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| Emily S. Pruszinski (the author) |
Too often throughout history leaders and members of the church have provided theological cover for injustices both small and great in scale. Too often the church has reaped the benefits of injustice instead of refusing to receive ill-gotten gain, or denounce those who exploited their fellow human beings. Too often members of the church, out of greed and a lust to dominate, have actively participated in perpetrating injustice, all while remaining “in good standing” within their local church bodies. Too often the church actively promotes a culture of forgetfulness, in which the details of these stories are quickly and conveniently forgotten. In each case, the victims of injustice are ignored, their cries unheard or silenced, their stories buried or erased (the Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review has chronicled many such examples). But Christians have many good reasons to remember wrongs, and to work to make them right.
The opportunity and, dare I say, requirement to remember our past is integral to our liturgy. Throughout Christian liturgy we remember the past for its importance for the present. And in so doing, we remember, not just the life of Jesus, but our own past as well. This latter memory is most obvious during the general confession.[1] Confession requires memory of past wrongdoing, both recent and distant. And the text of the confession does not use I language, but WE language. We confess our sins against God and neighbor. We confess that we have done wrong and not done right. And this “we” language matters for how we understand memory.
As Christians we are part of a global church, and as Episcopalians we are part of the global Anglican communion. Each time we gather for corporate prayer and worship, and each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we gather not just with a single living congregation, but with all the simultaneously living members of the global church, and the dead members of both our particular church and our larger communion.[2]
Our present church community exists in continuity with those who have gone before us. Our group – the Church – includes its dead members spiritually, in prayer and in memory,[3] and physically, in the ways that our church architecture includes burial grounds, columbaria, memorial gardens, and plaques. We have integrated the memory of our church founders and former esteemed members into our buildings, and though at times we may forget, we are the spiritual descendants of these, now silent, but still present members of our communion. These are our religious ancestors. We may not be related to them genetically, but we are related to them through our common participation in a particular church, in a particular location, over time. By participating in, and being confirmed in, the Church we become inheritors of their legacies.
Our liturgy reminds us in countless ways that we are in communion with members of the faith both living and dead. But speaking particularly, using WE language in our corporate confession of sin specifically includes not only the people we see in church each Sunday, but also the people who sat in our pews fifty, one hundred, even two-hundred years ago. When we, the living, confess and ask for forgiveness, we do so on behalf of the dead as well.[4]
But there’s more. Through liturgical acts of confession and repentance we express our desire to walk in God’s ways,[5] to treat our neighbors in ways that would delight God, and to be God’s hands and feet on this earth. Our confession comes packaged with responsibility to do right by our neighbors here and now.[6] This entails fixing the harms of the past that continue to affect our neighbors in the present.
How can we do what is necessary to repair the harms of the past, if we forget those harms? If we forget who the victims were (and are)? The short answer is “We can’t.” Such ill-informed efforts will be misdirected and inadequate. Or worse, we will not even see how or why we should exert effort to make repairs in the first place.
This, in short, is the reason churches should, and do, engage in memory work. Widespread poverty, racial injustice, job and housing insecurity, chronic illness from exposure to environmentally harbored toxins, lack of access to healthcare resources, and violent police tactics are all indicators of a broken system. Our religious ancestors either actively created the injustices themselves, created the conditions for these present injustices to become possible, or suffered under similar conditions. Knowing the details enables informed and effective responses.
In Germany, generations born after World War II have had to work to uncover the evils done by their ancestors, many of which were deliberately hidden. This became known as the “dig where you stand,” movement,[7] and has been oriented around documenting what can be found about the past in an effort to work for a more just world. As Episcopalians[8] we too have inherited a legacy of injustices where we now worship, even when we don’t know it. For us to “dig where we stand” involves first examining how our religious ancestors perpetrated, and cooperated with harm. Then it involves allowing those memories to guide us as we discern how to take responsibility for reparative justice in our present. If we are to repent effectively for the wrongs we are implicated in, wrongs which continue to cause injustice today, we have to know what those wrongs have been so that we can take appropriate steps to remedy them.
Emily S. Pruszinski
Doctoral Candidate in Theology, Ethics, and Politics
Princeton Theological Seminary
[1] E.g. from Holy Eucharist I (BCP 331): “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable…. Forgive us all that is past…” Or “We confess that we have sinned against thee in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved thee with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” Emphasis added. In all this language the past tense is conspicuous. In Episcopal worship accurate memory of the past is critical to confession and repentance. One could argue that liturgically emphasized memories of Jesus are meant to provide a counterpoint to our memories of the ways we have fallen short of his life, teachings, and ideals.
[2] The Prayers of the People set us in direct relation to, and community with the dead. See, for instance, “The Prayers of the People,” in Holy Eucharist I (Book of Common Prayer [henceforth, BCP], 328-330).
[3] E.g. from Holy Eucharist I (BCP, 330): “And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear… beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service; and to grant us grace so to follow the good examples of… all thy saints, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.” Emphasis added.
[4] And in some liturgies we acknowledge explicitly that they have done harm of which we are the beneficiaries when we repent of “both the evils we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” The Church Pension Fund, “Confession,” in Enriching Our Worship 1 (New York: Church Publishing, 1998), 19.
[5] E.g. BCP, 331.
[6] John the Baptist’s proclamation “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt 3:8; Luke 3:8), and Paul’s “do deeds consistent with repentance” (Acts 26:20) are relevant here.
[7] Reinhard Bernbeck and Susan Pollock, “‘Grabe, Wo Du Stehst!’ An Archaeology of Perpetrators,” in Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, edited by Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke (New York: Routledge, 2016), 217-233.
[8] Though the same pattern holds for all Christians and, indeed, all people of good will.
