One of the more amazing aspects of being human is that other people’s memories can become our own. Although we did not experience them, we can receive them secondhand and carry them as sources of humor, encouragement, or wisdom. One such memory comes to me thirdhand from my father’s seminary professor, Dr. Van Groningen. He recalled his boyhood in the 1930’s, when his grandmother lived with his family. Long after the rest of her memory had gone, she could still sing the Psalms in her native Dutch.
This memory became mine when my father relayed it to me in 1988.
What fills our memory fills our lives. And part of our hope at Trinity is to fill our students’ memories with great words. Like the profligate sower in the parable, we do this any way we can.
The most obvious way is straight-on memorization. Each year, all seventh through tenth graders memorize and recite at least one poem for their classmates. We also memorize collectively— walking the hall, you might hear Mr. James’s boys reciting On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer at the top of their seventh grade lungs. I’ve often used a poem as a way to call my seniors back from break. I walk into the room and declaim—The hidden law does not deny/Our laws of probability—the boys join in—But takes the atom and the star/And human beings as they are—while tucking in their shirts, clearing their desks, and wiping sweat from their temples.
Another way is foreign words. Words in foreign tongues maintain a peculiar freshness, as you may know from your own experience. My ninth graders and I begin class singing in Hebrew. Every sophomore declaims the Aeneid’s proem. Students graduate with the Lord’s Prayer memorized in Latin, Spanish, Italian, or Old Church Slavonic.
Drama offers all sorts of words. Everyone performs in at least two plays, which may mean memorizing 600 lines in a month while taking other courses, playing a sport, and working. They lose some, but I can attest that lines from my own high school’s production of You Can’t Take It With You still surface.
We offer students a lot of singing: ballads, work songs, sea shanties, spirituals, chants, hymns. And nothing sticks with us like lyrics, which is why every Trinity graduate has Psalms 1, 47, 122, 130, and Luke 1:68-79 down cold. And they’ve absorbed these secondhand memories without even trying—simply by singing them in morning prayer.
This brings me back to my father’s professor’s grandmother. I remember her and I am grateful. And I hope that we are offering here what someone offered our sister in Christ, in her girlhood in Holland, many years ago.
That the generations to come might know,
and the children yet unborn . . .
So that they might put their trust in God.
(Psalm 78:6a, 7a )