Forgetfulness
I didn’t set out to make February “Billy Collins Month”, but it appears that I have. ☺
So one more of my favorites: “Forgetfulness.”
If you have a parent or sibling or friend who has experienced memory loss, you know how painful and frightening it can be. Memory, in so many ways, makes us who we are. We’ve talked before about the fragility of memory – we often don’t remember things aright – but when push comes to shove that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we believe we remember correctly and that belief, that memory – accurate or not – is what our reality is stitched from.
Which is what makes forgetting things so unsettling. It’s what makes us, as Collins writes, “rise in the middle of the night / to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.” If we can remember we can remain – whole, intact, ourselves.
But as I read Collins’ poem again this time, it made me wonder if we are not also all those things we forget. They happened, they contributed to who we are, and even if, like waves washing repeatedly upon a shore, they are no longer something we can point to or call up at will, they have nevertheless, like those same waves washing repeatedly upon a shore, left their imprint.
By this way of thinking, we are more than our memories – we are all those things that happened to us – places and people and events and accomplishments and heartaches and disappointments and joys innumerable. For even if we don’t remember them, others do – family, friends, loved ones and more. And when they forget or are gone, we have the promise that God remembers them all and, in remembering them, remembers us.
God remembers. The one who, in the words of the Psalmist “neither slumbers nor sleeps” (121:4) remembers all and remembers us and will, one day, call us back to ourselves.
But will God really remember everything? That thought, initially comforting, when taken seriously can become a little daunting. Do we really want God to remember all our worst moments and days, all our unkind words or thoughtless actions?
In one of the more powerful verses in the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah shares the word of the Lord that God will not, in fact, remember everything. That God is also forgetful, if selectively so. After sharing God’s heartache at Israel’s faithlessness, God promises to make a new covenant, one written on their very hearts, and then God also makes this promise: “I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
We are forgetful, over time often more so, and that makes us anxious for we fear that we are losing who we are. Yet God promises to remember us – and not only that, but also to remember who we really are, not our shortcoming and failures, but the persons God made us to be. And one day, when we awake in the nearer presence of God, we will remember all this as well.
“Forgetfulness”
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins, in Questions About Angels 
Post imagine: “Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Israel,” Rembrandt, c. 1630.
Thanks David: some helpful thoughts here, especially about God remembering what God wants to remember.
This is a lovely post, David, and wonderful reminders. Special thanks to Rod for recommending it!
Billy Collins has a marvelous way with words. He can use ordinary language to illuminate extraordinary thoughts. But you, David, have th ability to connect these moments of light to our faith and God and that is truly a blessing on us all!