In writing the previous posting (December 17th), I had occasion to hop around the Web, revisiting some of the lesser moments of the last millennium’s religious history. For some of the Web’s denizens, these awfully old events (e.g., Michael Servetus’ burning for heresy in 1553) are treated with the rawness you’d expect if they happened only yesterday.

Folks have long memories.

Yet again, our minds turn to Osama Bin Laden, still smarting over Islamic defeats in Andalusia in the 15th century, not to mention the Christian crusades of 900 years ago. Sure, the First Crusade wiped out virtually every man, woman, and child in the city of Jerusalem, but hey, the modern American wants to say, that happened in 1099 -- get over it!

Long memories. They seem the bane of the world: people suffering and angry about wrongs committed so very long ago. And yet, we cannot, should not live without memories: they are lessons learned, experience crystallized, predecessors honored. Is there a way for humans to honor the tragedies of their ancestors without perpetuating an endless cycle of revenge? And how long a memory is too long? If not the Crusades, then the medieval pogroms? Slavery? The native American massacres? The Armenian genocide? The Holocaust? Bloody Sunday? The Munich Olympics? Sabra and Shatila? Bosnia? Rwanda?

Merely listing these events (and recalling the many left unlisted) is a statement of their universality. The human capacity to victimize seems universal; the human tragedy of victimization is certainly universal. In remembering the deaths of our ancestors, we naturally deepen our identification with the groups we were, by chance, born into. But that’s no longer enough. We need also to identify with the universal.

It’s a commonplace that the human race is too big to identify with -- hence the need for ethnicity, community, and so forth. (It’s also a commonplace that those who love humanity tend to be far less impressed with the real-life humans standing in front of them.)

But perhaps, just as today’s companies can begin to view themselves as global, as the United Nations works ever so slightly better than the League of Nations did, as we begin to think haltingly about issues like global warming, we individuals can find a little room for viewing ourselves as members of Homo Sapiens.

Not to the exclusion of the affiliations closest to our hearts, but as a complement to them. Not as an abstraction, but as a new photograph in our family album: a family dressed in unfamiliar clothes, living in unfamiliar terrain, yet with eyes that speak our language. A family that enriches our understanding of what it means to be human. A family we can especially recall whenever we’re tempted to forget what links us all together.