Memory and Hope

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Munich, Germany with 40 faith leaders of seven different religions, who serve on the Board of the Elijah Interfaith Institute, an international interfaith organization whose tagline is ‘Sharing Wisdom, Fostering Peace’. This gathering convenes every other year, in various regions of the world, to discuss and originate papers which provide theory and research to broaden and advance interfaith dialogue. This year in Munich, just down the road from the infamous Nazi Concentration Camp of Dachau, the theme was ‘Memory and Hope’.

How do people in general, and religious people in particular, move forward out from under the traumas, persecutions,oppressions, and even genocides that are engraved in our collective and individual memories and identities? And how much more difficult and painful is it when those atrocities were couched in or motivated by religious hatred? In the deep and dense gloom of Dachau, where 30,000 Jews were crammed into a prison camp built for 3000, where even today it is recollected as one of the “better death camps” because they worked people to death instead of gassing them, how do we find hope surrounded by painful, agonizing memories that don’t just stay in their era, but are an active and integral part of the present?

Memories are an asset and a burden. As an asset, memory recalls and preserves what is most important in our religious, spiritual, and everyday lives. As a burden, it recalls trauma, tension, hostility, violence, and oppression, which implants negativity, resentment, or hatred of “the other”.

The interfaith discourse and dialogue was quite reflective:

– a Jewish insight offered that memory was malleable, and is transformed in light of the present.

– a Christian furthered the point by emphasizing that memory is an active process, and that remembering was neither neutral or objective.

– a Muslim participant was concerned about corrupted memory and how true memory was mired in human reality.

– a Hindu position was our problems were due to ignorance and the lost of unity with the Divine.

– a Jain attendee stated that negating the existence and legitimacy of others is negating the existence and legitimacy of oneself.

– a Sikh perspective presented service as a way to purify memory. He saw memories as lessons, so learn the lesson, then let go of the memory.

-a Buddhist insight prescribed the past as limited but the present as fully open.

It was the idea of the malleability of memory that facilitated the group’s transition into hope. We agreed that hope is affirmed in our recognition that our memories are not fixed, but always open to interpretation, restatement, and to new perspectives. Hope is affirmed in our ability to move beyond trauma, past pain, and beyond conflict. Hope lies in the capacity to reframe and revisit our collective memories and our mechanisms of human behavior. Hopes lies in gestures, rituals, and processes of transformation, repentance and reconciliation. Hope lies in our capacity to change and in the liberation of memory.

submitted by Imam Plemon T. El-Amin