Malleable Memories and the Gospel

I was listening to NPR Sunday afternoon. They were doing an utterly fascinating piece on memory, and how we construct and tell the stories of our lives. I am completely bummed out that I can’t find a summary of the program anywhere on the NPR website, so I will recall what I can.

The gist of the story was that the more we re-tell a memory, the less accurate it tends to become, and the more removed it becomes from the actual event. Take a couple who shares a first kiss. Except for the first time one of them describes it, that person’s subsequent re-tellings of the first kiss are built, neurologically speaking, on the previous memory of the kiss, not the event itself! What this means is that if any details from the actual event are embellished, left out, or otherwise altered in the memory, they become imprinted and part of the event itself.

Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist at UC-Irvine and UW who has done a lot of writing on memory and its “malleability”. She is particularly interested in applications to the legal system; a 2003 article she wrote in Nature begins as follows:

"The malleability of memory is becoming increasingly clear. Many influences can cause memories to change or even be created anew, including our imaginations and the leading questions or different recollections of others. The knowledge that we cannot rely on our memories, however compelling they might be, leads to questions about the validity of criminal convictions that are based largely on the testimony of victims or witnesses. Our scientific understanding of memory should be used to help the legal system to navigate this minefield."

Among other things, she has run experiments showing how easy it is to manipulate peoples’ memories, including implanting false memories of events that never took place. Subjects recounting those events, however, were firmly convinced that they had. Fascinating stuff, and much more that I plan to read up on.

Here’s what it got me thinking: I have heard the gospel stories about Jesus be defended as being historically accurate in several ways, including: because they were written by eye witnesses to the events; because they were written within the lifetimes of people who would be able to refute their truth (40-70 years after the fact) [thanks Heather for the correction]; because the written records of the events of Jesus’ life were merely formalizing what was a strong oral tradition at the time.

I don’t know much about oral tradition, though I have heard that it was a very serious discipline of exactly passing on a story, verbatim, from one person to another. (Does anyone know more about this?)

Loftus’s research seems to suggest that it is possible that, over the course of probably countless verbal re-tellings of the events of Jesus’ life, the “memories” could have changed and morphed, either by altering details of the story or even adding events that literally never happened.

Loftus is apparently quite a controversial figure – not everyone agrees with or likes her research. But hers is a pretty interesting research thread that could have implications for how much stock Christians put in the “eye witness account” defense of the gospels.

Our Gracious Father's Most Amazing Grace In Jesus

My older sister has an old high school friend who has always been "on fire" for Jesus, even way back in the day when we all went to the public high school together. Seriously. The amount of enthusiasm he carried around was unmatched by anyone else I knew at church. He was even more in love with Jesus than my youth pastor. I was never terribly close to "Dave" though I did go to his wedding with my sister some 10 years ago. But he is the kind of person who, if I saw him today, would envelop me in a gigantic bear hug and ask how my spiritual life is going. Perhaps you know similar people.

Somehow, years ago, I got on his mailing list and every month or two I get a kind of "Jesus Pep Talk" email in my inbox. It usually includes an opening anecdote that Dave then ties to some scripture to remind us that Jesus is our All in All. He then invites us to pray with him. This is a typical prayer:

Gracious Father, we are humbled by Your Most Amazing Grace in JESUS that invites & makes it possible for us to be a part of Your Winning Team! Lord, we acknowledge that we often lack the “Winning Attitude” of Your Son. You gave us Your Mighty Holy Spirit to empower us with JESUS’ Winning Attitude that surrenders to You & seeks to glorify You in all things. O Lord, forgive us for not submitting to the Spirit & not trusting in You at times. In 2007, bless each of us with an overriding knowledge & awareness of Your Victory at Calvary. O Lord, You are the Eternal Victor & we are so grateful that You so graciously shared Your Victory with us through JESUS. We submit to Your Purpose & Plan for 2007. Let us not be distracted by the circumstances. Help us to be about abiding in You & being completely Yours! May we be instruments that You can use in any circumstances to glorify Your Son in the Highest!!! It’s in the Name of the One Who is FOREVER VICTORIOUS, JESUS CHRIST, we pray. AMEN.

My sister at some point changed her email address and made it a point not to tell Dave - and made me swear not to give it to him. Now every so often I will forward her Dave's emails and we will share a giggle over it, and she will express relief that she no longer receives them.

But here is the thing: I know this comes from a very heartfelt and sincere place, and I know Dave is just trying to encourage his brothers and sisters in Christ. So why do his missives make me so uncomfortable?

Easter Lies and Old Boyfriends

I told a lie on Easter, of all days. I might as well have poked the risen triumphant Jesus in the eye. I was in a foreign country for work. Friends living there invited me to go to church with them. I am a Christian and therefore of course I wanted to go. It is what Christians do on Easter Sunday: we go to church and we celebrate Jesus. I have been a Christian for almost thirty years. That is saying a lot because I am only 32.

