Made To Remember

Made to Remember

On a bitterly cold January morning, I visited a public storehouse of memory: an enormous cache of collective human consciousness and achingly personal artifacts. Together with hundreds of others bundled against the chill, I remembered the day we call 9/11 at the newly opened National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

Visitors moved into a vast space full of light and were strongly urged to watch a short introductory film before advancing through the exhibits. We queued up and quietly entered a small auditorium, and without being asked, sat shoulder to shoulder with strangers and waited.

For the next four hours, we wound around and down into the excavated site of unthinkable destruction, seven stories below ground. We heard the recorded voices of survivors, the wail of sirens, the urgent pleas of public officials, and the strangely calm reports of air traffic controllers. We saw crumpled trucks, twisted steel girders, and pieces of the planes once used as weapons.

The lower we descended, the smaller and more personal the artifacts became: crushed spectacles, an unused MetroCard, a melted cell phone, a single shoe, a printed page of instructions from a flight attendant’s manual. An insistent, internal voice begged, Remember this. Don’t forget.

The museum held only one piece of art: Spencer Finch’s Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning. It covered the breadth of one vast interior wall, and behind it rested the unidentified remains of those who perished at the World Trade Center that day. What looked like a stone mosaic was actually 2,983 pieces of paper, each colored a different shade of blue.

When Jesus knew that he would be crucified and his disciples would be left without the physical presence of their beloved teacher and friend, he created a memory with them. He gathered them at a table, blessed a cup, broke some bread, spoke mysterious words about their meaning, and ingested both with them. “Do this,” he said, “and remember” (see Luke 22:19). Try to remember today the color of grace and mercy, of holiness and hope, of justice and faithfulness and love. We are made to remember. Try.

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty. Everything in the heavens and on earth is yours, O LORD, and this is your kingdom.

1 Chronicles 29:11