Memory verses

I RECENTLY HAD the opportunity to read a series of essays written by young adult Mennonites, essays reflecting on their "wrestling with the text." The text in question, not surprisingly, was the Bible, and their recounting of coming to terms with its complexity set me to thinking about my own experiences and what I've observed in recent years in American communities of faith. After rejecting the Bible of the fundamentalists, can people in the mainline reclaim this text? Would it matter if they did? As I listened to those young Mennonites, it seemed to me that the answer to both those questions must be yes.

I have to admit to reading their stories with a goodly dose of nostalgia. Like them, I grew up doing my "daily Bible readings" (we didn't call it a lectionary, but it was) and memorizing weekly verses in Sunday school. I not only learned to name all 66 books of the Bible, but I could find any given passage faster than almost any "sword drill" competitor around. By the time I was in junior high and active in "Girls Auxiliary" (the Southern Baptist mission organization for girls), I was memorizing whole chapters--Proverbs 31 being among the more daunting. I always took my Bible to church (and never laid it on the floor). My father's sermons were laced with impromptu references to dozens of verses that would buttress his points, so it was important to have a Bible handy at all times. While I might fail a Bible quiz today, I have a formidable reservoir of memory to call on, with words and images that remain a powerful part of my psyche.

I found myself wondering, however, whether my own young adult daughter has that same reservoir of memory. I have no doubt that she knows a great deal about the Bible and holds its values close to her heart; I also know that she simply did not spend her early childhood thoroughly immersed in scriptural words and images that can now be called up to guide her. Her experience probably falls somewhere between the intense biblical surroundings I experienced and the anemic platitudes many liberal Protestants pass along to their children.

Lest you think that last remark is uninformed prejudice, I should tell you that it is a worry born not only from my own research on American congregations, but also from my reading of studies such as Soul Searching, by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundqnist Denton (Oxford University Press, 9,005) and Choosing Church: What Makes a Difference for Teens, by Carol Lytch (Westminster John Knox, 2004). There is reason to worry about the ability of mainline churches to pass on their traditions. In sheer organizational energy invested, the contrast between liberal Protestants and everybody else is dramatic. Everybody does some equivalent of children's Sunday school (even Muslims and Buddhists); mainline Protestants, however, are the only group that routinely does nothing else. Everyone else has weekday programs or day schools or bar mitzvah classes, for instance; but mainline churches are more likely to sponsor a scout troop than to have a regular organized religious activity for their children.

Many mainline kids don't even hear sermons, since they leave for Sunday school after the opening portion of the worship service. And in many New England churches, religious education shuts down for the summer. Even a pretty regular attender in these churches is lucky to get 20 to 30 hours a year of religious exposure. Also, when children are in Sunday school, freethinking teachers rarely ask them to memorize anything, lest they be accused of indoctrination. It seems likely that these children's reservoir of biblical memory will run dry before they ever have a chance to reach adulthood.

In some churches, this pattern is more a matter of neglect than intent, while in others it reflects a genuine ambivalence about teaching children the Bible. Is all that Bible reading and memorization a good thing? Have those biblical images embedded in our brains made us too accepting of patriarchy, too willing to trust authority, too willing to believe? Perhaps. But I am convinced that it need not be so, that when we commit something to memory, it sinks deep and often resurfaces in surprising ways to meet new situations. Biblical fragments ("knit together in my mother's womb," "her price is far above rubies," "plans for your welfare and not for harm") happily can grow with us, providing both a touchstone to the past and points of connection to new people and new meanings. We stuff our memories with so many things (lyrics to Sesame Street songs, Santa's reindeer), why worry about adding the names of the apostles and the words of Psalm 23 to the mix?

Those biblical words are, in fact, the common language we speak as Christians, part of the tool kit with which we build ourselves and our communities of faith. If nothing else, the Bible's existence means that we do not have to start from scratch in building a community of faith. And its infinitely multivocal and multiform self also means that there is plenty of material to work with as we and our communities change. Thinking again about how scripture works, I have become convinced that having a canon matters, not just because the words are uniquely inspired or holy or true, but because this is the core set of stories that we've all agreed to share and that have shaped us and our forebears in manifold ways.