Dear Nick,
A helpful starter, thank you. I would hope it would lead to a discussion and some sort of action but I fear the OHP users are happy with what they have and don’t remember what is missed. Yet others of us need to take the digital projection more seriously.
But forgetting our history is catastrophic I think – for example in Bosnia where friends became enemies when a legend was claimed to be true.
In the BBC where I spent so much of my life, nobody has any clear idea of its history much before 1980 – eg religion summed up in cliches about ‘men hearing prayers broadcast in pubs with their hats on’ (this incidentally is a silly myth)
If the BBC forgets, what happens to the rest of us?
The same applies in faith communities – last week, in the broadcast Choral Evensong, The Dean of York read Joshua 8 – the first 29 verses. Being there I listened intently to his most dramatic reading of the end of AI – a story I admit I thought I had never heard before- no-one there will forget it as it sounded as if he had witnessed it. Today in New College Oxford, a further huge story from the Hebrew Bible was told as if it had just happened.I now think these are stories I have forgotten. I must read them again.
Last night in Scotland, the first Mass for 450 years was celebrated in a fine but redundant church built in 1447. Called a Mass of thanksgiving for the centuries, we deliberately set out to retell and reflect on the 450 years together. The result – a sort of reconstructed memory ended with the Communion which many of us couldn’t receive, but the history approach did more for the different churches than we had ever expected. Now we share the memory (and it is in print) we seemed to have made a great leap forward. How do we best use memory?
June 17, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Dear Nick,
A helpful starter, thank you. I would hope it would lead to a discussion and some sort of action but I fear the OHP users are happy with what they have and don’t remember what is missed. Yet others of us need to take the digital projection more seriously.
But forgetting our history is catastrophic I think – for example in Bosnia where friends became enemies when a legend was claimed to be true.
In the BBC where I spent so much of my life, nobody has any clear idea of its history much before 1980 – eg religion summed up in cliches about ‘men hearing prayers broadcast in pubs with their hats on’ (this incidentally is a silly myth)
If the BBC forgets, what happens to the rest of us?
The same applies in faith communities – last week, in the broadcast Choral Evensong, The Dean of York read Joshua 8 – the first 29 verses. Being there I listened intently to his most dramatic reading of the end of AI – a story I admit I thought I had never heard before- no-one there will forget it as it sounded as if he had witnessed it. Today in New College Oxford, a further huge story from the Hebrew Bible was told as if it had just happened.I now think these are stories I have forgotten. I must read them again.
Last night in Scotland, the first Mass for 450 years was celebrated in a fine but redundant church built in 1447. Called a Mass of thanksgiving for the centuries, we deliberately set out to retell and reflect on the 450 years together. The result – a sort of reconstructed memory ended with the Communion which many of us couldn’t receive, but the history approach did more for the different churches than we had ever expected. Now we share the memory (and it is in print) we seemed to have made a great leap forward. How do we best use memory?