Often, when a movie director wants his audience to shed a few tears, he’ll throw in a flashback montage. Have you noticed this? Even when you know he’s using pure emotional manipulation, it’s sometimes hard to resist crying. There, at the climax of the film, the character’s memories flash through their minds—moments that have new significance, new coherence, in light of present events. The people in the past scenes go about their lives, unaware of when and why their future selves will recall these moments. I don’t know a person in the world who isn’t moved by a good dose of nostalgia, hence the many, many montages.
But movie directors aren’t the only ones who employ this approach—so does the Psalmist. It took me a long time to notice that in so many of the saddest Psalms—the laments, the cries to Heaven—memory is presented as the best response to sorrow.
For instance, take Psalm 77: “You have kept me from closing my eyes in sleep; I am troubled and cannot speak. / I consider the days of old; the years long past / I remember” (5-7). At first, the memories make the Psalmist even more confused and upset. “Will the Lord reject us forever?” he asks. “Has God forgotten how to show mercy?”
Then things take a turn. He sinks deeper into contemplation of God’s past works, not just in the life of the Psalmist himself, but in the life of his people. He remembers how God rescued the Israelites from Egypt, how His “lightning lit up the world,” how “the waters saw [Him] and lashed about” (18-19). The reflections expand, growing larger and larger in scope, until the Psalmist is comforted by the glory of God that stretches far beyond his personal memories. His sadness is calmed like a storm.
Over winter break, I had this experience on a much smaller scale. I decided that my Christmas gift to my mom would be to take the giant box of old photos in her closet and finally put them in a photo album (a task she’d talked about for years but hadn’t gotten to, being too busy taking care of all of us). It was as much as gift for me as for her. The photos were from the earlier days of our family; some from before I was born, and the rest from years I was too young to remember. That was what struck me—that I didn’t remember being in most of them.
I didn’t remember, but I look so happy in all those different memories. My older brother and I blow bubbles; my grandfather lifts me up toward the Christmas tree; my dad holds both my hands as we walk by the ocean. Every time I’m wearing a nice outfit, it’s because my mom wrestled me into it; every time I’m covered in dirt, she would wash my clothes after. As I sorted through 500 pictures, it struck me that this was a small selection of an untold number of happy scenes.
God knew I would never remember the happiness of those days. He gave them to me anyway.
Thank goodness for the invention of the camera, if for no other reason than to teach me the lesson the Psalmist has taught for millennia. As I worked on the photo album, I happened to be listening to a musical setting of a prayer by Charles de Foucauld: “Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me as you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you…” This is what memory enjoins us to say; it’s the ground where both gratitude and trust begin to grow.
Even when we have to remember hard things, we can begin to see His hand in them. We can come to know the ways we were led (or are being led) out of difficult places, as the Israelites were freed from Egypt. We can start to know a God Who gives gifts we might never recognize until we get to Heaven. So as the Psalmist encourages us to do, we lean on our memory, trusting that experience will show us what our own anxious monologues and distracted prayers will not.
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