I grew up in Holland on East 17th Street, not far from Columbia Avenue One Stop. My friends and I would often go in there, and one of us would distract the cashier while another would drop to his hands and knees and scrounge for loose change that had fallen under the counter. Across the street, where Mi Favorita now stands, was a laundromat where, too, one could find an occasional quarter that had dropped underneath the machines. Crawling inside the industrial dryers and having our friends spin us around was cheap entertainment.
In this time when cell phones didn’t exist and computers were stored away in the basements of NORAD and TV was to be avoided except for the 3:30 airing of Looney Tunes, our lives were largely lived outside. During the summer this meant baseball and the beach (as well as paper routes and working in the blueberry fields) and during the autumn and winter it meant random games with a football whereby we could take out our boyish and therefore mostly harmless aggressions on one another. No matter the season, our lives were accompanied by the obbligato provided by the church bells that rang from Dimnent Chapel, more often than not warning us that it was time to head home so as not to be late to dinner. The tolling eliminated our best excuse for tardiness: that we simply didn’t know what time it was, and this meant we had at best about a half hour margin of error we could negotiate with mom. Absent a legitimate reason, you could be assured that supper would be cold when you finally got home, and since most of the peasant food served in our house was objectionable under the best of circumstances, consuming it cold intensified the gag reflex.
But not only the bells of Dimnent. Prospect Park CRC had a speaker system in its bell tower that would broadcast a chiming of hymns that reverberated around the city. I remember that around the time I would typically finish my paper route, I could hear the tunes tolling, and I would softly sing along, as the hymns were always familiar to a young boy who went to church twice every Sunday. In addition to this, we had Sunday school after morning services, catechetical instruction on Wednesday nights, and daily attendance at the Holland Christian schools.
I remember playing a pick up game of baseball one summer evening when I was around 12, over at what is now Moran Park (we typically played over at 19th and College but occasionally expanded our reach when no games were readily found). I was talking to a kid who told me he didn’t believe in God, thought the Bible was a book of fabricated stories, and never attended church. I was flabbergasted and profoundly unsettled. I tried to tell him he was wrong, but lacked the vocabulary or capacity to make the argument. I remember going home and sharing how upset I was with my dad, who just sort of shrugged it off and told me that I was out of my element.
That’s maybe not the best response a father can give to a twelve-year-old who is experiencing his first religious crisis (the death of my closest friend a year earlier was indeed heart-breaking, but never made me doubt the faith), but it did raise for me an interesting tension that I’ve been pondering ever since: how do we make faith such a part of someone’s element that they hardly even notice it? How do you make a culture whose underlying beliefs are so self-evidently true that they’ll never need justification? In his famous essay “This is Water,” where an older fish asks two younger fish how the water is and one responds by asking what water is, David Foster Wallace reminded us that “the immediate point of the … story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”1 We might take this as a limit upon our ability to engage in what passes for critical thinking or, even worse, as a demonstration of our inauthenticity, but I think Wallace’s point is that we are at our freest when we aren’t aware of the very thing that sustains our life, and once that element enters the field of consciousness as an object rather than the context of its operations, it becomes a problem for us.
How so? Well, I can think of at least two ways. The first is that as an object the context of thinking and living and moving and breathing becomes something that we can investigate. We hold it outside ourselves, turn it around in our minds, inspect its contours, question its structures, and become so self-conscious of our presence within it that we can’t really enjoy it the way we once did. Secondly, once we think of ourselves as inhabiting a context, we begin to entertain the possibility of other contexts, and this creates a double-movement whereby we are less satisfied with the one we inhabit and increasingly curious about the ones we don’t.
Consider, for example, Disney’s execrable retelling of the story of The Little Mermaid. In Anderson’s original version the point of the story is obvious: the little mermaid belongs to the sea, that is the rightful place for her, and the desire for land and air is a denial of who she is. Such denial has only one result: death. By transgressing the natural limits of her condition, she brings death upon herself and sorrow to her whole family. Such transgression is only made possible by the temptation brought about when she becomes aware of herself as a sea creature, and this awareness proves destructive of her happiness.
