Memory is a funny beast.
When “Blurred Lines” came out in 2013, I listened to it almost every time it came on the radio, as long as my kids weren’t in the car. As a feminist, as someone concerned about the pervasiveness of rape culture, as someone who found the nods to that rape culture particularly egregious in rapper T.I.’s contribution to the bridge (I’m a nice guy, but . . . is both the most and least offensive line), I cannot defend this. But I loved the hook, I loved the homage to Motown soul, and I loved Thicke’s rhetorical question What do they make dreams for / When you got them jeans on?
It reminded me of the first time I spent a long night dancing with someone I was hot for in a club with cheap drinks and great music. It reminded me of feeling his hand on my waist and wondering if we were just dancing or if he felt what I felt. It reminded me of those blurred lines of friendship and attraction and dancing and desire.
It reminded me of the joke that Christians don’t approve of sex because it might lead to dancing. Which of course is funny because Christians often fear that dancing might lead to sex; which is funny because often at least one dance partner wants it to, if not immediately than eventually. Dancing can be foreplay.
That’s what “Blurred Lines” felt like to me—why I loved it and kept it from my children: crass, but fun, foreplay.
Memory is a terrible beast.
Those who have heard “I know you want it” and “I’m a nice guy, but . . .” and “I’m going to do this to you” spoken to them before acts of violence and coercion might understandably have quite a different response to the song.
I have never had acts of violence or coercion visited upon me, but certain words can stop me in my tracks and cart me off somewhere I’d rather not go: words that will never make it into my personal vocabulary of dirty talk and naughty slang; compliments that I’d rather not receive. I remember the first time I felt sick to my stomach when an older man made a comment about my legs. I remember, too, sitting in Mrs. Smith’s eighth-grade reading classroom after school, making up a missed reading period, while another student served a detention. Alone in the room with me, he filled the forty-five minutes with vulgar questions and suggestions. I sat in silent shock, hoping that if I didn’t acknowledge him he’d stop. (What girl isn’t told to ignore them to get them to leave you alone?) I’d never had anyone talk to me that way before; never heard anyone talk that way, never had another living soul reference my genitalia. He took the same route home on the late bus afterward, and I remember sitting near the front, intentionally close to the creepy driver, who was a safer bet for neutral conversation. The boy, whose name I never recall, but whose leering face I could still pick out in my junior high yearbook, didn’t say another word to me.
That afternoon I got home, desperately hoping my parents would read my mind, so they would know something had happened without me having to find words or give voice to how disgusting I felt. At thirteen, I had already started to imagine what it would be like to kiss or be with a boy; I wanted someone to see and know me. I had not wanted this, though I worried that I had invited it by wanting the other attention.
It’s not much of a violation as far as violations go. I climbed into bed earlier, pulled the covers over my head, cried, and went to sleep.
What do we do with our sexual and romantic histories? What do we make of the parts we hate, of the sins and crimes committed against us that seem unlimited in their capacity to injure again and again? How do we hold the memories that continue to inspire our ambivalence, or our regret over hurts we’ve caused? And what do we do with the things that were wonderful, but are gone? Are we forever bound to the experiences and individuals who have populated our past?
Time is a central concern in Christian thought: how we live in it, how we understand it, how God moves in it and beyond it. That’s what I want to explore in this chapter: how time, memory, forgiveness, and hope go together as we seek to reconcile what we’ve seen and done, who we’ve been, with who we long to be. For most of us, our current relationship is not our first rodeo. What do we make of what has come before, what was delightful and what was dreadful?
God’s grace can be a critical source of healing in all of that, but we mustn’t allow platitudes or calls for quick forgiveness—for reconciliation where there is none—to masquerade as that grace. We’re called to reflective engagement with our own stories, as well as the unfolding of God’s story through history. Our hope is that we’ll know salvation—not in some distant heaven, but even here, even now.
MANY PEOPLE THINK of time, of history, as, in the words of Winston Churchill, “one damn thing after another.” It is simply the unfolding of things, the way we measure how it is that everything doesn’t happen all at once. But humanity has ascribed different meanings to this unfolding: imagined that the gods or the fates have arranged all things from time immemorial or, alternatively, suggested that time itself is fully relative, passing differently in space, passing differently for children than adults.
