Drona's "Manifesto on History" is worth some attention. I don't agree in any way with his conclusions, but I do think they are, in some respects, accurate descriptions of how we approach the past.
In 1850, Mormon settlers in Provo, Utah, where I work and used to live, killed a local Ute man they suspected of stealing a shirt, cuts his bowels open, and filled them with rocks so they could sink the corpse in the Provo River. When the Utes found they body, they were upset, and began shooting (or stealing?) Mormons' cattle. Local settlers sent representatives to Salt Lake City and, neglecting to mention the murder which had set off the conflict, secured an armed force and authorization to drive out or exterminate adult males in the local population.
My wife shares an article on this and other events in local history with her English class. I read the article a few weeks ago and just finished a set of poems about the surrounding events.
Why remember the painful past? While I was working on the poems, my five-year-old daughter asked what I was writing about. I told her I was writing about a very sad battle, where a woman got killed by a cannon shot. My daughter got upset and said "Cross it out!" Almost as if she believed that my silence would undo old suffering.
It can't. But my speaking of it, if I do so with an appropriate reverence and with the awareness that all people and societies are capable of making terrible mistakes, can help me have the "broken heart and contrite spirit" Jesus talks about.
We ought to remember painful history, I think, to learn humility. To get a sense of intertwined sacredness and vulnerability of life.
If we can learn to face terrible human tragedy without giving way entirely to denial or anger, I think we are on our way to more moral and intentional lives.
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I think it's interesting that the standard approaches to this difficult Mormon history are the two Drona recommends: either ignore it, or be made angry by it, and divorce yourself from the tradition it's a part of.
ReplyDeleteBut all history has violence and mistakes, and the most violent and mistaken history (Drona admits violence but does not admit mistakes) is the history of those who cut themselves off from the lessons of history.
We love to think that we inherit goodness and light from our ancestors. It is hard to admit that we inherit madness and abuse as well. If we are forced to admit that we inherited some bad, our judgment of the imperfect people in our past is often harsh and one sided.
ReplyDeleteIf we are honest, we are able to see faults in ourselves. Yet we are told not to condemn ourselves for our faults, not to believe that we are defined by our mistakes. We are told instead to repent and repair our mistakes the best that we can. We see ourselves four dimensionally, because we can see how a mistake was followed by repentance. Or, we can at least see three dimensionally, how mistakes and good exist side by side.
When we look at the past, we forget that people change. Our view of them is so limited that one action can taint a whole lifetime of good: we struggle to separate before and after, or "yes, once, but meanwhile." People in the past become 2d, and their mistakes can seem to blot out the good that they did.
Past mistakes, in ourselves or in our ancestors, do not dictate future failure. We don't have to fear their mistakes or ours, if we are willing to commit to live better in the future. That is the wonder of the Atonement.