with memory.” In Christ, even the darkest memories can become the fuel for future ministry. What a gift.