“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana–The Life of Reason, 1905

The phrase is most often spoken collectively. We apply it to civilizations, political movements, religions, and nations. We study wars, collapses, revolutions, and atrocities because buried within the rubble of the past is wisdom capable of preserving the future. History becomes a warning system. A teacher. A witness.

But perhaps the phrase applies just as powerfully to the individual soul.

Every person carries a history within them—patterns, fears, instincts, concealments, wounds, compulsions, and inherited narratives. And just as societies unconsciously reenact the unresolved traumas of their past, so too do individuals. What remains unexamined does not disappear. It simply continues operating underground, shaping perception and behavior from the shadows.

If we desire a different future, individually or collectively, we cannot merely wish our way into one. We must develop the courage to look honestly at the past and ask what wisdom it contains.

This is where much of modern religious thinking feels tragically incomplete. Sin and error are often treated like felonious marks on a permanent record—evidence of moral failure requiring removal or expungement. Salvation becomes a kind of divine legal process in which the goal is acquittal rather than understanding. We speak of forgiveness as though the highest spiritual state would resemble amnesia.

Scripture itself sometimes appears to reinforce this idea:

“God remembers it no more.”

But while divine forgetfulness may sound comforting in heaven, it is not particularly useful for human growth on earth.

Human beings rarely heal by forgetting. They heal by understanding.

Even our most destructive instincts have a history. Concealment has a history. Dishonesty has a history. Rage, addiction, control, withdrawal, self-protection—none of these emerge in a vacuum. Somewhere in the story there was pain, fear, humiliation, abandonment, shame, or survival. Somewhere there was a moment when hiding began to feel safer than being seen.

To examine the past honestly is not to excuse behavior. It is to understand the conditions that produced it. And understanding is often the first step toward freedom.

Is there any atrocity in human history that cannot be traced back to a fundamental belief that made the destruction possible?

Every genocide, oppression, conquest, exclusion, or act of collective cruelty begins long before violence manifests outwardly. Somewhere beneath the visible devastation lies an idea—a story about who matters and who does not, who belongs and who threatens, who is fully human and who can be sacrificed in the name of some higher cause.

The visible catastrophe is only the final stage of a much longer sequence.

Like a line of falling dominoes, history’s great destructions are often set in motion by something deceptively small: a fear left unquestioned, a prejudice normalized, an ideology protected from scrutiny, a certainty treated as sacred enough to justify harm. The first flick of the finger rarely appears catastrophic in the moment. Yet once set in motion, entire systems of suffering begin to unfold downstream.

And this is precisely why remembrance matters.

Because history is not merely a collection of dead events. It is a map of consequences.

Buried within both collective and personal history are patterns waiting to be understood. The past carries clues. Warnings. Revelations about the beliefs that repeatedly produce human flourishing and the beliefs that repeatedly produce destruction.

Our histories—both individual and collective—hold secrets.

If we are willing to face them honestly, they may yet free us from the patterns that govern us unconsciously.

If we refuse them, they will continue to hold us captive.

The Jewish tradition contains profound wisdom here. In Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, attention is ritualized toward both the collective and individual past. The community does not distance itself from the failures of its ancestors as though those stories belong to some inferior people from another time. Instead, the ancient voices are allowed to speak again.

The sins of the past are remembered publicly.

Not to produce shame for shame’s sake, but because forgetting is dangerous.

The stories remain alive because human beings remain human. The same fears, tribalism, violence, pride, scapegoating, and self-deception that shaped ancient generations still exist in us now. The ancestors become mirrors. Their failures become warnings filled with hard-won wisdom.

Perhaps this is also why so much modern scripture study fails to become revelatory.

Too often we approach sacred history not seeking wisdom, but seeking confirmation that our side was right all along. Scripture becomes less an encounter with truth and more a mechanism for preserving certainty. We read not to be changed, but to reassure ourselves that change is unnecessary.

This instinct is understandable. Human beings long for stability, coherence, and belonging. To question inherited assumptions can feel threatening, especially within religious communities where identity and salvation are often intertwined with being correct.

But when the goal of interpretation becomes protecting prior conclusions, revelation quietly suffocates.

The text can no longer speak honestly because we have already decided what it is allowed to say.

And once this posture takes hold, the entire enterprise subtly shifts. Instead of remembering for repentance’s sake, we begin constructing increasingly clever explanations for why repentance is unnecessary. Contradictions are harmonized. Harms are minimized. Blindness is reframed as righteousness viewed from a higher perspective.

The purpose of scripture quietly transforms from awakening conscience to defending identity.

It is unsurprising then that when we encounter morally unsettling passages in scripture—God commanding the destruction of the Canaanites, Abraham being asked to prove his allegiance through the unthinkable, or Nephi taking the life of a defenseless man—we often scramble for immediate certainty rather than remain inside the tension long enough to be transformed by it.