Our views of the past, present, and future reveal and shape not simply what we think about the world, but how we come to terms with our own personal histories. Everybody loves a good redemption narrative: Christian worship, particularly American evangelical worship, has long featured the sharing of testimony—of lives once a disaster, until the surrender to Christ’s lordship. But this is no new story: John Newton wrote I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see in 1779; the apostle Paul saw the risen Christ, was blinded, and had the scales fall from his eyes just a few years before that. The Hebrew Bible narratives are divided into the exilic and post-exilic periods: from the period following the destruction of the Temple and the time spent living in a strange new land, in a foreign culture, to the time when they returned to their homeland and tried to rebuild.
Christians have even structured our calendar this way, marking years not from our perceived beginning of recorded time, but as periods of “before and after”; before and after the advent of our Lord. Time, we understand, includes all the happenings, large and small, under the sun, but is also marked by significant moments of change, of possibility, of pain.
The Psalmist prays:
Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord, and of your steadfast love,
for they have been from of old.
Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions;
according to your steadfast love remember me,
for your goodness’ sake, O Lord!
(PSALM 25:6–7)
Remember this, but don’t remember that. God requests similar responses from the people: remember that you were exiles; remember my promises; do not remember your old ways. Jesus, too: “You have heard it said . . . , but I say to you.”
The relationship of the divine to humanity is characterized by this back-and-forth, by remembering and forgetting, by forgiving and retelling, by change and reinterpretation. History is, in some ways, one damn thing after another, but also, now in Mark Twain’s witty phrasing, “History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes.” I even hear the voice of God, weary of the Israelites’ continued breaking of the covenant, or Jesus, as the people routinely miss his point, in Edna St. Vincent Millay: “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.”
MY MEMORY OF dancing is still called to mind by Top 40 radio, but I only recall the longing and desire I felt; I remember that I felt longing and desire all those years ago. But the feelings don’t themselves remain. That distance took some time. Bob Dylan names it well in his song “Most of the Time” eventually singing: Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine.1
It wasn’t always that way. When I was lonely in grad school following a breakup, flailing in classes, I could call the happy memory of dancing with a London friend and crush to mind, with all its erotic pathos, and start pining with renewed vigor. My memory served to distract me from my current mess. What if, I could muse, I had actually made a move? We danced around getting together for years, and it was only when Josh and I started dating, and the London boy married his longtime love, that we stopped keeping in touch. The memory stayed, but the feelings faded, because the uncertainty, that what-ifs, the revisionist fantasies were gone. There was no uncertainty; we were certainly with other people. The door had certainly closed.
I once read a book written by an earnest young Christian man, who had married a woman who had multiple sexual partners “before becoming a Christian.” He lamented the way he felt the ghosts of those previous lovers haunting their marital bed—was she comparing them? Was she longing for the past? I couldn’t believe the way he seemed to be blaming her for his own insecurity.
Surely there are those who will compare one partner with another—or will use past relationships as measuring sticks by which to evaluate current ones (or, worse, will evaluate real partners based on fictional characters or porn). But I think that’s poor behavior and bad habits more than the necessary consequence of having had more than one relationship.
I officiated a wedding once for a gorgeous and wonderful couple who were active members of a thriving, progressive church, two thoughtful people in their late twenties who couldn’t have been more in love. In one of our counseling sessions, though, the bride mentioned that she had some lingering anxiety about the fact that he had lived with a previous girlfriend. Neither bride nor groom were “saving themselves for marriage,” but there was something about the cohabitation that bothered her. It was too close to marriage: the domesticity, the quotidian nature of the sex with his previous partner. She was jealous.
Topping things off, he was still Facebook friends with his ex, and pictures yet existed of them as a couple. He tried to reassure her: their relationship was so much more; he loved her so deeply. But that first woman had been an important part of his life, once. He felt strange not acknowledging that. Still, his memory of her was distant. Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine.
His bride relaxed, in the assurance of his love, and in the grace that fades memories and replaces them. Sex and domesticity for him now, and for as long as he could remember and foresee, was about the two of them.
There are those who worry about the long-term effects of the pervasive sexual assault, the imperfect intimacies of hookups, the marriages of those who have sexual and romantic histories (and the inevitable threat to them posed by the Facebook bogeyman). Me? While I’m fascinated by longitudinal studies, I don’t worry too much about the long-term effects of a lengthy sexual and romantic learning curve. I do worry about a culture of pervasive sexual violence, of course, but I also have hope in the ability of survivors to overcome even the deepest darkness. At the same time, I’ve known too many folks in recovery and too many friends who can’t quite shake bad relationships to believe that once we’ve seen the light, we’ll never struggle again. I’m moved by the poetry of I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see, but am convinced it’s truer as a metaphor than as a diagnostic tool.
