MemoryKeepers,  Attentional-Pie  

and Our Disappearing Church

 The organizations with which we align ourselves affect our thoughts about ourselves and others, our emotions, and our actions.  This can be true for the sports team we support, the business we work for, and the church we attend.   Our allegiances affect our identity, and our identity affects what we think, feel and do.   We grow to have cyclical relationships among our identity, the other people in our lives and our “organizations” (groups).

Most of us can recognize the truth of such a cyclical relationship, at least for the formative events that added to our sense of who we are as a person.   What seems to be harder to understand is the important role that our accessible memory of “formative events” plays in our current identity.  It is not an accident that weekly sermons at church cover, more or less, the same ground covered last year at this time.  The continuing reminder of the Word of God is a key part of the awareness and strength our own religious beliefs.

What we pay attention to is like a pie – an attentional-pie.  The more we focus on some aspects of our life, the less attention we have remaining to focus on other elements of our life experiences -- that could have “come to mind”.  Thus, as we consider our personal characteristics that affirm to us who we are (our identity) what comes to mind is necessarily a limited number of the possibilities of current events and events from our history.

Thus, our mind’s attentional-pie determines in many ways, what will come to mind as we think about who we are as a person. The role of memory for the stability of knowing our own identity came to me in an unusual way recently.  It began with a conversation with a friend who has Alzheimer’s Disease;  I’m going to call him Roger.

Roger was able to express to me that as he has a conversation, he feels a sense of enjoyment and appreciation.  He said those conversations bring him “happiness” of some sort.  For instance, I have recently had excellent conversations with Roger about his youth in Alaska and about the reasons he has chosen to open himself for challenging opportunities and new directions throughout his life.  He does seem to realize that in ten minutes he will have completely forgotten our conversation about his experiences. 

For most of us, a recall of our experiences is what keeps us on a reasonably steady life journey.  An ability to remember our experiences can be what gives us an identity (a sense of who we are) because we can “see”, in retrospect, our consistencies of thought, action and feelings.  This is an invisible, but extremely important psychological process.

Roger explained that he is OK with only momentary sources of “happiness”.  In some way he seems to recognize that something is missing.  I can certainly understand how hard it is for any of us to “see” something that isn’t there – although beliefs of all sort play a real-life role here.

Then, as Roger and his wife, and my wife and I were having dinner, Roger’s wife shared a brief story.  She and Roger were walking through their nearby river-side park recently.  They passed near the park gardener.  Roger noticed the well trimmed hedges and said to the gardener, “Thank you for trimming the hedges.  They look nice.”  His wife said that the gardener stopped what he was doing, looked at us in amazement and said in return, “Nobody ever stops to tell me things like that about my work.  Thank you.  It makes a big difference.”

The look on Roger’s face as his wife was telling this story (his story) was one of smiling intensity.  Clearly he appreciated this powerful story being told about himself – something his failing memory would never have enabled him to do.   It seems that listening to somebody else telling about the good things in life that he did (and was doing) was the way that he now had to learn about his own identity – in this case, that of a being a good person who made other people feel good.

Being a good person is truly consistent with his identity as I knew it over the years.  But he truly had no way to remember and understand that, without hearing a story about himself told by somebody else.  Roger’s wife was, for him, his MemoryKeeper.   

The same dynamics are true, it seems to me, for the identity and values we have incorporated over the years that have come from the organizations and the people in those organizations with which we have been aligned -- such as our church.  The problem does not usually come from our lack of ability to remember things, like it is for Roger.  Our lack of remembering what our organization stood for last year or twenty years ago that affected our sense of who we were, is more likely because our current attentional-pie now only brings to mind recent events or only a few of the meaningful events from past years.  The breadth of events and values that were embodied in our church that truly influenced us in the past, are simply not likely to be recalled and thus considered.  This is a serious handicap because it can narrow our perception of our contemporary identity – who we are today.

Furthermore, who we think we are today, can be projected back on our perception of what our church has become as well.  For example, to the extent that we older adults think of ourselves as less capable and resilient, we may see our church as less capable and resilient as well and vice-versa.  (To the extent that we really care about our church, our understanding of our identity and the identity we perceive our church to have can be quite reciprocal.)

Importantly, these issues must be considered in any conversations about how to address our “disappearing church”.

We are, in reality, all MemoryKeepers of our own church.  The fact that we differ in what we recall about the meaning our church to us over the years is perhaps the most significant resource available to a congregation.

As members of a church congregation share their diverse stories (from yesterday and last year and 20 years ago) the reality of a complex, living (and changing) church becomes clearer.   When we combine our memories, hidden strengths and sources of resilience will emerge that never would have been recalled and considered with a more traditional, hierarchical approach.  These newly recalled resources can enable a church to consider a host of creative ways to find resilience in the face of change.

Note:  As the writer of this blog, I find myself becoming very emotional as I write the words of the last three paragraphs.  The reality of what I write is so clear, and yet the approach is hardly ever discussed, let alone tried (as far as I know), that I weep as “disappearing” increasingly becomes an identity of far too many of our churches – and an identity of far too many congregation members as well!

Bruce