To Be Remembered

Yesterday my family and I visited the museum at March Air Reserve Base, near my parents-in-law home in Yucaipa, CA.  We drive past the base coming-and-going from San Diego every time we visit them, and had long wanted to stop in to see the extensive collection of planes.  Moving (as we are to Washington) has a way of making us do all the things we’ve long meant to do, and so we found ourselves on a sunny and warm January day on the base.

Along with the many airplanes from WWI vintage to the present (it really is an impressive collection), the museum and grounds have various memorial statues and plaques.  As my wife will tell you in an exasperated but gentle voice, I read everything in museums and that includes every single name on the memorial plaques.  I suppose this is in part due to my anal-retentive nature but it is also due to a desire to remember, if only for a moment, those who have gone before me in service of our country.

Of course I wonder if spending a fraction of a second reading a name really is “remembering.” Other than a name, and perhaps a short phrase indicating cause of death, usually in combat, I don’t know anything about the individual (1).  Even so it feels like it is my duty to read the names as a sacred act, for who among us does not hope to be remembered beyond the grave? 

This hope is ancient, and the desire to be not forgotten a central part of our human experience.  It is also a central part of the religious texts of my faith.  We read in Exodus, “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph,” a verse pregnant with the impending 400 year curse of Hebrew slavery that came because the man who had once saved Egypt from seven years of famine was remembered no more.  After centuries of oppression we read, “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.” To be remembered by God is to find new life, the fullness of hope, and the joy of a covenant unbroken.

In the Gospels, Jesus Christ shares a final meal with his disciples.  Breaking bread and taking the cup, he imbues these common elements with sacred meaning, telling his disciples to share in the meal of broken body and shed blood in remembrance of him for what he was about to do—sacrificing his own life in the ultimate battle of life against death to establish a new covenant of grace. 

 

In the book of Revelation we read of the Lamb’s Book of Life, a heavenly record of those who will spend eternity with the Triune God.  In our popular culture, said book is usually referenced jokingly, as the recently departed await their fate from Saint Peter, Heaven’s bouncer and the keeper of the book, their eternal destination reduced to a punch line.  Even so, this image resonates with me.  Unlike the lists of names I’ve read on war memorials around the world, the names in the Lamb’s Book of Life are not venerated for their heroic sacrifice.  My name should not be on that list, for I have sinned and continue to sin.  I am no hero; I am selfish and self-centered.  I want to do things my own way, have often turned my back on God and taken the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for granted.  Even so, I am grateful that though I often forget God, still he remembers me.

(1) During my 2012-2013 Western Pacific deployment, I had the opportunity to visit the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.  We arrived only a few days after the burial of Master Chief Glenn Harvey Lane, an Arizona survivor who I had met while stationed at NAS Whidbey Island.  He faithfully attended each year’s Pearl Harbor and Midway memorial events and I was fortunate to have had a few one-on-one conversations with him.  Slightly wilted flowers and leis of shells were piled under his name, freshly carved on the low wall in front of the larger memorial wall that lists those who had died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.  I read his name, along with all the others (including a Peter Ott), but his was the only one I truly remembered.