To Heal, We Must Remember

Table Talk

Setting the Table

Take a moment to remember.
Remember who you are, where you’ve been and who you hope to become.
Remember who we are together, where we as a people have been, and who we have the potential to become.

Then, as you move through this day and into the days ahead, may you find ways to embody love and bring healing into the world around you.

Our goal is to create a beloved community.
This will require a qualitative change in our souls
as well as a quantitative change in our lives.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Food for Thought

Yesterday would have been my grandma’s 86th birthday. It is hard to believe that 14 years have passed since I last hugged her neck, listened to her laugh, spent an afternoon sitting with her in her living room, or enjoyed a Sunday lunch gathered around her food and her table. I miss her every day, but I’m especially aware of that longing each year when her birthday rolls around, so I spent most of yesterday remembering.

I remembered the time I took her to the BB&T building in our hometown and she hollered (because that’s what you do in the south - you holler) from the front doors of the echoing lobby that she had come to meet her personal banker (because they advertised on television that every customer has a personal banker and she had not yet met hers). I remembered how open her lap was to her babies - even her grown babies - and how the last time I saw her, she let me lay my head in her lap to catch a quick nap after my day of graduate classes. But the memory that lived with me most this year was the conversation we shared on the afternoon of the Virginia Tech shooting - just months before her stroke.

It was in my first year of graduate school. On hearing the news of the shooting, I left school to go to be with family. Just as I was about to turn in the direction of my house, I decided instead to go by and visit my grandparents. When I walked into their home, I found my grandma sitting in her rocker, watching the coverage with tears on her cheeks. We talked and cried together - we grieved the lives stolen and imagined the pain of families who would never hug their loved ones again; we grieved for the students and teachers who witnessed the violence, and we grieved for college communities around the country and for all students who felt unsafe. Then I remember my grandma saying, “I can’t stop thinking about that young man and his family. How do you think he got here?” I had no answer and honestly hadn’t given him much thought. But her question did shift my perspective in one important way - it reminded me that he was not just some far-fetched villain - he was a person.

I heard her voice asking the same question 2 weeks ago, as a crowd of people gathered and then forcefully took over the Capitol building. They did so displaying symbols of hate intended to instill fear and incite rage. We can call them terrorists and insurrectionists, racists and white supremacists - but if we do not also call them people and Americans, then we do not face how this event lives in our collective history and memory - and we do not ask honestly of ourselves “how did we get here?”

Last night, our nation gathered for a memorial service to honor the 400,000 lives that we have lost in the COVID-19 pandemic and to acknowledge the overall toll this year has taken on our public service works, our healthcare workers, our communities, and our families. During that service, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris invited us to remember.

Remembering is a powerful, sacred act that has the potential to bring us together across the artificial lines of politics and to wrap us instead in the shared bonds of our humanity. “To heal, we must remember," President Biden said. "It's hard sometimes to remember, but that's how we heal. It's important to do that as a nation.” Our country, our communities, our families are in deep need of healing - from the pandemic for sure - but also from hate, from indifference, from division.

At my grandmother’s funeral, my cousin read a letter that she sent to him as he was finding his way through high school. In it she said, “You have the potential of being a great influence for good or bad. Take care of which path you choose and the compromises you make. Never underestimate the importance of both." We have witnessed that truth - that we have both the potential for incredible good and incredible harm. The paths we choose shape and define the course of our common existence, toward flourishing or toward destruction. Toward collective tears of joy or collective tears of sorrow. We must honestly face and remember both if we are to truly know healing in our communities.


We want to walk with you as you heal and remember this year. Let us know how The Welcome Table can be a place of refuge for you. Is it through reflection? Is it through discussion groups? We want to hear from you so that we can walk this journey together.

Thank you for being with us around the table.

Blessing

On this Inauguration Day, as we move together toward healing and toward beloved community, let us honestly remember who we are, who we have been, and who we have the potential to become - even when remembering is hard and painful. And let us then find ways to move toward one another instead of away, to pay closer attention to what is keeping us apart, to hear and see with compassion the needs of those around us, and to offer ourselves to each other in ways that bring peace.