There are moments each of us remembers for decades. I don’t mean moments like September 11, or the day JFK was assassinated, but personal, inconsequential, ordinary moments that impress us in ways it may take years to understand. One such moment for me happened at a gathering of some kind of my mother’s family. An aunt was present with one of her two daughters, the one who was a wife and a mother of numerous children, all of whom she home-schooled. She was a professional wife and mother, and a devout fundamentalist who stayed close to home and church. The only thing that ever bothered me about this first daughter was her propensity for criticism of others. I later came to recognize this hyper-critical tendency as characteristic of women who role-play their femininity. In other words, her devotion was not authentic at its core; rather, it was a staunch fidelity to a role she had chosen to play. That fidelity made her reject (i.e., criticize) other women who did not also choose to play the same role. It was a way of rejecting any temptation in herself to deviate from the role. She found it necessary.

Her sister, my aunt’s other daughter, was one whom some people might call “troubled.” She’d had some acquaintance with drugs, I think, and with sex. She didn’t stay close to home but traveled a great deal.

On the afternoon this memorable moment occurred, someone asked where the second daughter was. The first daughter made a kind of mocking half-shrug and said, “Well, you know, she’s what you might call a free spirit.” She tittered, inviting the others to titter along with her, and they obliged. Her mother (my aunt), however, just asked quietly, “What’s wrong with that?” Silence. I always liked my aunt.

What made the moment so memorable? If you know a family, a staff or faculty, a club or church, team or class, any tribal group where role-assignment is the functional adhesive, you know why it was memorable. My aunt’s question was a statement: “We will not play this soul-destroying game.”  As much for the sake of the assigner as for the assignee, the scapegoat, who, conveniently absent, was to be assigned to carry the sins of those present. Moments of divine intervention often leave silence in their wake, much like the occasion when Christ wrote in the dust at the stoning of the woman caught in adultery, just before he also asked a momentous question. The numinous moments are always the most memorable, however ordinary they may seem.

The news today of René Girard’s death brought this incident to mind.