Edited by Jim McCrory, Monday, 16 June 2025, 09:51
“The sea gave up its dead…” Revelation 20:13
Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot
I stepped out of the Titanic Museum in Belfast into the daylight yesterday, but it didn’t feel like the world I had entered a couple of hours earlier. There was a hush in the air, not just among the people, but within me, a kind of spiritual quietness I’ve only ever known after visiting Auschwitz.
Two very different places. One, a triumph of engineering and opulence that ended in catastrophe; the other, a calculated factory of death. Yet both have become sacred in the way graves are sacred, not because they preserve the past, but because they insist on not letting us forget it.
What is this heaviness we carry when we leave such places? It’s not just sorrow. It's something deeper. A sense that we have been handed a memory that doesn’t belong to us, and yet we are somehow responsible for carrying it. That’s what I mean by the burden of memory.
I didn't know the people who drowned in the Atlantic, nor those who perished in the camps. But in walking the corridors of their stories, hearing their laughter caught in letters, seeing their faces frozen in photographs, something passes from them to us. We become keepers. Not of their suffering, perhaps, but of their dignity.
I consider the petty arguments, unkindness, and fallouts that families and friends visit upon one another. And yet, our links to humans of past generations connect us inexorably to our human family—so why not to those in our immediate midst? There’s a tragedy in closing our eyes while someone—or we—nurse some small issue.
Memory, when it is real, demands something of us. The Bible speaks of remembering not as a passive act. In Hebrew, the word zakar—to remember—is deeply active. When God remembers His covenant, He acts. When we remember the poor, the afflicted, the broken, we’re not meant to be spectators in history’s theatre. We’re called to be participants in its repair.
It’s tempting to think that remembering is enough. That by standing in front of a glass case, reading the names etched in steel or carved in wood, we’ve fulfilled some moral obligation. But memory that doesn’t shape our character is little more than nostalgia in funeral clothes.
I think that’s why these places stay with us. They won’t let us walk away unchanged. They whisper: Live more gently. Speak more truthfully. Pay attention. Honour the living by remembering the dead. The burden of memory becomes a kind of moral inheritance. We carry it forward—not as guilt, but as resolve.
And so I walked away slowly from this Belfast Museum of tragedy. Not because I was tired, but because I didn’t want to hurry back into the noise of things. I needed to honour the silence. To let the burden settle into place. Because some memories aren’t meant to be put down. They are meant to be lived with; in order that we live differently.
We are reminded that those who passed away in the tragedy have hope, albeit they are not aware:
“The sea gave up its dead, and Death and Hades gave up their dead, and each one was judged according to his deeds." Revelation 20:13 (BSB).
The Burden of Memory
“The sea gave up its dead…” Revelation 20:13
Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot
I stepped out of the Titanic Museum in Belfast into the daylight yesterday, but it didn’t feel like the world I had entered a couple of hours earlier. There was a hush in the air, not just among the people, but within me, a kind of spiritual quietness I’ve only ever known after visiting Auschwitz.
Two very different places. One, a triumph of engineering and opulence that ended in catastrophe; the other, a calculated factory of death. Yet both have become sacred in the way graves are sacred, not because they preserve the past, but because they insist on not letting us forget it.
What is this heaviness we carry when we leave such places? It’s not just sorrow. It's something deeper. A sense that we have been handed a memory that doesn’t belong to us, and yet we are somehow responsible for carrying it. That’s what I mean by the burden of memory.
I didn't know the people who drowned in the Atlantic, nor those who perished in the camps. But in walking the corridors of their stories, hearing their laughter caught in letters, seeing their faces frozen in photographs, something passes from them to us. We become keepers. Not of their suffering, perhaps, but of their dignity.
I consider the petty arguments, unkindness, and fallouts that families and friends visit upon one another. And yet, our links to humans of past generations connect us inexorably to our human family—so why not to those in our immediate midst? There’s a tragedy in closing our eyes while someone—or we—nurse some small issue.
Memory, when it is real, demands something of us. The Bible speaks of remembering not as a passive act. In Hebrew, the word zakar—to remember—is deeply active. When God remembers His covenant, He acts. When we remember the poor, the afflicted, the broken, we’re not meant to be spectators in history’s theatre. We’re called to be participants in its repair.
It’s tempting to think that remembering is enough. That by standing in front of a glass case, reading the names etched in steel or carved in wood, we’ve fulfilled some moral obligation. But memory that doesn’t shape our character is little more than nostalgia in funeral clothes.
I think that’s why these places stay with us. They won’t let us walk away unchanged. They whisper: Live more gently. Speak more truthfully. Pay attention. Honour the living by remembering the dead. The burden of memory becomes a kind of moral inheritance. We carry it forward—not as guilt, but as resolve.
And so I walked away slowly from this Belfast Museum of tragedy. Not because I was tired, but because I didn’t want to hurry back into the noise of things. I needed to honour the silence. To let the burden settle into place. Because some memories aren’t meant to be put down. They are meant to be lived with; in order that we live differently.
We are reminded that those who passed away in the tragedy have hope, albeit they are not aware:
“The sea gave up its dead, and Death and Hades gave up their dead, and each one was judged according to his deeds." Revelation 20:13 (BSB).