Our lives are lived within the dimension of time, which inextricably defines our experience of the three dimensions of space – both constraining and contextualizing our existence. This is why our existence seems to defy being examined as a fixed point, or held apart from the relentless unfolding of circumstance . . . except for in the rearview mirror. And our awareness of this fact, though largely subconscious, is what ends up preoccupying us — the present, attempting to anticipate the future, predicated on the experiences of the past. So it could be argued that our lives are actually lived in the rearview – our present spent looking back in order to calculate what comes next.
Psychotherapy has long understood this dynamic. Anxiety, phobia, and depression aren’t the byproducts of an accurate understanding of the future – rather, they are the haunting echoes of disappointment, pain, and despair populating the past and casting a dark shadow over any hopeful expectation of the future. And here’s the thing; the past can’t be undone or relived, and the future can only await what we will bring to it – while the present remains swollen with the tears of our broken and unreconciled experiences . . . subverting every decision we make, invariably sabotaging every anticipation of the future.
In this regard, making peace with the past is far more than pretending we can simply pack the past into boxes marked “Don’t Open!” and shoved into a dark corner of an attic. Because in the dead of night, the unsettling noise from that attic will begin to fill us with the dark foreboding of what has long gone unresolved — now seeking resolution. This is the very nature of the human psyche – like it or not, we live with everything we’ve ever experienced . . . regardless of the boxes we pack it in. So the question isn’t whether we will live with our past, but how will we choose to live with it?
Heartache and despair leave us broken and confused, and tragic events hammer us like a blunt instrument, knocking us off our feet – so the idea that we could simply make rational sense of such things in the aftermath of them is utterly ridiculous. Therefore, the past isn’t a logical puzzle to be solved – because there are no words capable of dispelling a past that makes no sense. For we are incapable of un-ringing the bell of the past or muting the reverberating effects it has on our lives. So reconciliation with the past can’t be found in an endless rehearsing of the past, hoping to somehow unlock a meaning we can understand – rather, it can only be found in surrendering our need to understand.
It is my Christian faith confession that we can be reconciled to God, and within that reconciliation, we can be reconciled to one another . . . and even be reconciled within ourselves. And integral to this reconciliation is forgiveness and redemption – that our past can both be, forgiven and redeemed. Forgiveness addresses the guilt and shame that weigh us down, and redemption restores meaning back to the places in our story where meaninglessness has ravaged any expectation of hope. So that with a clear conscience and our hope restored, we might imagine ourselves as being truly reconciled.
For it is God who redeems all our years . . .
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