more on Volf

My friend Brooke was excited to see the book blog up and running. She wanted to know what I thought of my most recent read, "Exclusion and Embrace." It's one of those books that everybody reads in seminary and one of the many texts with which I have to play catch-up.

I've heard, like Brooke said, so many good reviews of this book. For some reason, I found it very hard to get into. I felt like the first section in particular was off-putting. It felt like a primer of post-structuralism complete with "here's what Derrida meant." Maybe I am ultra-sensitive to evangelicals trying to make postmodernity say what they want it to say instead of dealing with some of the very negative theology-esque moments inherent in concepts like radical indeterminacy. Maybe it felt spoon fed.

But after that, I felt more engaged, mostly because my friend Matthew was most impressed with the section on memory and forgetting and it got me focused. I didn't buy it. Volf's thesis is that forgetting is essential to forgiveness. Being formed in a new, heavenly image means leave-taking of our earthly memories of wrong and wronged.

This made me think of Marilyn, one of the core members in l'Arche who is especially difficult to be in relationship with. The only way I know that I love her is that I return in spite of both her continual refusal of my love. Even though I know she acts out of the instinct of one who survived life long abuse and therefore imagines relationships only on the plane of reward and punishment (and you can stick that in your Foucaultian pipe and smoke it), I am still unable to love perfectly. My inability to perfectly love her is magnified each instant I end our time with anger, frustration or pity.

Marilyn and I are both constantly enagaged with sin that so easily entangles. We are also being made holy by our willingness to return again and again as those formed by our memories of the cross. Memories build which make sense of other memories, and we actually begin to imagine differently. This is the fascinating thing about neuroscience. We actually remember in ways that are different than they actually happened. We aren't cameras snapping pictures. There is a constant flux.

I can never forget the first time Marilyn slammed the door on my face and told me with pure hatred that she wished I was dead, but that memory is regenerating. There are other memories which barnacle onto this one, memories of the time when I learned my friend had been raped, the time when I went outside and screamed at the top of my lungs in anger, the time when she bought me a lamp "for my marriage."

Isn't there something to be said for making sense of our memories and the great web of pain and grace that binds us to one another? Of letting the stories of others change us into seeing the intertwining of sin and redemption which lead us to be both oppressor and oppressed? That's different than forgetting; it's redeeming.

I felt like there were times when Volf got close to this but I never settled it. Please chime in.