I don’t believe in inevitable progress, but I do believe in the steadfast grace of God, the love that will not let us go, the hope that God’s time is ever transforming me and you and the world toward love. I know women and men who were made to suffer but who know life again, and know it in abundance of joy.
I used to work in the same neighborhood in which I attended grad school, and even now, I am back regularly enough: teaching classes, attending conferences, spending too much money at the great bookstores. From the stop sign at 55th and Dorchester, I can see the apartment of the boy who mystified and confounded me, and the parking spot he sent me walking back to unexpectedly—alone! late!—after one of our dates.
At one of the chapels on campus, right before worship, two weeks after we broke up, he returned an errant sock of mine he’d finally managed to locate in his bedroom. It had, you can imagine, been misplaced in the heat of a moment deeply unlike the one that precedes community worship. The irony was jarring. The jerk. He even smiled as he handed it to me.
After we broke up, this lovely chapel became associated with my humiliation and my hurt. It’s been more than a decade now; the building has undergone a renovation since then. But it’s neither the design changes, nor the mere passage of time, nor even the frequency of my visits to the space that have provided healing, that have allowed me to set aside the association. It’s what I’ve done in the space since then: I’ve worshipped, shared communion and Communion, preached and presided over memorials and weddings there. I’ve imposed ashes—confessed my sins and experienced assurance—at the beginning of Lent each year.
SAD, WISTFUL, WHAT-MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN memories are one thing. The pangs of heartbreak, no matter how severe, are of a different order from the weights burdening far too many people—if not you, then surely someone you know. What do we do with experiences in which things we value highly—trust, innocence, bodily integrity, hope, physical expressions of love and intimacy—are violated? What do we do when words of grace—you are special, you are beautiful—are twisted and turned, used in service of evil?
What of the girls and boys who are molested and raped at church, by pillars of the community? What damage is wrought in those whose first experiences of romance was bound up in coercion and manipulation? What can we say to the generation of girls who go off to school—to learn, to grow, to be enthralled by education and possibility—and are assaulted, raped, by their peers, and denied any justice by their schools’ administrative culture?
I sat at dinner discussing a New York Times story about sexual assault on college campuses2 with my parents some time ago, and we wondered if things had always been like this. Did pairs of men use to simply take it upon themselves to penetrate young women on pool tables with a host of objects? Did they, as in an article from earlier that spring,3 use to lie next to women they’d had sex with in the past, and if she declined their advances on this occasion, just take off her clothes and rape her anyway? Did that happen as frequently in the seventies, when my parents were in college, or fifteen years ago, when I was? Certainly marital rape has a distressingly long history (Renita Weems writes of its biblical precedents in Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets4), but there was a period in which the culture of sex prior to marriage, among college students at any rate, wasn’t structured in quite the same way. Is the frequency of this sort of assault changing, or just the way we talk about it? Are we simply more aware of it now?
I asked my survey respondents if they had any history of sexual abuse, as a victim/survivor or as an abuser. So many said yes, they had been victimized. Roughly a third said yes, a percentage that reflects the results of larger, more rigorously analytical data sets. But one of the benefits of an open response survey like mine is that I can see responses like this:
Do you have any history of sexual abuse?
“No.”
But she continues:
I once slept with a guy when I was blacked out drunk who I believe was either not at all drunk or was sober enough to know that I had blacked out. I don’t consider it a rape, though it’s possible someone else would feel that it was.
Semantics matter: I don’t want to tell someone she’s framing her story wrong; but if I were called to testify in a court of law, I’d suggest that the clearly unequal power dynamic in the interaction she describes does not meet the criteria of consensual sex.
Semantics matter, and so do our various interpretations of how to deal with conflict. The article from earlier that spring focused on Swarthmore College, a liberal school outside Philadelphia with a progressive Quaker heritage. That heritage has really only two remaining vestiges today:
The second central remnant of the school’s Quaker legacy—the “peaceful resolution of conflicts”—resides not in the student body, but in the administration. “From the very smallest scale to the largest scale, the college does have a long history of finding a way through that won’t leave half the people in any room feeling like they lost,” says Swarthmore history professor Tim Burke.5
I believe in the peaceful resolution of conflicts, of trying to find a way through that doesn’t leave anyone out. One problem of that approach, Burke notes, is that “it means . . . we tend to defer difficult decisions.” In situations of sexual assault, a larger problem is that it treats perpetrator and victim as equal partners in a conversation: it ignores the problem of power, and more often than not re-victimizes those who have already suffered. The school doesn’t want anyone to feel like he’s lost, but in some situations, that’s not possible. In criminal situations, for example, like this one, that’s not possible.