Not surprisingly, the tragedy of this lesson eludes the producers at Disney, who turn this tale into a justification of both teenage rebellion and the desire to be something other than what we are. Ariel, once conscious of the world above but knowing nothing about it, imagines that it must be a place where “betcha on land they understand / Bet they don’t reprimand their daughters.” That’s quite a bet to make. She wonders, “What would I give if I could live / Outta these waters? / What would I pay to spend a day / Warm on the sand?” and answers by sacrificing the same person who reprimands her.2 A noble young lass indeed! But Disney, being Disney, wraps it all up in a tidy bow, and her union to a guy she doesn’t know receives a blessing from her feckless father. We were spared the sequel The Little Mermaid 2: Ariel Begs for Forgiveness, wherein years of heartbreak brought about by her husband’s philandering, her mother-in-law’s complaining about how Ariel keeps the palace, and her father-in-law’s chronic drinking have her pining to return to the sea to be around the one person who ever truly cared for her, and for whose feelings and well-being she had showed such callous disregard. But Disney would have us believe Faustian bargains always turn out well.
There is, alas, no going back. Once we become aware of the fact that we are swimming in water, we must engage in the double-movement of imagining our lives outside of it and then embracing our return to it. The gain in authenticity is offset by the loss of naturalness, of legitimacy, but that loss, too, can be abridged by mindful ritual, by repeating the rhythms and sounds and sights that enacted our first immersion. We need, in some ways, a second baptism. In other words, we have to engage in acts of remembrance that can restore us to the fullness of the rightful order of our lives.
The difficulty resides in this obvious point: we are not fish. Our immediate social context is not absolute, but receives its legitimacy and meaning when it reflects a larger context, which is to say the fullness of the reality of our being. We too often confuse the pond we are in with the wholeness of reality, so there is something salvific about recognizing the water. But such recognition should not necessarily lead to a desire to escape; instead, unlike fish who don’t shape their water, we should fashion our places in accordance with the truth of the higher reality they reflect, with the larger contexts of our destiny. We are not simply “thrown” into a pond by an evil demiurge; this is the gnostic error. We are instead carefully placed there with the expectation that we can remember we belong to something so much larger and greater. The tolling of the bells thus serves as a reminder, as an invitation to memory, as the daily and hourly marking of a time that resonates an eternity.
Allow me to elaborate. In the Phaedrus, Plato offers us a great mythological description of man’s destiny, his limitations compared with the divine, and his attachment to the earthly burden of the sensuous life of the body.3 He describes the procession of souls that reflects the heavenly movement of the stars by night. There is a chariot race to the vault of the heavens led by the Olympian gods. The human souls also drive their chariots and follow the daily processions of the gods. At the vault of the heavens, the true world in the fullness of its order is revealed to view. There, in place of the disorder and inconstancy that characterize our so-called experience of the world down here on earth, we perceive the true constants and unchanging patterns of being. But while the gods surrender themselves totally to the vision of the true world in this encounter, our human souls are distracted because of their unruly natures. Since human vision is clouded by sensuous desire, we can only cast a momentary and passing glance at the eternal orders. Then the souls plunge back toward the earth and leave the truth of the whole and holy order of things behind them, retaining only the vaguest remembrance of it. These souls, having lost their wings, are weighed down by earthly cares and desires and unable to scale the heights of truth.
There is one experience that causes their wings to grow once again and that allows them to ascend once more. This is the experience of love and the beautiful, the love of the beautiful. It is by virtue of the beautiful that we are able to acquire a lasting remembrance of the true world. In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience this convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels an admission from us: “This is true.” The important message that this story has to teach is that the essence of the beautiful does not lie in some realm simply opposed to our world. On the contrary, we learn that however unexpected our encounter with beauty may be, it gives us an assurance that the truth does not lie far off and inaccessible to us, but can be encountered in the disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes, and fateful confusions.
In his Consolation of Philosophy, the unjustly imprisoned Boethius sits in his cell bemoaning “the savage bitterness of my misfortune.”4 In his lament he is visited by Lady Wisdom who, like a physician, diagnoses his condition, but focuses not on his internment, but on a sickness in his soul: “you have forgotten who you are, your true nature.”5 She calls him to remembrance as the only therapy for his condition, to recall to mind what he is, where he is, and when he is; to recollect his life and to place it once again in the fullness of its being. We can’t know who we are without such ritualistic enactments of memory.
These reenactments are intimately tied not to ideas and dogma, but to concrete memories encapsulating sounds, smells, sights, and stories; in short, they evoke the senses. The Christian Reformed Church I grew up in was a doctrinaire one. We were taught questions and answers, we were told to memorize both scripture and catechism (a practice I’d still defend), we were asked to exercise our critical faculties at all times, we were hyper-alert for doctrinal error. To believe rightly meant to think rightly, and while we weren’t justified by works, we did seem to be justified by right thinking. I carried this prejudice with me for years, until a series of crises led to my shifting my worship to the Catholic Church with its more imaginative framework.