The 100-minute Easter service featured a 30-minute CCM-inspired musical tribute to the passion of Christ, clips from the “Jesus Film” in which our Savior was, naturally, white (did I mention I was in east Asia at the time?), and a 20-minute altar call during which an unfortunately timed movement of my head made the pastor think I had just accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I hardly breathed for the rest of the altar call for fear that the pastor would invite me onstage to share my newfound joy in the Lord.

It was when my friend asked what I thought of the white-Jesus Easter service in Asia that the lie spilled across my lips: “I liked it,” I said brightly. “Just like at home.”

Obviously I hated it (and on reflection, she probably knew that). Every pore of my body was screaming to get out of that oversize auditorium with oversize banners and oversize preacher personalities making oversize statements about the boundless joy, everlasting hope, and unquenchable life that Jesus rising from the dead gives us.

It’s not just that this was a supremely cheesy Easter service (though it was). This is the deal: I don't have boundless joy or everlasting hope; I am tired and disappointed and unsure of who the Alpha and Omega is. For me this is a very unsettling thing to say because until about two years ago, I had problems, sure, but God himself was never really in question. And now he/she/it is. And we know God is really in question because I just now went back and added the “slash-she-slash-it” to the pronoun he in that last sentence and I used to be very traditional and comfortable just calling God “he”.

But you can’t really say any of this serious doubting stuff to people, or at least not the people in my church/faith/religion community. If you do, you immediately set off marathon prayer sessions, friends ask if they can lay hands on you, people suggest seeing a Christian counselor (God forbid you should go see a secular counselor) and above all, they gaze at you with concern in their eyes and wonder what you’ve done (read: sin) to create distance between yourself and God. I am reminded here of a joke that goes like this: an old married couple is driving down the road in an old truck with one of those bench seats that extends all the way across the cab. The wife looks at her husband and says: “Earl, how come we sit so far apart in the truck these days? We didn’t used to. We used to cuddle up!” Earl responds: “I don’t know, Edith…but I’m not the one who moved.” This is how most (conservative) Christians view other Christians who are having a hard time with God: it’s always the Christian’s fault because, as we all know, God doesn’t change.

In my younger, more zealous and certain Christian days I prayed fervently that I would never become what I think I am becoming: a doubting, unsure, frustrated, person who is disillusioned with what life handed her and is blaming God for it. Apparently I have changed.

I know I sound like a bad after-school special, or just very cliché. But I have been carrying around a load, a burden, about the size of a house on my back for some time now. I’d like to thank my ex-ex-heartbreaker-boyfriend (not the gay one – a later one) for helping me notice it. We dated for 7 months before he unexpectedly dumped me, and I have finally found the perfect way to describe our relationship: he was like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby courts Maryann like mad and it’s magical and happy and the chemistry is palpable and nobody sees it coming when Willoughby breaks things off. Maryann almost dies of heartache. In Jane Austin’s story it of course comes to light that Willoughby is a shallow bastard who knocked up some other girl and marries rich in order to pay child support. I am still waiting for confirmation that my ex-ex-boyfriend has done the same thing, but I draw a certain comfort from the otherwise strong parallel to my relationship.

Anyhoo: Heartbreaker helped me notice the house on my back because for a long time after we broke up I prayed that we would get back together. And I swear that God himself was telling me to pray for that, and he was sending all these weird signs to confirm that that’s what he wanted me to pray for. And, duh, we didn’t get back together. The guy never spoke to me again, in fact. So I got all disillusioned with my prayer life, and how I must have only imagined that God wanted me to pray all that stuff, but then I thought that that doesn’t make any sense because it felt exactly like other times when I’ve been convinced God wanted me to pray a certain way (and that the things came to pass afterward that I had prayed for) and so how could I retroactively say that God must not have been leading me in that way, and how could I tell the difference anyway, and what kind of God would be so cruel as to make one of his Children all hopeful and then crush the hope in a big fell swoop? And what’s with this God that had His Old Testament People smite all their enemies, killing women and children and basically committing genocide, when now good Christians say that’s wrong and terrible and we should stop Rwanda and Sudan? Who the crap is this God?

And this is the load I've been carrying around: I've been assuming that, by following the "rules" (oh, but we're not legalistic around here, are we?) and being an exceptional example of the (Accomplished) Good Girl, that God would do his part and give me what I want. Probably, this is very obviously not true to most readers, and it even sounds ridiculous when I say it because theologically of course it's not true, we're not promised anything like that in any version of Conservative Christianity except for the Prosperity Gospel people who have that whole "name it and claim it" idea, which almost everybody else within Conservative Christianity recognizes as a load of hooey.

But there you have it: that idea has been wired into my subconscious for many, many years, and only now am I pulling it out of its dark little place in my brain to turn it around, play with it, figure out how it got there, and decide what to do with it now.