Remembering Together

“Special Sauce”  Ingredients

Personal Photo - Holland’s Farmers Market

“The more we get together,

Together, together,

The more we get together,

The happier we'll be.

For your friends are my friends

And my friends are your friends.

The more we get together,

The happier we'll be.”

Lyrics of the song “The More We Get Together”

I just finished a recently published book, “Why We Remember”.  It offers insights into our everyday experiences of remembering and forgetting.  I was most excited to read the last chapter of the book, “When We Remember Together”.  It is in that chapter that I read about the “special sauce” that happens with our collective memories.

“The transformative effect of social interactions on life narratives 

might be the “special sauce” that explains

the efficacy of so many forms of psychotherapy”

Charan Ranganath

This past summer, I have done a lot of remembering together around events that have very long histories.  These events have centered around the celebration of the lives of friends and relatives.  Most importantly we celebrated their lives of faith and how they made a difference in the world we shared.  

What I experienced was not just the memories of the past but how these individual life events created a future.   We remembered more than just the events but the faith that was shared in the recitation of our core beliefs.  I left these remembering together events with a deeper appreciation of how our faith stories point to a future hope. It was the “special sauce” that made their deaths point to a future reality.

“Where, O death, is your victory?
    Where, O death, is your sting?”

1 Corinthians 15:55 (NIV)

Thanks be to God for the healing work of remembering together.

Marvin 

References

Ranganath, C. (2024). Why We Remember. (p. 180). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Lyrics of the song “The More We Get Together”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_More_We_Get_Together

Hage, M. L. (2019). Healing Memories.

http://healingagents.blogspot.com/2019/11/healing-memories.html