Pessimisms

I can remember, at the age of five, being told that childhood was the happiest period of life (a blank life, in those days). I wept inconsolably, wished I were dead, and wondered how I should endure the boredom of the years to come.   Bertrand Russell

The woman you don’t want at Celebrate Recovery OR “The Woman Who Can’t Forget”

I am a fan of Celebrate Recovery. I like its way of handling the past. Meet it, see God in it, and then turn to face the future God’s way. So far so good.

But suppose a woman comes to CR whose name is Jill Price. She is the author of the book, The Woman Who Can’t Forget, a book that I have been listening to on cd. Jerry Adler of Newsweek describes Ms. Price in these words

Price’s memory, which she describes as “shockingly complete” beginning in 1974, when she was 8, and “near perfect” from 1980 on, appears to be organized like a diary. Given a date from the last 30 years, she can instantly summon up the day of the week, and usually at least some tidbit of biographical trivia. “On Friday afternoon, October 19, 1979,” she writes, “I came home from school and had some soup because it was unusually cold that day.” Oprah, take note: Oct. 19, 1979, was, in fact, a Friday, and it was cloudy with a high of 67 in Los Angeles, well below normal. As for the soup, we can only take her word for it, but McGaugh—who checked Price’s recollections against whatever documentation was available, including some 50,000 pages of her own written diaries—believes her abilities are real. “She doesn’t make it up or fake it,” McGaugh says. “If she doesn’t know, she says so. She may say, ‘I just hung out.’ A lot of our days are like that.” McGaugh points out that Price has extraordinary recall for news events, if they were important enough to attract her notice at the time. Does Aug. 16, 1977, mean anything to you? It did to Price, who instantly recognized that as the date Elvis Presley died.

Price can recall the date and day of each episode of All in the Family and the theme of each episode. Adler goes on to describe her condition.

Oddly, in this era of luridly factitious memoirs, Price’s comes with unimpeachable credentials. She first came to public attention in 2006 as “AJ,” the pseudonymous subject of a paper in the journal Neurocase entitled “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering.” The lead author, James L. McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, spent five years bombarding Price with psychological, neurological and physiological tests to investigate what was going on inside her otherwise quite ordinary mind. He coined a new term for her condition, “hyperthymestic syndrome.” It means “overdeveloped memory,” but of a very particular kind. Price has no special aptitude for memorizing lists of words or numbers, or for facts or stories or languages. She was an average student. What Price does remember—obsessively, uncontrollably and with remarkable accuracy—is stuff that happened to her.

I wonder how a person who remembers so much moves on spiritually speaking. And I wonder how much of our remembering is a version of Ms. Price’s dysfunction at a less hyper level. Which makes me wonder about how much of our spiritual journey is affected by biology. Which makes me wonder about brain science studies and how much of ourselves is actually explainable by chemistry. Which make me wonder about how much insight Baruch Spinoza had in his book Ethics when he proposed, in his way, that there is no difference between thought and matter. They are two aspects of the same substance.

I know that there is a level to which my understanding cannot reach, but I have always been concerned as a pastor about pushing people too far with one model of passionate Christianity that does not fit their biology. In other words, we simply have differences that are genetic which must and do affect how we do Christ-following.

Ms. Price would be a very interesting person to have in church to see what Christ-following would look like in her condition.

Today’s Quote 6/16/09

I am tangled up in contradiction.
I am strangled by my own two hands.
I am hunted by the hounds of addiction.
Hosanna!

I have lied to everyone who trusts me.
I have tried to fall when I could stand.
I have only loved the ones who loves me.
Hosanna!

O Hosanna!
See the long awaited king come to set his people free.
We cry - O Hosanna!
Come and tear the temple down.
Raise it up on holy ground. Hosanna!

I have struggled to remove this raiment,
tried to hide every shimmering strand.
I contend with these ghosts and these hosts of bright angels.
Hosanna!

I have cursed the man that you have made me,
as I have nursed the beast that bays for my blood.
Oh, I have run from the one who would save me.
Save me, Hosanna!

You have crushed beneath your heel the vile serpent.
You have carried to the grave the black stain.
You have torn apart the temple’s holy curtain.
You have beaten Death at Death’s own game.
Hosanna!

O Hosanna!
Hail the long awaited king,
come to set his people free.
We cry – O Hosanna!
Won’t you tear this temple down,
raise it up on holy ground?
O Hosanna!
I will lift my voice and sing:
you have come and washed me clean. Hosanna.

A song by Andrew Peterson, downloadable at Amazon for 99cents

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001IDBWTQ?ie=UTF8&tag=redletters-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001IDBWTQ