If that world of my youth was overtly more brain than heart, one could still feel the heartbeat below it. Without that heartbeat — the rhythms I described at the beginning of this essay — the brain would have soon perished. I’m not sure my faith could have withstood, in the awareness of its own situation, the (largely false but deeply felt) sense that the water was poisonous. Like many young people, I suspect I would have ended up not on land or in air, but nowhere. The forgetfulness would have been thorough. Again: without knowing where we are and when we are, we will never know who we are. It is in the darkest and coldest hours that we need most to be reminded, that we need most for the bell to toll to mark our place.
Whatever else is true of the faith, it is primarily an act of remembering. After describing his conversion in Book 9 of his Confessions,6 St. Augustine spends Book 10 discussing memory, mainly because he has to figure out how to keep that original flame of faith burning. The conversion experience can’t be repeated; it can only be copied. Its image is maintained in memory, and its evocation triggered both serendipitously and through intentional repetition. Surely this is what Marcel Proust was getting at in his famous novel:
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (New York: The Modern Library, 1928), 54.
But not just that. Proust rightly describes, in over a million words, the flood of memories that might besiege us after dipping a cookie in a cup of tea, but he pays little attention to regulated and regular stimulations, the ways in which we can ritualistically reenact the originating experience, and that such reenactment operates not primarily off of words but off our senses. Proust continues:
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Proust, Swann’s Way, 57-58.
All of us possess this “vast structure of recollection” whose contours we can barely perceive. The structure of memory is not itself part of memory. This structure of recollection is made up of experiences both random and intentional, contingent and planned. No one said “let’s make church bells part of Polet’s structure of recollection,” but it’s very much there, and to this day a church bell evokes a world of coherent order, one where all the parts fit together, one where expectations are clear and life is uncomplicated, where we know exactly what is expected of us. So it’s no wonder that that world juxtaposes so harshly to the one I now inhabit, with its confusions and complications, its worries and warts, its fragments and fractures.
Robert Frost had his memories triggered by the sight of a birch tree bending ever so slightly toward the ground, and this for him evoked his boyhood with its uncomplicated joys and spontaneous games, where he and his friends would freely swing off the branches.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
Robert Frost, “Birches,” in Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 118.
But there is no going back, and that’s just as well. Nonetheless, Frost’s poem is testimony to the fact that we carry the past into the present and, more importantly, such “baggage” shapes the imaginative world of the present, and therefore shapes our soul and our conduct and our character. These random memories are thus, to borrow the words of Boethius’ Lady Wisdom, reminders of who we are, and it is precisely when we feel most lost, most confused, most alone, that such reminders are necessary and are experienced by us as moments of unplanned and therefore unwarranted grace.
The Dimnent bell tower was for me the marriage of past and present, of keeping alive the world of my youth, one that was in many ways well-ordered and exemplary precisely because it was organized around our highest aspirations — those aspirations represented by the church’s spire. And it resonates down through the years into the moment where it resounds again the songs of worship that remind me of who I am by telling me who God is.
After twenty years of academic wandering I returned to Holland, to my home, and discovered a world that was at once strange and deeply familiar. Certainly Holland was no longer the city of my youth: Vogelzang Hardware was now New Holland Brewing, and the Curraugh stands where the auto-parts store used to be. Underneath that, however, were the familiar sights and sounds of a world not fully lost so long as I made make the effort to make it ring again in my life. Dimnent’s bells both evoked this old social order and also the place of that order in the overall order of things. It’s a reminder not just of what time it is, but that our days are marked by the church’s participation in eternity. So at one level the recollection was accidental, but at another it was intentional because someone still saw fit to ring those bells.
Proust’s “structure of recollection” could kick in because someone still knew how to make madelines. Without someone retaining that necessary skill, there would have been no experience in the cafe and thus no novel. The maintenance of a social world that attends to who we really are thus requires passing along the skills, habits, and practices that are essential parts of that world. There will always be an over and above that maintenance, amidst all the intentional reenactments a triggered memory that will give us in a moment of shock, a reminder we could never anticipate, and we realize there is a song that has played throughout our lives that resounds with the joy of a heavenly chorus. It is a moment of grace.
Jeff Polet, Ph.D.
Retired Professor of Political Science at Hope College. Current director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.
1 David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009), 8.
2 The Little Mermaid, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (Disney, 1989).
3 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 228a, ff.
4 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. W. V. Cooper (Ex-Classics Project, 2009), 11, https://www.exclassics.com/consol/consol.pdf.
5 Boethius, Consolation, 15.
6 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2019).