Memory, the cross, and the role of Jesus

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful post on the 'cross in the sand' story that is exercising more comment than it ought. Memory is a totally plastic thing. Anyone in their sixth decade is aware of its impermanence - there are days when I have trouble recalling names of people I have known for years. What we are not always aware of is how easily our memories change. What we are absolutely certain is a concrete fact, we saw it happen, we know we did, we are certain. Then we look at an old photo, or see an old film, or read our diary, or talk to an old friend - and suddenly realize we had it all wrong. Worse, we allow our memories to change from outside pressures we are not even aware of.

So hyperventilating about whether or not McCain's cross in the sand story actually happened is one thing, thinking he consciously invented it to deceive us something else. What I find more interesting here is Sullivan's attempt to trace the development of this theme, starting with Solzhenitsyn, retold by Billy Graham in 1975:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was over here recently, remember? And he toured around the country. And he told a little story that everybody ought to hear, if you didn’t hear it. He said when he was in that prison for so long there came one time, and one time only, when he thought of suicide. He said he was not allowed ever to speak to his cell-mate. For weeks on end, they could not speak to each other. And he said that his cell-mate saw him growing weaker and weaker and more depressed and more discouraged all the time. And he said his cell-mate took a little stick and in the sand, or the dirt, in the cell, he drew a picture of the Cross. And Solzhenitsyn said, “At that moment, the whole purpose of my existence dawned upon me. Because,” he said, “I realized that Jesus Christ shed His blood for me on that Cross.” And he said, “That gave me the courage to live through my imprisonment.

Fascinating, as is a similar story quoted from a witness in the Sudan in 2002. But would someone from an Orthodox Christian phrase the role of Jesus as Saviour quite this way? This is a genuine question by the way: I am at a loss and it is an interesting question from an historical point of view.

Anyway, always remember that there is a big difference between truth and mere accuracy.

Thank God no one fact checks the anecdotes I add to my lectures. And with that, I am off to wrestle of few syllabi into shape for the new semester. ugh.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

He is dead now and will always be one of those odd figures who with nothing much behind him at all may have swayed history. I'll leave that for history to reveal that truth, or not. For now, simply because it is one of my favorite ballads, here is a long, positively epic, song about Solzhenitsyn's experience in World War II. He was certainly no Russian everyman: in fact in some ways this song simply stands for the Russian nation. And I think he would have liked this song too, though for complex reasons of deep seated civilizational love (I don't say nationalism because that is too pale a word for what Solzhenitsyn talked about). In any case, I love both songs, so here they are.

And a little anecdote. I used to work in a history department where Michael J., one of the grads, was a veteran of the gulag just like Solzhenitsyn. Michael spent 15 years there, from age 15 to age 30. He came of age there and told me once that his nation, his homeland, was the gulag. Like Solzhenitsyn he ended up at the Hoover Institute where he worked on his own history of the Soviet gulag.

I asked him once if he didn't think that Solzhenitsyn has already done it, what with his three vol. Gulag Archipelago, each at over 1000 pages.

He thought about it for a few seconds.

"Too superficial."