Slow Monday, with interruptions

It’s funny how sometimes I feel as if the day has run away with me and at other times as if I am out of sync with  my day, like a couple dancing together  and not quite able to match rythms.  This has been a day of continual interruptions: the doorbell, the phone,  a power cut, false starts and abrupt endings.

I went up to buy some bread and milk and linseed and a few bananas, came back without the milk. Watching my neighbour’s cat Tully sunning herself on an oak stump, her tail twitching, pausing to look at the neglected gardens of the old church rectory with its peeling gabled front  that dates back to 1812, wondering why they persist in planting marigolds and  tea roses and shrubby azaleas that do not do as well as our lovely  indigenous  bushes and trees. Looking up at the light blue skies and  thinking about the autumn equinox, the scraping of new moon waxing just visible in the day skies. An elderly man further down the road playing hopscotch under a honey locust tree, the small boy he must once have been peeping out for a moment. We never really grow old, do we? Came home and settled for black tea with a spoonful of sugar.

It is a public holiday here in South Africa,  Human Rights Day, in honour of the 69 people killed at Sharpeville in March 1960. Unarmed black men, women and children marching to a police station to offer themselves up for arrest in protest against the iniquitous pass laws. They were met by Saracen armoured vehicles and after low-flying Sabre jets dispersed the crowded, the police opened fire — most of those killed were shot in the back. Out of these kinds of terrible violation emerged understanding of the need for a human rights culture.

I was thinking about something that came up for me when I was writing a post to someone this morning,reflecting on the role played by memory in recovery.

In the mid-1980s, after the banning of  all democratic resistance movements under the State of Emergency in South Africa, many of us moved across to work for civil disobedience movements  within church groups (a complex topic this one — ) influenced by liberation theologies worldwide.

One of the most resonant  ideas prevalent at the time was that of  ’the dangerous memory of the passion of Christ’ as a persisting vision of freedom and liberation. This concept comes from the work of the catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz and his focus on memory as an act of solidarity, a persisting memory of what freedom might be for oppressed communities. The ‘dangerous memory’ was that of a commitment involving risk and the willingness to  do whatever it took to become free. A freedom located in solidarity, the ability to choose to be there for others, to seek freedom together.  A living memory that would inspire others to take the same risk.

This isn’t just something abstract in the context I am recalling — liturgical services were held for those imprisoned  or killed by apartheid forces and their memory was linked to sacrifices made for the sake of freedom. Despite banning orders,  funerals for those who had been killed  by police were attended by church leaders of all denomenations and thousands of  people, with speeches  talking about the dangerous memory  kept alive through martyrdom and sacrifice. The rhetoric was problematic for many, but the solidarity and hope  was very evident. And even today South African history is a history grounded in memories of resistance and the need to remember those who lost their lives in that struggle for freedom. 

In a way I think that for the last  two years at least, I have drawn on that notion of memory in a more limited and secular way for myself — to link memory to solidarity and hope, to put  my faith in those who stay sober on these blogs and  forums and in meetings, to trust that  if they are able to do it, I  may also be able to hold steady and come through, even if there are slips or relapses along the way, that I remember their experiences of  struggling with alcohol and those memories  are close to my own, that I remember how their lives and thinking changed in sobriety, that I share their memory of  getting better as they in turn know my story and remember how we have listened to one another. 

To re-member: to put back together, to piece together, to restore whokeness to what has been dismembered.

This all sounds a bit idealistic, so I am not going to say more — but it is  the only way I can put something quite powerful into words — that hopefulness in looking forward and  seeing myself embedded in a community of the likeminded, the creation of a shared memory of  overcoming alcoholism. Those who remind me why I stay sober each dayand help to keep alive the shared memory of why we can never, ever drink again.