We rush toward resolution because unresolved questions threaten the stability of inherited belief. If scripture must always justify us, then ambiguity becomes dangerous. Moral complexity becomes intolerable. And so we develop quick explanations designed to protect certainty rather than deepen wisdom.

But perhaps revelation is not found in bypassing the tension.

Perhaps the deeper spiritual task is learning how to wrestle honestly with these stories as part of the long human journey of coming to know God and embodying that reality more truthfully in the world.

Because once scripture becomes incapable of disturbing us, it also becomes incapable of changing us.

The goal of sacred history may not be to provide flawless examples for imitation, but to expose the terrifying complexity of humanity’s evolving consciousness—our mixture of transcendence and tribalism, compassion and violence, revelation and projection. Scripture does not merely preserve divine encounters; it also preserves humanity’s incomplete understanding of those encounters.

And perhaps this too is part of remembrance.

Not sanitizing the past into moral simplicity, but allowing its unresolved tensions to humble us, awaken us, and keep us from confusing our present understanding with finality.

Yet throughout sacred history, revelation almost never arrives as confirmation of collective innocence. More often it arrives as interruption. Prophets disturb certainty. They expose hidden violence, challenge tribal righteousness, and call communities into painful self-recognition. Revelation enters history not merely to comfort communities, but to confront the stories they tell themselves about their own goodness.

In this sense, remembrance is itself a revelatory act.

To revisit history honestly—whether scriptural, institutional, familial, or personal—is to create the conditions under which new vision becomes possible. The moment we stop needing the past to prove we were always right, the past becomes capable of teaching us something.

Perhaps this is where we as Latter-day Saints have something profound hiding in plain sight.

Every week we gather around the sacrament table and are invited to “always remember him.” Traditionally this remembrance has been interpreted almost exclusively as remembering Jesus’ suffering on our behalf. But perhaps remembrance in the Christian sense is meant to be larger than recollection alone. Perhaps it is an invitation into conscious honesty.

What if the sacrament became not merely a ritual of reassurance, but a ritual of remembrance?

Not remembrance designed to humiliate us, but remembrance designed to awaken us.

A people committed to remembrance might approach the sacrament table carrying honest awareness of the week behind them. Not simply asking, “Am I worthy?” but also:

Where did I conceal?

Where did I wound?

What fears governed me?

What patterns did I repeat?

Whose pain did I fail to see?

What unfinished history continued operating through me?

And beyond the individual, perhaps communities themselves could learn to remember collectively.

We might speak honestly about the harms inherited within our own religious history—not to condemn our ancestors, but to learn from them. Every tradition contains both wisdom and blindness. To refuse this truth is to guarantee repetition.

Yet this idea lives in almost diabolical contradiction to the instincts of modern LDS culture.

When racism within our history is mentioned—whether priesthood and temple restrictions, theological justifications for racial hierarchy, or the lingering cultural assumptions that remain—many immediately rush toward explanation before lament. When authoritarian tendencies emerge, whether through unhealthy deference to leadership, fear of open disagreement, or systems that suppress uncomfortable truths, defensiveness often replaces introspection. Conversations around misogyny, homophobia, white supremacy, or doctrinal exceptionalism frequently produce visible discomfort, as though naming the wound itself constitutes betrayal.

Almost instinctively, apologetics arrive to rescue us from grief.

Explanations replace repentance.

Defenses replace mourning.

Institutional protection replaces self-examination.

We seem far more comfortable preserving the appearance of innocence than telling the truth about our history.

But traditions, like individuals, do not become healthier through denial. Silence does not heal collective wounds. Avoidance does not prevent repetition. If anything, the refusal to examine the past guarantees that its patterns will continue operating beneath the surface in subtler and more unconscious forms.

A mature spiritual community would not fear honest remembrance. It would trust that truth is sturdy enough to survive examination. It would understand that acknowledging blindness in our ancestors does not erase their goodness any more than acknowledging our own failures erases ours.

In fact, remembrance may be one of the highest forms of honoring those who came before us.

Not because we preserve the illusion that they were flawless, but because we are humble enough to learn from both their wisdom and their errors.

Otherwise the sacrament risks becoming strangely hollow: a ritual centered on remembering Jesus while simultaneously refusing to remember the very human patterns of exclusion, fear, domination, and self-justification that Jesus consistently confronted.

The sacrament table could become something more than a boundary marker dividing the worthy from the unworthy. It could become a communal act of courageous remembrance. A place where people bring the truth of their humanity into the light rather than hiding it behind performance and certainty.

There may even be another forgotten thread buried within Latter-day Saint theology itself: the practice of baptism for the dead.

