The unforgetting Spirit and the Voice to Parliament

This week sees the culmination of the Christian Easter season with the Day of Pentecost, the occasion on which, according to the Evangelist Luke, Jesus' disciples experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which founded the Christian church.

Yet, despite its obvious centrality to religious thinking, 'spirit' is probably the church's second most useless word (after 'God' as the most useless). Spirit is (purportedly) not body, and so cannot be located, and so lacks tangibility, and so cannot be measured, monitored or assessed. This imprecision and elusiveness seem to render soft spirit marginal to the hard realities of personal and political life, other than as a marker or means of escaping those realities.

The Spirit as remembering

Yet, at least in Christian understanding, spirit is no escape. The purpose of the giving of the Spirit, according to St John, is that the Spirit will 'remind' disciples of the things of Jesus: what he did and what was done to him. This is anything but a soft option. Forgetting is bad, especially when it forgets the bad things – not least the catastrophe of the crucifixion. Remembering matters for true human being – in this case, for the continued presence of, and attention to, the dehumanised, humanising being of Jesus.

But the point is not that only the church should be a remembering community. The giving of the Spirit constitutes a broader socio-political claim that all personal and communal identity requires good memory. This is scarcely controversial; the centrality of memory to identity drives countless 'amnesia' plots in films, with the pressing 'Who am I?' question pounding inside the head of the protagonist. Our identity rests upon recollection of what we have done and what has been done to us.

Nonetheless, the desire is strong to remember only the best and none of the worst. Within Christian confession, the reminding-of-Jesus Spirit recalls not only the light of the resurrection but the darkness of the cross.

The Voice, identity and the memory of hard things

But selective memory is not only active in the churches. Australian society is presently in the grip of a call to uncomfortable memory: remember that colonisation was very often a violent process and continues to be radically disruptive of whole peoples. Remember, Australia, and know how you have come to be what you think you are.

The proposal of a constitutionally guaranteed First Nations Voice to Parliament makes little convincing social or political sense without an understanding of the importance and possibilities of memory for identity. Oppositional arguments propose a forgetful unity rather than the purported divisions the Voice would instantiate. Division would be bad, but one group being 'more equal' than another is scarcely the intention nor a necessary outcome of the Voice. To attend to the question of memory and identity would be to attend to the possibility of unity in full view of the past and not in fearful ignorance of it. The psyche (spirit?) must know itself, and so we cannot only look forward but must also look back. We must recognise the place of memory and the importance of institutions like the Voice which have precisely the purpose of bringing a fuller identity by reminding us of the good and the bad that have made us.

Like any full remembering, this one will be painful. It is often the case that the amnesiac in the TV thriller discovers with horror who he was in his forgotten life. But to forget the bad would be to cease to be human. It is memory which makes us.

For Australia to be properly made, it must also remember uncomfortable things. Our history is the voice which speaks to us and by which we speak, even if we don't remember it. But the remembering matters. To remember is to know why we are like we are, and so to see that we could have been different. And to see that we might have been different is to realise that we could still be different. So memory like this, even if uncomfortable, makes change possible, and we could do with a few changes.

Jesus' promised gift of the Spirit to his disciples is a promised gift of memory. What is remembered through this Spirit is the human experience of Jesus as a presentation of the rich possibilities of human life, whatever the circumstances. As well as the good, this memory recalls the darkness which falls when we turn from the enlightening presence of another's humanity.

The call to memory in the Uluru Statement from the Heart is no less a gift than Pentecost's Spirit of remembrance: reconciliation requires truth, and truth is not-forgetting. Whatever 'spirit' might be in other imaginings, the Pentecost Spirit is not a wafting everywhere-so-nowhere zephyr for faint hearts. It is a spirit to animate the body politic into a future shaped not by fearful forgetfulness of the past but by repentant and reconciliatory remembrance. To this end, the Spirit speaks to the churches and to everyone through the Statement: remember, understand, repent and build a shared future upon all this.