As I read the book I felt like I was being asked to carry a tiny fraction of the burden Simonetta and her family bore — and it was still onerous. But I also see the beauty of being part of a community where personal possession of painful knowledge is essential to burden-bearing.

Lois Lowry tells a story about how a utopian state required that all of the community’s memories going back through the generations be committed to a single person, a receiver. The elders engineered a society where no one but the receiver had to feel or remember. Life was safe and comfortable. The citizens were spared the pain of knowing, of emoting. And they could always call on the receiver when faced with a decision that exceeded their self-imposed limited experience.

Lowry’s The Giver makes sense to me. She understands the Preacher. “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases in knowledge increases sorrow” (Eccl. 1:18). I agree. There are some stories I don’t want to know. Some pictures relentlessly haunt.

This is why I didn’t want to read Simonetta Carr’s Broken Pieces and the God who Mends Them: Schizophrenia Through a Mother’s Eyes (P&R, 2019). I knew just enough of the story to know that it would rattle me vigorously. It did. As I read the book I felt like I was being asked to carry a tiny fraction of the burden Simonetta and her family bore–and it was still onerous.

But I also see the beauty of being part of a community where personal possession of painful knowledge is essential to burden-bearing. Lowry’s characters–to the extent that they could still reason without deep recall and feeling–believed that avoiding the pain of shared memory and emotion was an advantage. But the receiver knew that something basic to their humanity had been stolen from them. We need to feel even when we don’t want to. It is part of what makes us human, part of what made Jesus quintessentially human. When we give and receive sad–and happy–memories we affirm each other’s humanity. Being drawn into Simonetta’s living nightmare felt like being told, “I trust you with this memory. I want you to have part of my experience so that you will be more than you are.” Giving and receiving hard memories is beautifully symbiotic.

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