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How We Remember Tomorrow is Memorial Day. A day to honor those who have died in military service to our country. Historically it is said to have originated after the civil war when graves of both union and confederate were decorated. In the South, it is often referred to as “Decoration Day” and it is a time to gather in cemeteries and decorate the graves of all family members, using flags on the graves of those who died in military service. In our desire for holidays, Memorial Day has become the marker for the beginning of the summer vacation season. At the core of all of this is a time to remember. Memory is a function of our mind so I was fascinated to explore what the website “Simple Psychology” had to say about memory. They say there are three stages to memory, for example: encoding, storage and retrieval. Encoding is how information or a memory gets into our mind, usually visual or auditory or based on meaning. Apparently more people are auditory than visual but we all use meaning as a method of encoding. Storage is categorized as short term and long term. We see this as individuals struggle with one or the other and have come to understand these are distinctly different areas of storage in the mind. People can remember childhood memories but not their current phone number. The last stage is retrieval. How do we access the information we have encoded and stored? Short term memory is retrieved sequentially and we try to go through a time line or order to access the information. Long term memory is retrieved by association. Which I want to discuss more in a moment. An interesting Dr. Seuss quote came up as I was playing with research for this sermon. “Sometimes we do not know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” On the one hand, this may be a measure of our ability to be truly present moment by moment. The more we are able to recognize and enjoy the beauty, the wisdom and the love in any given moment, the less we need to depend on memories to experience these qualities in our lives. Yet, the value of a moment as a memory depends on how we remember. I had two interpretations of what “how we remember” means. The first interpretation of “how” is “what triggers our memories” and this does not seem to contribute much to the value. This first “How”is our prompt to go to those memory files in our minds. In terms of the stages of memory, what nudges us to try to retrieve this information stored away? 1 There seem to be two primary motivations. Need as a motivation is the ordinary routine of accessing information for work, school, learning, teaching and daily life. I need to access how to cook a meal, what my phone number is, what Fillmore considered the three phases of mind. And so I attempt to retrieve that information from my memory bank. And it seems sometimes we really need a piece of information and we just can’t seem to retrieve it. Students with testing anxiety are really familiar with this. More and more I have to pause and focus to access a name, a word or a fact that I am trying to connect with in conversation. The online Psychology article indicated that although there appears to be a limit to what we can retain in short term memory, long term storage is unlimited. As I get older I prefer to imagine some of my difficulty accessing information is related to the fact I am trying to store waaaaay too much information. The old, classic Far Side cartoon showed a young man raising his hand to ask the teacher, “May I be excused? My brain is full!” I completely understand this storage and retrieval problem. Aside from need, sometimes memories are retrieved more spontaneously by our sense associations. We see a photo or an image, we hear a song or sound and we retrieve the story and thoughts we have stored in association with that. This is how music therapy helps people with memory loss access memories. We cannot recreate a smell memory but scents tend to trigger us to access memories, usually stored in long term memory. This is why the smell of fried chicken and apple pie baking takes me immediately back to my grandmother’s kitchen. My tiny hands play in the flour. I fidget in anticipation of the deliciousness about to be devoured and my mouth waters in response to taste memories. We often notice this “association triggered memory” experience as we move through the grief of a loss. Suddenly we see reminders, hear familiar songs, and pause in moments as our mind retrieves the memories we created with the one who is no longer physically present. As we are reminded to access memories, we keep people in our lives, whether that appears to be a positive or negative experience for us. Which brings me to the second interpretation for “how we remember”. This how refers to the quality and meaning we have for the information that is retrieved. This how is a measure of the value we give any particular memory. I think we can all agree that humans are “meaning making machines”. Especially in our human duality thinking, we not only assign a meaning to everything, we label it good or bad. And we can change our mind! 2 Rain one day is good and means life and abundance and another day rain is bad and means plans have gone astray. Words not only have definitions, they have what we call “connotations” or implied meanings and judgments. To doubt the power of connotations, look at what happens when we hear the words of prejudice and oppression. We are not reacting to a word or even its definition. We are reacting to the meaning and connotation of the word built into our memory system. And as we have this visceral reaction to words, we also react to memories largely based on the meaning we have given the memory. We have stories built around memories and we label them good and bad; we assign positive or negative value. What I want to propose or maybe remind us, as we can change our mind about the meaning or judgment of good or bad we assign to rain, we can change how we remember something. For me, how I remember has become a measure of my spiritual evolution. Well, Reverend Joy, you kind of lost me there. How I remember is a measure of my spiritual evolution?? Let’s look at what Charles Fillmore says in the Revealing Word about our spiritual evolution. Evolution is the development in our minds working under spiritual law. Fillmore says, “What we are is the result of the evolution of our consciousness, and this consciousness is the result of seed ideas sown in the mind. In the beginning, God implanted the Perfect Word—involved this seed into each one. Evolution is the unfolding in consciousness of that which God has involved in one in the beginning.” We have this consciousness, this power of thought without judgment, without bias, without ego’s determined duality, within us. We have the power to see with love and wisdom because it has already been placed within us. Our evolution is to bring these powers forward and to live according to this vision and this power every day. How I show up every day; how I react or respond to the world around me and the events of my day is a reflection of my spiritual evolution. Some days it may not appear I have evolved much. Other days I do much better. Some of you have paid attention and know I just returned on Thursday night from a time of vacation. Thursday, when I got settled into my seat at the airport in Kansas City, the first thing I heard was the tail end of an announcement, “flight to Philadelphia delayed to 4:15pm departure, arriving in Philadelphia at 8pm.” I admit, the first word that sprang to mind was “crap”. It was a little after noon. I was scheduled for a 1:30pm flight to arrive at 5:15pm. Ok, take a breath. I can’t change whatever is going on. 3 This will be fine. I checked the website. Still showed ON TIME for my flight. Overhead was the announcement of a cancelled flight to DC. Another breath, doesn’t mean anything for my flight. It wasn’t until the third announcement of the delayed flight that they said it was a FRONTIER flight and I was on American. It was a mechanical maintenance issue for Frontier. I sent a prayer for those folks delayed and went back to clearing clutter from my neglected work email box. And reflected that IF my flight had been the one affected, I really would have been ok. Really, I would have been ok in that moment. How we remember is a reflection of our spiritual evolution. That Dr Seuss quote, “Sometimes we don’t know the value of a moment until it is a memory.” In the moment, we experience. In the split second it takes for our brain to engage, we have a judgment, and then a memory, and then a value. As spiritual beings, evolving our spiritual consciousness in this human experience, we have the capacity to reflect on moments of experience and look at them with fresh eyes.

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