Dissonance

I’ve been reading, “The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World” by Miroslav Volf. (just a little light reading…). It’s a heavy book (an academic theological work, so you don’t breeze through it too quickly). Last Sunday some of us gathered together to discuss the book, our thoughts, ideas, things we were learning through the book etc. As always (we have these book discussions once a month) it was a great conversation.

What is somewhat ironic about the fact that I’m sitting here writing this post is that a week ago I sat in this very room and said, “This is the sort of stuff that I wouldn’t share with folks back home. It’s the sort of stuff where i wonder, ‘could I share this with people back home. Would they understand? Would they think I’d ‘lost the plot’ somehow? How would they respond?’” I’m sure this is mostly internal, and I feel that way cause this is one of those things that has changed in me since living overseas…since doing the work I do, hearing the stories I hear, and interacting with the realities I interact with.  Pre-kolkata Melissa would probably disagree with (or at the very least be incapable of understanding) what I see/believe/feel now. And I’m certainly no theologian…i'm just gonna share some things I’ve been thinking about, and how they’ve been good for me.

One of the things Volf addresses is how we handle memories of suffering, and if it is necessary to learn from every experience, or if some events/circumstances simply are. Some things are too horrific to try to make sense of, or to find meaning in. Another author, Lawrence Langer (he wrote Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory). Lager notes that written accounts of the Holocaust often integrate the suffering into a larger structure of meaning. There is often some good, or something of value that is noted in written accounts. Conversely, in oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors, “experience resists being tamed by the imposition of meaning for the most part, the experience appears impossibly to integrate into a larger narrative of meaningful life”

Volf goes on to say, “Can one give meaning to such experiences? As we listen to the “mutilated music” of such lives we want the dissonance to release itself into harmony so we can hear the whole as music rather than parts of it as horrifying noise. But the dissonance remains unintegrable into anything that came before and will come after.  ‘Harmony and integration,’ argues Langer, rightly referring to this and many similar stories, ‘are not only impossible – they are not desirable.’”

This was freeing for me to read. Because I do (so desperately) long for the dissonance to give way to harmony. I want to see how things work together for good. I want there to be some transformative moment, something that makes all the suffering “worth it.” And I do believe that it is possible for the Lord to bring good out of any situation. But that doesn’t mean that the situation should have happened in the first place. Some things are dissonant. They resist integration into harmony. They do not belong.  The moments where humanity shows it’s worst. And just because some things happen doesn’t mean they should have. i don't have to find value in it. i can just name it as wrong.

In another part of the book Volf says, “Like a disfigured foot too misshapen for a shoe, such events resist taking on positive meaning. Any positive meaning we might lend to them seems to rob them of their overwhelming horrendousness. The best we can do toward integrating such terrible wrongs into our life-story is to label them as senseless segments of our life-story. Once labeled, memories of horrendous wrongs are no longer loose beasts wreaking havoc in our inner being and external relationships; they are locked up in the basement of our mind. Though the imprisoned beasts may stomp and shriek, we can live in the rest of the house unthreatened.”

This also is so freeing to me…because I am so inclined to try to find greater meaning or connection in life…because I so desperately want to see how the story resolves, and how all the pain and suffering were worth it…and i cling to that surprise twist (that i know is coming) where we find out that the part of the story that was hard and horrible, and most confusing actually turned out to be the linchpin that the whole thing spins on and we suddenly find ourselves skipping through technicolor fields of flowers and happy endings. Yeah. That’s how my mind works. And that’s why this is so freeing. Cause there are some things that I can just chalk up as “wrong” or “bad” or “unlucky.” I can look at a situation and say, “wow, now that is stranger than fiction…no seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up” and then I can let myself off the hook of trying to figure out how that bizarre puzzle piece is supposed to fit into the beautiful whole. I can let it be what it is.

Sometimes there is dissonance.

There just is.

And I can’t gloss over it.

Or make it harmonious.

And that’s okay.