Rescue me

           

Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the temple, 
but they had hardly forgotten Him.

               The saddest kid on any given day at school dismissal can be found in the same spot, the stretch of sidewalk behind the church where students gather who have searched the parking lot for mother or father or grandma or brother and found nobody there to take them home.  The teachers can assure them, they may vaguely understand the vicissitudes of local traffic, and they may even know well that lateness happens.  But there is in that one child, for as long as the wait endures, the quiver of fear of having been forgotten.  

            Her fears may vanish when the long-sought car rolls up with the late arrivals, or she may have to troop back to the office for those awkward phone calls.  Never yet has a student been abandoned at our school.  Nonetheless, the fear abides.  

            More than once after Sunday Mass I have been approached by a young person whose family departed the campus with one fewer kid than arrived with them.  Usually old enough to take it in good humor, there may even be time to share the story of the time that a brother or sister was left at a gas station or rest stop.   Families in which this has occurred tend to have enough children to stir up a “cloud of unknowing,” disorder sufficient to make it easy to fail to notice one is not returned to the car, or forget  which children are riding with which parent.  In such cases, even small kids are somehow aware that there has been something more like an administrative error, rather than to think they have forgotten.  Although they don’t have to be very old to realize that they now have an episode they can deploy as leverage, possibly for the rest of their lives.

            But that flicker of fear and sadness that naturally appears in the eyes of a student whose anticipated ride home is not where it is expected to be reflects a basic human dread of being forgotten.  It is one of the worst things that can happen to a person and causes great grief when it cannot be chalked up to operator confusion or administrative error.  Anybody and everybody has a natural fear of being forgotten.

            Things happen, mistakes are made, the obvious is overlooked, and memory fails us.  All can contribute to a brief and regrettable episode of forgetting someone.  More alarming, and more damaging, is the possibility of forgetting somebody on purpose, intentionally reducing a soul’s presence in memory, one’s own and that of others. 

            Totalitarian regimes of the last century and this one have mastered the art of eliminating people from the histories of their people and their nation.  Faces eliminated from photographs, names stricken from lists, articles removed from archives, and conversations forbidden make us think of dictators in faraway lands.  But some of these have become commonplace occurrences more locally.   The internet makes it easy to manipulate one’s own online history, as well as that of others.  For some reason the destruction of monuments has come into vogue.  Even cemetery markers are being stolen and smelted for the bronze.  

            Not everybody is a governmental or revolutionary figure who decide that it would be best if some person be forgotten.  Other organizations and associations, individuals and even families can take steps to push some disfavored member toward the memory hole.   

Wrack your brain for a moment.  Look up from your screens and close the “feeds” that you follow these days.  Try to recall your habit of thought ten or twenty years ago, or even longer.  Who was on your mind then, whose name was on your lips?  What person or personality can you recall distantly, as down a dark corridor, of whom you never hear or think anymore?  Is it someone who needs you to rescue him from the quivering sadness of the memory hole?

Monsignor Smith