That doesn’t mean we can’t long and work for restorative justice, but there can never be justice at all if it is the victim whose needs and safety are sacrificed for a veneer of reconciliation.
THIS ALL GOES to say that the injustices of our world are not going to fade away because of the inevitability of increasing goodwill. What liberal Christians mean when we speak of original sin is just this: it’s part of our makeup to be estranged from self, God, and neighbor. Existentialist theologians call this the “ambiguity of existence,” which means that sometimes good things are good, and sometimes good things have lousy effects. Witness the desire for peaceful reconciliation that hurts the vulnerable. Sometimes lousy things have okay or even good effects. My go-to example is the number of happily married couples I know who initially hooked up at a party; a willingness to pursue casual sexual interaction need not end in criminal sexual assault. Sometimes it can be intimate, fun, and even healing or liberating, if my anonymous survey respondents are telling the truth about their experiences.
The ambiguous realm we live in, in which good is sometimes good and sometimes less than fantastic, is referred to in ancient Greek as “chronos.” But Christians describe another sort of time, “kairos,” as well. Kairos is time outside of time, time in which everything happens, in which all reality is held together. It’s the time in which God is: our shorthand has become “God’s time,” but I kind of loathe that translation, because it gets used far too often to encourage people to sit still and be patient with their suffering. The long single. The marginalized. The victimized. Your intended mate and the justice you seek will come in “God’s time.” Or never. “In [God’s] perspective a thousand years are like yesterday past,” Psalm 90:4 says. Best to get comfortable. (This is why Martin Luther King, Jr., had to write “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and Why We Can’t Wait.)
“Kairos,” I think, is better translated as “the eternal”: that which is as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. There are moments, theologians say, when the Eternal One, when God, breaks into chronos. The key example of this, the clear, unambiguous example, is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He ate and slept and hung out and worked within chronos, but he also healed, taught, and bore witness to the Good News (kairos). He was the eternal within our world: God incarnate.
But just because God’s grace—God’s eternal love, God’s healing presence—was most present in the relatively short thirty-three-year window of Jesus’s life doesn’t mean that it is never again present. We have a tendency to divide time into before and after God was present in our lives, before and after our conversion, but God breaks into our lives and world regularly. Part of faith is trusting that such a healing presence will show up; part of grace is being able to trust that God will keep working in us and in our world, and subsequently being opened to that healing and reconciliation.
Chronos is ambiguous, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes neither; kairos, as we experience it, is fleeting, but persistent; its goodness is unambiguous. Life continues, but God is present. This has important implications for all of us, with our histories, living in the world.
John Wesley, eighteenth-century theologian and revivalist, wrote that God is at work at us “from the first dawning of grace in the soul till it is consummated in glory.”
If we take this in its utmost extent it will include all that is wrought in the soul by what is frequently termed “natural conscience,” . . . all the desires after God . . . [through which God is] showing every man “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his God;” all the convictions which his Spirit from time to time works in every child of man.6
We can recognize, through this natural conscience, when something is not right. The women and men who experienced abuse as children and adolescents and into young adulthood may not have needed anyone to tell them that the way they were treated was wrong. There’s grace in that. We can’t right injustices if we can’t first name them.
There’s also grace in the assurance that we can trust our interpretations of what has happened in our lives, even in the midst of our ambiguous existence.
In See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity, Amy Frykholm writes of Sarah, a young Korean-American woman wrestling with what it means to be a loving daughter, an American teenager, and an independent but grounded young woman. She gets a job at the mall. There, a boy she’s not particularly attracted to shows interest. They go on some dates, during which “she always felt they were playacting, imagining what other people did or said on dates and awkwardly trying to do the same.”7
Her parents go out of town for the weekend, and she invites him over, without really knowing why—perhaps because this is what teenagers do? She shows him her room, she sits with him on the bed, and then “he had sex with [her], and [she] let him.”8 Afterward, she feels terrible. She showers a bunch of times. She cannot believe she gave away something that is supposed to be sacred.
