Memory loss.

That old pop song from the '70s seems to be as true about society as it is about personal relationships: What's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. But as Patrick McCormick points out, hanging on to grudges can be very dangerous, too.

ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE BOOKS OUT this spring was The Seven Sins of Memory by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter. This highly readable and informative text explains how the mind forgets and remembers. It will, no doubt, be fascinating reading for millions of middle-aged baby boomers whose instant recall isn't what it used to be and who are just a little bit afraid that increasingly frequent memory lapses are a sign of some troubling neurological disorder.

But as embarrassing and upsetting as middle-aged forgetfulness can be, there are more serious sins of memory than the inability to remember a name or recall where we put the car keys.

A couple of years ago someone (I can't remember who) told me a joke about "Irish Alzheimer's": You forget everything but the grudge. In Christopher Nolan's Memento, this past summer's best and nastiest cinematic thriller, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a man with this particular memory problem. Injured by the assailant who raped and murdered his wife, Shelby can no longer form new memories. What he can't seem to forget, however, is his need for vengeance. So, in spite of his daunting handicap, Shelby sets out to track down his wife's killer, tattooing clues on his body and jotting down notes on Polaroid snapshots to remind himself of the names and character of new acquaintances.

At first we are sympathetic to Shelby's plight and admire his daunting grit and ingenuity. He reminds us of The Fugitive's Richard Kimble and the quest for the one-armed man. But as Memento unfolds in a backwards series of flashbacks, we discover things that Shelby has already forgotten, sometimes intentionally, and learn that neither he nor his quest is as noble as he wants to believe.

In the process, Nolan has us questioning our own memories. How often have we edited and revised our past, inflating and exaggerating old hurts, minimizing and deleting misdemeanors and crimes? How reliable or trustworthy are the things we've told ourselves about who we are and what we've done? And just what sort of people have we made ourselves into by the things we've chosen to remember or forget?

Curiously enough, the summer's biggest cinematic disappointment was also about corrected or distorted memories. In Jerry Bruckheimer's Pearl Harbor, we are transported back to a simpler time, when Hollywood could glorify war with an untroubled conscience and combat films showed young men and women marching bravely, even happily, into war's gaping maws. Among the "aw shucks" lads and lasses in Bruckheimer's technicolor remembrance of Pearl Harbor one almost expects a cameo shot of Errol Flynn, James Cagney, or even the Duke himself, tugging down on the visor of his aviator cap and waving a sly salute.

Hollywood has long been in love with World War II, nostalgic for the good times of the "good war." But it has been a while since war was such an unadulterated pleasure down at the local movie theater, a while since we could remember war without any sense of ambiguity or remorse. Korea, Vietnam, and a series of incursions in Central America ruined combat for a couple generations of Americans, and our best films have reflected an edgy sense of guilt and unease about America's wars. Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), Mike Nichols' Catch-22 (1970), Robert Altman's M*A*S*H* (1970), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) painted war as a form of lunacy, a season of brutality and madness that episodically erupts on the human landscape.

BUT RECENTLY, IT SEEMS, OUR POPULAR ENTERTAINMENTS and historians have been forgetting war s darker side--or projecting its evil onto our enemies. By focusing almost exclusively on the noble struggle against Hitler's Germany or Hirohito's Japan, we have chosen to overlook our more ambiguous and troubling military escapades. Popular histories like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, James Bradley's Flag of Our Fathers, or Stephen Ambrose's The Good Fight, Citizen Soldiers, and Band of Brothers celebrate the heroism of Americans at Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, and D-Day but pay little attention to Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. Indeed, though there is a rush to erect a WWII memorial near the Washington Mall, Congress stopped the director of the Smithsonian Institution from doing an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

This amnesia about our moral failures In combat is particularly ironic given that the week before Pearl Harbor hit the theaters, the New York Times printed a story implicating former Senator Bob Kerrey in the slaughter of 13 Vietnamese civilians in 1969.

According to a member of Kerrey's Navy SEAL team, the Americans took no prisoners, killed grandparents, women, and children, and were operating under widespread policies that savagely punished villagers for failing to support the war effort. Kerrey, long respected as a thoughtful and moral man, is no Milosevic or Pinochet, but he--and his superiors in Washington and Saigon--may well be guilty of war crimes. But we will probably never know the truth of this matter or have him taken before a U.S. or U.N. tribunal; it is a memory we prefer to suppress.

BOTH SCRIPTURE AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY warn us about the sins of memory. In Luke's parable of the prodigal son, we encounter a man who cannot forget the sins of his brother. And in Matthew's parable of the unforgiving debtor, we meet a scoundrel who has no memory of his own failures or the incredible mercy just shown to him.

So, too, in the Hebrew scriptures the prophets are always scolding the ancient Israelites for conveniently forgetting their own humble origins as slaves and aliens, their covenantal duties to widows, orphans, and strangers. These sins of memory are in sharp contrast to the God who remembers to keep promises, never forgets the poor, and offers forgiveness from the cross.

Johann Baptist Metz, a German political theologian who has written a great deal about the importance of memories, warns about the dangers of nostalgic memories that present us with a sanitized version of our past and the temptation to remember only those offenses committed against our tribe or clan. Too often, Metz warns, our popular and official histories are distorted and incomplete, including only the memories of the victors and their successes. The memories and stories of those who have been enslaved, oppressed, or pushed to the margins are silenced or forgotten. (Aside from Dances with Wolves, how many films has Hollywood made taking the side of Native Americans? And even here, a white man is the hero.)

Often, when we do remember suffering and pain, it is only our own suffering--or the pain of our group--and these memories are used to fuel a passion for self-righteous indignation, even vengeance. Look what they did to us. Listen to how we were wronged. So we make big budget movies about Pearl Harbor and the Cuban Missile Crisis but none about My Lai or the killing of Korean civilians at No Gun Ri. And when these incomplete memories are passed on to our children, they, as Oscar Hammerstein once wrote, learn "to hate all the people our relatives hate."

But Christianity, Metz argues, must be committed to passing on "dangerous memories," memories that include the stories of the suffering, the defeated, and the colonized. At the heart of the Christian story is a God who hears and cannot forget the cries and whispers of widows and orphans and aliens.

And in Christ's Passion and death we are called to recognize and remember the names and stories of all the broken, tortured, and starving. Indeed, we must remember the suffering not just of our own people, but of strangers and enemies. And we must let these memories work on us like a leaven, forcing us to recognize the humanity of foreigners and foes, and pressing us to stand with and cry out for all the victims of injustice. This is the sort of remembering that can change the future.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.