You Are What You Remember

This title comes from a statement made by one of the characters in the modern science-fiction classic Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card (in my opinion a very good and interesting book that I would recommend). The title is a provocative thought, but hardly the whole picture. 

  

In addition to what I will argue below, I likewise believe we are what we remember—with one merciful twist:  King David in the Psalms pled for the Lord to “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: [instead], according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O Lord” (Psalm 25:7).  It is clear that David remembered his sins and was troubled by them.  But it is also clear that David knew that God could, upon his (David's) sincere repentance, choose not to ‘remember’ them. That the Lord will do that for the truly repentant is indeed the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  That is one good reason why Christianity matters. 

I, too, believe God knows and remembers everything about us (or can easily access our 'record')—except what He chooses for our sake not to remember.  Forgiveness on His part is choosing not to remember the bad parts about us based upon our repentance. Caution on our part is remembering and then acting appropriately based on what we have learned from what we remember—and then trusting God’s grace through the Atonement of His Son to perform the miracle of forgiveness. 

In addition to what you cognitively  remember, you are also what you can do now and can yet do in the future; you are your competencies (present) and your potential (future).  A baby seemingly initially  remembers nothing, but all agree he or she is an eight-pound bundle of potential, and some of us believe there is imprinted on his tiny soul a divine heritage (as a spirit child of God) which, through appropriate and receptive stimulus can recall at least echos of its pre-mortal past.

Moreover, I also have had, and I think most people have experienced this, a sort of déjà vu experience of remembering something from the distant past.  The poet William Wordsworth said it this way:

                    Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

                    The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar

                   Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had this related insight:

Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.

 

This knowledge, this resonance with truth when we hear it, I believe is a restoration of that which we learned in our pre-mortal past.  This is a doctrine of my Church and I have personally experienced it.  

So yes, we are what we remember. And as we live our lives in congruence with the truth that we know, we will be added upon with more truth and with a remembrance or suggestion ‘of things as they really are,’ and really were, ‘and as they really will be’ (Book of Mormon, Jacob 4:13).