Date: March 3, 2025
The act of remembrance is central to the Scriptures. The Eucharist is an act of remembrance, explains Paul to the Church of Corinth. The Jewish people are obligated in Deuteronomy to “remember the commandments” and various strategies are explicated to ensure that happens. The reason why remembrance is so important is because with memory things are truly binary – you either remember or you forget.
Institutions know that remembrance is important. Portraits remind us daily of Seminary leadership. Buildings are named after certain people who want to be remembered. And so at VTS, we remember certain people – the Deans, the Faculty, and the Students. But all those who built the buildings, served and cooked the food, took care of the farm (yes we had a farm initially), laundered the clothes, and waited on the students, these people have been forgotten. Although their names were in the record, they were not remembered. And the fact that these lives were exploited under systemic racism makes the act of deliberately forgetting a heinous sin.
On Saturday morning, I stood with others and listened to an holy act of remembrance. Each name was a human life. They served an institution that did not give back. We repent and we resolve. We resolve that the future must be different.
The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D.
Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and the President of The General Theological Seminary