The .Plan

I.

‘Paycheck’ is about a reverse engineer, Ben Affleck, who gets paid insanely large sums of money to take a competitor’s product and figure out how to make it. But the deal is, after each assignment, he agrees to have his memories erased so that he can’t divulge any corporate secrets. Since it usually takes him a few weeks to do his reverse engineering thing, this means he loses a few weeks’ worth of his memory in return for cold, hard cash. The real meat of the movie occurs after he accepts a mystery assignment that is particularly lengthy (duration: 3 years) and lucrative (paycheck: $90 million). After he finishes, bad things start happening to him, and, bewildered and handicapped by the loss of 3 years of his memory, he has to figure out what’s going on, rescue the white blonde chick, and save the world.

Would I willingly allow someone to erase portions of my memory?

We live in a society that is committed to a destructive and careless amnesia, but as Walter Brueggemann so often reminds us in his exposition of the Old Testament writings, the covenental God is always calling us to a simultaneous passionate remembering and a liberated forgetting. For what gives us courage other than a long memory of His faithfulness?

And what determines who we are other than our memories? We are historically and socially contingent beings. I have many memories, particularly ‘bad’ ones, that I feel I could do without — but somehow I have the feeling that my lack of appreciation for even these has to do with my inability to understand how God moves in the world and that these memories are all important… somehow. And, that to willingly part with even the worst of my ‘bad’ memories would yield someone who is less of me than I am.

II.

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion. (Ps 137:1)

God is constant. But life is not. And full worship, as Bruggemann reminds us in his The Message of the Psalms, requires participation in all seasons of faith: orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Life for the psalmist rarely dwells for long in the season of disorientation; he is always on the move. And the old season of disorientation (eventually) becomes the new season of orientation. To the faithful, these are all truisms.

Yet the movement to reorientation is more difficult for some of us than for others. The dominant ideology is the avoidance of hurt, the commitment to continuity, and the maintenance of success. In this context, it seems appropriate that some of us flail about in the foreign land, and the former lucidity of one’s communion with God seems much murkier. We are mature enough to know that we ought to assess the current unfamiliarity of things through the lens of dislocation, but we more often than not are unable to see the new ways in which God touches our lives. We’re just a little bit behind the curve.