The Forgotten Who Are Not Forgotten

I was driving down an ordinary stretch of road the other day, the sort of road that is remarkable only for being unremarkable, when I saw a banner strung from a lamppost. On the banner was the face of a young man in uniform, his name printed beneath him, and a pair of dates that told the whole story without telling any of it at all. He had been a soldier. He had come from this town. He had gone somewhere and not come back. And now, years or perhaps decades after his going, his neighbors had hung his picture on a pole beside a road he once walked, so that people driving past on their way to the grocery store might slow down for half a second and remember that he had been.

I drove on, of course. One always drives on. But something in that banner had lodged itself in my chest, and I could not quite shake it. For here was a face I had never seen belonging to a man I had never known, and yet someone, somewhere, had felt it worth the paper and the pole to say: do not forget him. Which is a strange and beautiful thing when you consider it. Because the very fact that his town had to put up a banner meant, of course, that without the banner he might have been forgotten.

The Slow Erasure of Kind Faces

There is a quiet cruelty to time, and it is not the cruelty of the sword but of the eraser. It does not strike; it smudges. It works not in dramatic blows but in the slow, patient smoothing away of ink on paper, of names on stones, of faces from the memory of children who will grow up and have children of their own who will not know whose eyes they inherited. The soldier on the banner had a grandmother once. She rocked him when he cried. She knew the smell of the top of his head, and the particular way he laughed when he was tickled, and the fact that he was afraid of the basement stairs until he was seven. All of that, every last detail of it, has almost certainly been erased from the earth. It survives, if it survives at all, in the memory of God alone.

And here is where the modern mind, so pleased with itself, begins to sputter. For the modern mind cannot bear the idea that anything should survive only in the memory of God. It wants monuments. It wants Wikipedia entries. It wants a name trending on a screen, and failing that, at least a paragraph in a history book. It has decided, in its enormous wisdom, that to be remembered by people is the same thing as to matter, and that to be forgotten by people is the same thing as never to have existed at all. This is not merely wrong. It is one of the most spectacular errors in the history of human thought, and it is repeated a billion times a day by people who consider themselves too sophisticated for religion.

The Ledger the World Cannot See

Consider what our age calls significance. It is measured, more or less, in visibility. The significant person is the one whose face is known, whose name is spoken, whose deeds are clicked upon. By this measurement, the great mass of humanity has been and always will be insignificant, because the great mass of humanity has neither the means nor the desire to make itself visible. The farmer who worked forty years to feed a family that fed a family that fed us insignificant. The nurse who sat with the dying through the long hours when there was nothing to be done but to be there insignificant. The mother who prayed her prodigal home through a hundred sleepless nights, and never told anyone, and died before he came back insignificant. Insignificant, insignificant, insignificant, says the world, filing them away in the vast unmarked cabinet of Those Who Did Not Trend.

But the Christian is called to look at the world sideways, and when we do, the whole picture inverts. For it turns out there is another ledger being kept, and it is not the one the world keeps. The world's ledger records who was seen; God's ledger records who was faithful. The world's ledger measures reach; God's ledger measures love. The world's ledger fades with the newspapers and the servers that store it; God's ledger is kept in a hand that does not tire and a mind that does not forget. "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?" our Lord asked, and then answered his own question in the most staggering way imaginable: "And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father." Not one. Not the little brown bird that no ornithologist ever named, that no child ever noticed, that lived its whole life in a hedge behind a house where nothing important ever happened. Not one falls unwatched.

If not one sparrow falls unwatched, what shall we say of the soldier on the banner? What shall we say of his grandmother, and her mother, and every mother going back to the beginning? What shall we say of the faithful old man in the pew who died on a Tuesday with no one to bury him but the parish? These are not forgotten. They are, in fact, more remembered now than they ever were, held in a memory so total and so tender that it makes our best rememberings look like the scratchings of children on a foggy window.

