Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Memorizing Preserves the Past

Memorizing Preserves the Past


The power of recalling memorized materials has awed me. I didn’t set out to memorize many things but those I did commit to memory are not only still with me, they are teaching lessons I didn’t get the first time around.

Take the Gettysburg Address, written by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, for instance. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Nelson, divided this famous speech into four parts. I got the first section to memorize: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation can long endure...” Then the person reading part two took over, followed by persons three and four. At the very end we chorused together, “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” What a great message to give a rising generation surrounded by doubts and fears about the future!

I was a little girl with a big book of Nursery Rhymes. I could recite the verses before I could actually read them. This prompted me to ask, “Why couldn’t Humpty Dumpty be put back together again?” And “Why would anyone put four and twenty blackbirds in a pie? In my book they were all chirping their heads off while singing.”

My dad decided I should memorize the multiplication tables. Every time we went somewhere in the car, he would fire off a set. “What is seven times six?” I was expected to fire right back with “forty-two.” I can still answer the questions quickly. After I perfected the times table he started drilling me on the names of the forty-eight states and their capitols. “The capitol of Michigan is Lansing.”

In church every Sunday we said little verses called Sacrament gems. Six of those verses are now words to a Sacramental hymn we sing. “In memory of the broken flesh, we take the broken bread. And witness with the cup afresh, our faith in Christ, our Head.”

I learned the thirteen Articles of Faith by memory, when my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. June Skyles, offered a prize to the first person who memorized all thirteen. Guess who won? I was given a sweet picture of a cottage surrounded by flowers, to hang on my bedroom wall. Maybe that’s why I love flowers so much. Maybe that’s why I can still do a pretty good job of reciting them today!

Other things I was around a lot just sort of seeped into me. Our newspaper had a little quote by Voltaire, “Though I disagree with what you say, I’ll defend to the death, your right to say it.”   That was noble.  Now its important.

Then there was a radio station that started out the morning news with, Salutation to the Dawn. That poem was in a book my husband and I were reading a few days ago. He had learned the same verse and we both recited it together. “Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence–the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty. For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision. Look well, therefore to this day.”

Another radio program that I listened to on Sunday nights right after Mystery Theater, and just before I turned off the radio, stayed in my memory. Lying there in the dark, I still recall the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sorrow, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I shall not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Another character building poem I recall was written by one of my favorite authors, Edgar A. Guest, called Myself. “I have to live with myself and so, I want to be fit for myself to know....”  This is one of the truths I have lived by.

At a recent stake conference in Peoria, Arizona, a visiting authority, Gregory Switzer, taught the audience a quick way to learn the Ten Commandments. (See Deut 5:6-21) The first four deal with God. (1) No other Gods, (2) No idols, (3) Don’t take My name in vain, (4) Keep the Sabbath Day holy. The fifth (5) commandment says to honor our parents. The last five deal with others. (6) Don’t murder, (7) Don’t commit adultery, (8) Don’t Steal, (9) Don’t Lie, (10) Don’t Covet. Since we can’t display these signs in public anymore we were told to “Teach them to your children.” He also said to use our walls and refrigerator doors to teach children. I used to display the framed testimony of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon near my front door from D&C 76:22 “This, last of all is the testimony which we give of him. That he lives!...” I think this left an impression on my children though nobody mentions it.

By recalling things I have memorized, and “how useful they’ve been in my life, I firmly believe you can’t start too soon. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6  Babies can be taught with music. 

Memory is the book that can't be burned, or confiscated, or hid in a virtual cloud, no matter how many ways they try to destroy it.  And even those with memory loss retain long-term memory longer than other things they may forget.