At Easter morning Mass, Fr. Adrian called the resurrection metahistory. I’d never heard of that before. He mentioned other feast days and holy days, including Christmas, and said they were observation of historical events. But not Easter. What happened at Easter – the resurrection – was beyond history, beyond event.
For one thing, it wasn’t a one-time deal. Maybe that’s the only thing.
Anyway, I got excited about it and wrote a note to myself on the book page of the paper, a big scrawling M e t a H I s t o r y over the picture of a memoir’s book cover, and then added a few other things I might forget. I know money was one of them (I actually do forget about money on occasion) but it was a shorthand reference to several things like banking. The other two items on the list fail to come to mind even though I just looked at the note a half hour ago.
That’s when I got excited again about this word, this idea. I turned on the computer and went to metahistory on the internet right away. I was curious. Here’s the only definition I found:
The overarching narrative or ‘grand récit’ that gives order and meaning to the historical record, especially in the large-scale philosophies of history of writers such as Hegel, Marx, or Spencer
Hmmm.
Far too heady for me this morning.
I’ll leave my Easter observation as this one of metahistory though because I get it. I get it that this is a quality of eternity; a different kind of continuity than what gets inserted into the calendars we hang on our walls and then celebrate as events, and how wonderful and bizarre it is. In year-after-year cyclical this and that, it is the only beyond-history phenomenon.
It reminds me of how when my dad was dying he said he didn’t want to send any more Halloween cards.
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Mari, I did a Google for "metahistory" and my first hit was this site: http://www.metahistory.org/
ReplyDeleteI like her "tag line" which is "Beyond the tyranny of beliefs." Don't you think it's our literal interpretation of our history that keeps us in our state of heels-dug-in. I feel that when we can rise above the literal and consider the symbolic/mythological, we can free ourselves...we can experience our own personal resurrections, over and over again. Does this make any sense? ;-)
I'm so unused to getting comments that it took me a few days to find this! Yes, I love "beyond the tyranny of beliefs," even though I hadn't thought of it in regard to metahistory. I'll have to visit the site.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely I agree that rising above the literal is freeing. And you know what? It's actual. How often is anything we're doing literal? Is what we do when we sit at our computers typing?