The Banner and the Book of Life

I do not want to sound as though the banner on the lamppost did not matter. It did matter, a great deal, and I suspect the town that hung it did more good than they know. For there is something profoundly Christian about the impulse to say a name aloud, to hold up a face and refuse to let it disappear, to insist against the smoothing of time that this one, this particular one, was here. This is the same impulse that carved the names of the dead into stone at Verdun and along the Vietnam wall and into the little brass plates in the floors of European towns where families once lived. It is the human echo of a divine reality. It is our small, faltering imitation of what God does perfectly and eternally.

For God is, if I may put it plainly, the great Rememberer. He is the one who does not forget. He knows the number of hairs on the head of the child who died in an orphanage in 1943 and was buried without a marker. He knows the name whispered by the slave in the hold of the ship whose bones lie somewhere on the ocean floor. He knows the widow who set aside her two mites and thought nothing of it, and He counted those coins as more than all the fortunes of Rome. He has, we are told, a book the Book of Life and in it are written names, and there is not one faithful name that has ever been left out.

The banner on the lamppost is only there for a season. Wind will fray it, rain will run its colors, and one day the town will take it down because a newer banner needs the pole. But the name is not on the banner only. The name is in the Book. And the Book does not fray.

The Great Communion of the Unremembered

There is a doctrine, tucked into the Creed in a phrase we say so often we scarcely hear it anymore, called the Communion of Saints. It is the belief that the Church is not merely the people currently drawing breath in the pews on Sunday, but every faithful soul stretching back through every century, all somehow gathered together in Christ. And when I think of that great Communion, I do not picture the famous saints, the ones with statues and feast days and gold-lettered books written about them. I picture the others. I picture the ones nobody built a statue for.

I picture a Roman housewife who loved her husband and taught her children the Lord's Prayer in the evenings and was never martyred and never wrote anything down and was buried in a common grave. I picture an African monk who copied a Gospel by candlelight and died of fever before he finished the Book of John. I picture a medieval peasant who tithed his last onion and said grace over a bowl of nothing and thanked God for the nothing. I picture a Union chaplain who prayed with dying boys in blue and a Confederate chaplain who prayed with dying boys in gray, and both of them praying, in the end, to the same Father. I picture the soldier on the banner.

These are the ones whose names the earth has lost. And these, I suspect, are the ones heaven knows best. For heaven does not measure by the metrics of the earth. Heaven measures by love, and love has a way of hiding itself. Love does not, as a rule, seek the spotlight. Love feeds a child in the small hours and asks for no praise. Love visits a lonely man in a nursing home and does not post about it afterward. Love, in short, does the very things the world overlooks which is why the world overlooks it, and why heaven does not.

What the Faithful Owe the Forgotten

So what are we to do, we who saw the banner and drove on, we who know that a hundred thousand faces will not fit on a hundred thousand lampposts? Perhaps we should pray for them. Not for the famous dead, who need no help getting attention, but for the anonymous ones, the ones nobody prays for because nobody knows their names. There is an old and lovely tradition of praying for the souls no one else is praying for, and it is one of the most beautiful acts of charity available to a human being. It is a kindness offered across the barrier of death to a stranger you will never meet. It is the practice of remembering someone God has not stopped remembering.

And perhaps we should live our own lives as though the ledger we care about is the one heaven keeps. Perhaps we should stop straining, as the world strains, to be seen. Perhaps we should be content to feed the sparrows and mow the widow's lawn and tell our children Bible stories at bedtime and die, if it comes to that, without a banner. For if the banner comes, wonderful. And if it does not, no matter. The banner was never the point. The banner was only ever a rumor, a small human whisper of what the great voice of God has been saying all along, in words that cannot fade and letters that cannot smudge:

I have not forgotten you. I have never forgotten you. I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

The soldier on the banner is not forgotten. Neither is his grandmother. Neither is the peasant with the onion or the monk with the unfinished scroll or the widow with the two mites. Neither, my friend, are you. Whatever the world does or does not remember about you, however small your life feels, however hidden your best work is, however unnoticed your kindnesses go you are not falling through the cracks of the universe. There are no cracks. There is only a Father, and a book, and a memory that outlasts the last banner on the last lamppost on the last road in the world.

Drive on if you must. But drive on knowing this: the road is lined, invisibly, with more faces than any of us will ever see. And every one of them is known.

~The Seeker's Quill