The Past Is The Past, Part I.

I’ve been reflecting a LOT on the past lately. I tried to outline a comprehensive blog post and realized no one in their right mind would read for that long. So I’m gonna break my reflections down. Today I’m gonna share about why I think remembering the past is important. 

You’ve probably heard the following lyric before–perhaps more often than you’d like:

Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by Thy help I’m come.

I talked to a friend once who hates “Come Thou Fount” because of that line; “everybody sings it, but nobody knows or cares what an Ebenezer is!” In case you have ever been confused by that line, here’s what it is. In the book of 1 Samuel in the Bible, there’s a story where the Philistines are coming after the Israelites. Samuel pleads with the Israelites to put away their false gods and cry out to the Lord alone for deliverance. They do this, God delivers them, and Samuel “sets a stone” in a certain place to commemorate what God has done for them. He calls it Ebenezer, or “The stone of help.” The forgetful Israelites need a reminder that it was GOD alone who delivered them. Throughout the Bible, we see the command to remember over and over again. Especially in Deuteronomy, God is always telling the Israelites to remember how he delivered them from Egypt, lest they forget and long for the days of captivity. So remembering the past is important because it can point us back to God. For the Israelites (and for us, I think), God’s deliverance was an integral part of their identity as a people. To remember who they were, they had to remember what He had done. 

 

 

If you’ve known me for very long, I’ve probably tried to read the following quote aloud to you. It’s from C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. In this story, a man named Ransom has been captured and taken to a strange planet. He escapes his captors and befriends an alien species. In this excerpt, he’s talking to a friend (Hyoi) and learning about the culture on his planet. Ransom asks if Hyoi’s people (the hrossa) ever struggle with overpopulation.

‘…But why should we have more young?’

Ransom found this difficult. At last he said:

‘Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?’

‘A very great one, Hman. This is what we call love.’

‘If a thing is a pleasure, a hman wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed.’

It took Hyoi a long time to get the point. 

‘You mean,’ he said slowly, ‘that he might do it not online the one or two years of his life but again?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.’

‘But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?’ 

‘But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.’

‘But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?’

‘That is like saying, “My good I must be content to eat.”‘

‘I do not understand.’

‘A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing… What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure…When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then–that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?’ 

How could I ever express how much I love those words? They’re so heavily beautiful to me. They show how remembering is also important because memory is often the real growth and substance of a moment or experience. For me, Mission Year happened. It took place over 11 months. But that experience will grow and develop things in my heart over a lifetime. I don’t need to experience it again; I need to remember and reflect. 

I know a lot of people, including myself, who will talk with friends and remember ‘the good old days’: some time in the past when things felt easy, exciting, restful, or significant. I know one friend group in particular that frequently laments the breaking of their fellowship, so to speak. It appears, from the way the act, that they believe the world would be better if they could relive their glory days–both relationally and musically. On the one hand, remembering those times is important! You can ache for the past (that’s actually what nostalgia means) in a beautiful way. You can let the memory grow something wise or lovely in your heart. You can celebrate and remember the good things God has given you or done for you. But this habit becomes twisted (or bent, as Lewis would say in the book mentioned above) when we allow a desire for the past to overtake us. It becomes ugly when we actually desire to relive the past instead of diving into the present. I think when those friends long for the past, it can rob them of the joy that’s present in their lives now. Friends, the past is the past. We weren’t meant to have it forever, and we have to receive (with hope and expectancy) the new wave of life that God sends our way. 

 

(In my next posts, I’m going to talk about how change is inevitable and hindsight isn’t always 20/20. Then we can talk about how accepting these truths can help us deal with the past in a healthier way :))