My Formal Disclaimer (F4-10)

Happy Saturday to you!

When English speakers learn German, it’s a funny time because most significant German nouns are just compound words. “Drums” are “hit-things,” an ambulance is a “sickness-wagon,” gloves are “hand-shoes.” And so when you encounter a new big German word, you can usually figure it out by breaking down its compound words: Bundeskriminalamt is federal-criminal-office, sooooooo even YOU can probably guess what goes on in Bundeskriminalamte!

The thing English speakers forget is that our language also makes extensive use of compound words. Christianese is full of these - I’m working on a letter about at-one-ment, dating seminars are quick to remind you that “into-me-see” is the key to healthy relationships, and all things tell God “I’m-possible” —

Ugh.

I wonder if Germans feel the same way about breaking down Schlagzeuge, Krankenwagen, and Handschuhe…

Ted Dekker’s devotional foray into non-fiction leans very heavily into English’s “re” compound words. The prefix “re” means “to do again” or “to come back to.” Here’s a smattering of re-minders:

Re-cognize

Re-pair

Re-store

Re-concile

Re-turn

Re-member

Some of those preach all by themselves. God blessed English!

A word like “remember” is a top-tier example of words meaning what they mean.

Current understandings of how neurons work in the brain indicate that re-calling memories is literally re-member-ing incidents. Your brain stores pieces of information, sure, but every time it accesses the information pertaining to the memory, it picks up the dis-membered pieces of information that it saved and re-pairs them, member by member, into a whole picture. If certain details weren’t saved, it invents them so that the picture is complete.

You remember a complete picture and would promise anyone who asked that it is an accurate re-presentation of reality. Witnesses giving testimony to juries do this all of the time - they usually didn’t retain all of the exact information about the criminal, but when they see the accused, their brains fill in the gaps with contextual information and become convinced that they’re accusing the right criminal.

Yet eyewitness is one of the least accurate testimonies modern forensics have. It’s so bad that statistically a single eyewitness is a more reliable account than two eyewitnesses – the two eyewitnesses will tend to socially start trying to make their accounts make sense together. Their brains independently take the information from the other account and re-member it into a new complete picture.

New. Cohesive. Resulting in a LOT of innocent prisoners convicted off of eyewitness testimony alone.

If I’m doing a good job writing, you’ve been reading my memories as stories. Instead of questioning, “did that really happen?” you’re hopefully asking, “how does she remember those details?”

Whelp. This is the truth: I’m re-membering details. My brain dis-membered the events into information that it can access later, and as I write I’m re-membering that information coherently and entertainingly for you. Did my coworker and his cousin really point fingers at each other and accuse each other of misanthropy? Did I really *read* the bulletin at age 5? Was Mom actually *that* mad at me when I came down the stairs shirtless? Did I actually know enough German to comprehend “Stille Nacht”?

I… don’t know? I definitely remember those things. But I can’t tell you if any of that “really” happened. Just that these are the details that are comprehensible when I access those memories.

I’m also writing these memories down coherently for me, cementing the details so that when I inevitably re-member the stories again and add even more members of detail that probably never happened, I can contrast that re-membering with this one and see how many exaggerations I’ve stacked up over years of assembling and disassembling the information my brain kept – real, and re-membered.

When I learned that eyewitnesses are the least accurate criminal testimony, I was suddenly horrified that God demanded no crimes to be punished without a minimum of two male eyewitnesses. He literally designed our brains to dis-member memories and re-member them every time we access the information! He always knew eyewitness testimony was fallible!

I was offended for a minute.

I also realized that the resurrection of Jesus was proliferated solely by eyewitness accounts, and the early church completely chose to ignore accounts like the Gospel of Thomas because the details didn’t cohere as nicely as with the canonized Gospels. They just… assumed he made details up because it messed with the complete picture their brains had assembled?

I was offended for another minute.

But then I learned the policies and punishments from other nations at that time God instituted the two-witness test in that part of the world… Let’s just say that requiring a minimum of *two* eyewitnesses to agree before conviction is a pretty big deal and I had to come to terms with the fact that God is playing a long game of transforming human nature and that maybe he doesn’t weaponize our fallible brains against each other nearly as much as we do.

And then I realized that books don’t have to be canon for me to learn about Jesus from them. I mean, I have a whole essay on how The LEGO Movie is the most powerful presentation of the gospel in modern media! And the gospel witnesses chose to maintain the testimony of Christ’s resurrection not from the legal two male witnesses, but female! witnesses! in all of their canonized gospels!

I calmed down pretty quickly.

It’s actually a pretty clever design that our subconscious automatically fills the gaps where our memory fails! It allows us to process our lives to make sense of the events and how they impact us. 

Which is why it doesn’t bother me that my memories aren’t airtight and that I don’t have perfect re-collections. It allows me to intentionally re-frame the way my life happened to me. 

So please receive this as my formal disclaimer: I’m writing down my memories to be compelling, thought-provoking, and occasionally hilarious. I’m not out to mis-re-present the events or characters in my life. As far as I know, all the stories are true!

And. Truth is a reality we re-cognize every time we re-member the details that define our under-standing of what and why life is, what and who God is. Maybe, like our memories, malleability is a feature not a flaw.

May your mind stay soft to God’s gift of new thoughts,

–Beth