History vs History

[jenk]

Aahz sent me a pointer to this Sister Joan Chittister column. She makes some good points about the religious uses of evergreen trees through the centuries, ending with Christmas trees arriving in the US about 1850 or so. Then she wrote something that really hit home:

It gets clearer every day that there are two histories about everything.

The first history is history, the accumulation of facts over time that help us understand how ideas develop and why and for what purpose.

The second history is immediate past history, the period that spans our own life experiences back to the time of our great-grandparents. The history which for us, at least, "has always been this way."

From where I stand, it seems clear that the second kind of history always predominates.

Maybe it's that human lives are short. We are told about history before our birth, but we have divorced ourselves from it. It didn't happen to us and (therefore) we discount it.

I also liked her closing line: [I]f I were you and I really wanted to be a sign of Christianity, I wouldn't set out to prove it by fighting over the Christmas tree.