Too often the ordinance is framed almost entirely as administrative necessity—a required legal mechanism performed on behalf of the deceased so heaven’s records can be properly ordered. The symbolism risks collapsing into paperwork for eternity.

But perhaps something far more human and transformative is hiding within the ritual itself.

In baptism for the dead, two people symbolically enter the water together: one living and one dead. One carries memory forward while the other represents the inheritance of the past. Together they are buried beneath the water and rise again bound to one another.

What if this ordinance is not merely about completing a transaction for the dead, but about reconciling generations?

What if it is an embodied acknowledgment that human beings inherit far more than genetics and surnames? We inherit wounds. Fears. Violence. Blindness. Tribalism. Shame. Survival patterns. Histories we unconsciously continue reenacting long after the original actors are gone.

The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children not because God curses bloodlines, but because unresolved pain replicates itself through human systems and relationships until someone becomes conscious enough to interrupt the cycle.

In this sense, baptism for the dead becomes a profound act of remembrance.

The living descend into the water carrying the truth that they themselves are not separate from history. They are participants within it. The arrogance of chronological superiority begins to dissolve. We stop imagining ourselves as enlightened people standing above our ancestors and instead recognize how easily we too are shaped by the assumptions and blindness of our age.

And perhaps simultaneously, something else happens within the living heart:

Contempt begins to loosen.

The ritual becomes an act of mercy toward the dead.

Not the mercy of pretending their blindness caused no harm, but the mercy of recognizing that most human beings, including ourselves, are acting out inherited fears and limited awareness they scarcely understand. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” becomes not merely something spoken about ancient enemies, but a way of relating to the generations that formed us.

In this light, baptism for the dead is no longer a one-sided saving ordinance performed by the righteous for the deficient. It becomes mutual reconciliation across generations.

The living forgive the dead.

The dead warn the living.

And both are bound together in the ongoing human work of awakening.

Past, present, and future meet together in the water.

And perhaps salvation itself begins there—not in escaping history, but in finally becoming conscious enough to reconcile with it.

In this way, remembrance itself becomes transformative.

Not because revisiting the past magically purifies us, but because what is consciously faced no longer needs to unconsciously control us.

In this sense, repentance is not erasure. It is remembrance transformed by honesty.

The modern instinct is often to avoid the storm entirely. We conceal. Minimize. Distract. Reframe. We try to outrun shame by distancing ourselves from the past. But unresolved things rarely disappear through avoidance. They simply wait beneath the surface until circumstances summon them again.

What we refuse to face, we often repeat.

There is a way this principle becomes painfully immediate, no longer abstract or historical.

It shows up not only in civilizations or traditions, but in the most intimate arena of human life: relationship.

I have recently come to see this with unsettling clarity in the wake of a relational fracture with my wife—one that was caused by my own act of dishonesty. What becomes visible in moments like this is that present behavior never arrives alone. It has a history. It belongs to a pattern shaped long before the present moment, formed in older reflexes: the learned instinct to conceal discomfort, to avoid conflict, to manage perception, to protect oneself from shame by hiding truth rather than risking rupture through honesty.

And yet the tragedy of such patterns is not only what they do in a single moment, but how easily they become self-perpetuating. What begins as protection becomes fracture. What begins as avoidance becomes distance. What begins as fear becomes the very loss one was trying to prevent.

In that sense, the present is never just the present. It is the reenactment of an unfinished past.

But this is also where the possibility of interruption emerges.

If the past is not merely something to be forgiven but something to be understood, then even painful relational rupture becomes diagnostic rather than only catastrophic. The question shifts from “How do I undo what I did?” to “What history was operating in me when I did this—and what would it take to stop repeating it?”

This does not diminish responsibility. It deepens it. Because responsibility is no longer only about owning the act, but about tracing the pattern that made the act feel possible.

And in that tracing, something unexpectedly redemptive appears: the realization that the same honesty that exposes harm is also the only thing capable of interrupting it.

To bring the pattern into the light is not to excuse it, but to break its continuity.

To allow history to speak is to refuse its repetition.

And in that fragile space between truth and consequence, something like repair becomes possible—not as instant restoration, but as the slow reconstruction of trust through sustained honesty, accountability, and changed behavior over time.

Freedom therefore requires something terrifying: we must step toward the very thing we have spent years organizing our lives around avoiding.

Toward the memory.

Toward the wound.

Toward the fear.

Toward the grief.

Toward the truth.

Not because pain itself is holy, but because reality is.

There is wisdom in the rubble.

And perhaps this is the deeper meaning of atonement—not the magical disappearance of the past, but reconciliation with it. The courage to allow history to become teacher instead of fate. The willingness to hear the voices from the dust before we unconsciously become their echo.

The past does not need to be forgotten.

It needs to be understood.