After reflection, however, Sarah realizes two things. First, that sex with this boy created a breach with her parents: a breach she had needed as she began working out her identity independent from, but related to, them. The second is a painful realization:
As much as having sex with Jacob had been a terrible mistake, and as much as she regretted it, it had ended something in Sarah that needed ending. As soon as it was over, she had awakened to a truer self than the one who had gone out with Jacob in the first place . . . Why she always had to do the wrong thing first in order to learn it was wrong, she didn’t know . . . It was a lesson that had to be lived, however unpleasant.9
My hope is that young women and men have the resources they need to avoid learning lessons the hard way, but I also want us all to be reassured that there’s no such thing as a perfect life lived with no hard lessons. A young clergywoman I met at a conference recently told me that she’d grown up in a conservative Christian culture that insisted that all sex outside marriage was sinful, so she and her boyfriend had waited. They’d started dating at eighteen, married five years later, and had waited to share physical intimacy, even as they grew in love for each other. They’ve been married more than a decade, and she told me that though she is tremendously happy in her marriage, she regrets that they missed out on all those years together of hot, late-adolescent sexual discovery. “I feel like I was sold a bill of goods,” she said, “and that instead I just missed five years when I could have been enjoying sex with a loving partner.” Her regret can be read as a hard lesson, but a kairos moment nonetheless, in that it led her to a deeper exploring of Christian norms and teachings, and that critical exploration in turn sparked her passion for ministry.
Sarah, the young woman in Frykholm’s book, gets to college and discovers what her afternoon tryst with Jacob has taught her:
not how to be more like her peers, but how to be more like herself. The questions raised by that encounter were still burning. . . . In her haste to detach sex and herself from its oppressive cultural, religious, and familial meanings, [Sarah] plunged herself deep into the wilderness, a place in which her life experience has only grown richer, more complex, where her questions daily grow less easy to answer.10
Our lives, our existence, our day-to-day time, are ambiguous, and can feel like a wilderness. Though we often experience ambiguity or even ambivalence about some of our choices and the events of our lives within that wilderness, our time there, like Sarah’s, can be rich and even include kairos moments, glimpses of grace. There is no brokenness, no sin—of our own or committed against us—that can define us. We may be thrust into the wilderness, we may be shaped indefinitely by it, but there is no telling what God will make with us during our time within its darkness and light. Indeed, it’s often within the wilderness that we come to know ourselves to be saved.
What is salvation? John Wesley asks.
It is not the soul’s going to heaven . . . it is not a blessing which lies on the other side of death, or (as we usually speak) in the other world. The very words of the text [Ephesians 2:8, KJV] itself put this beyond all question. “Ye are saved.” It is not something at a distance: it is a present thing, a blessing which, through the free mercy of God, ye are now in possession of.11
Salvation, then, isn’t something we wait or long for; it’s something that’s being worked in our lives even now, the kairos interrupting the chronos. It begins to work in us in that natural conscience, in that prevenient grace,12 until we reach the moment of greatest clarification: that we are children of God, living in a broken world, usually at odds with ourselves and others, but nonetheless, all at once, also loved beyond measure and being drawn into reconciliation and holiness. We are pardoned, the historic language goes. We are not in this wilderness alone. A turning point in Sarah’s story is when she, who has held the story of sex with Jacob close to her, in secret and in shame, shares it with a friend, who in turn “holds it gently.”13 Sarah’s realization that she is not alone changes her. Whether it’s the love of Christ manifest in a friend or the assurance of Christ’s own presence, this justifying grace brings a sense of peace. Even when I look back at my own story, with the boyfriend who returned my sock in the chapel, experiences of kairos have transformed the effects of my chronos memories, to the point at which I can share the story, laughing in empathy with my former self and a grad student smarting from a recent breakup.
Claiming a life with God, following Jesus, is, I hope it’s clear, neither about throwing our hands in the air and accepting ambivalence as a vision for life, nor about writing off what has come before as sinful and irredeemable. I recently baptized two adult women who came to Christianity out of another tradition. As we walked through the liturgy, I was very clear that when I would ask each of them if they renounced the spiritual forces of wickedness and repented of their sin, that wasn’t to say their lives before were particularly sinful, or that their prior tradition was a spiritual force of wickedness. Rather, baptism is an outward sign of this experience of justification; an acknowledgment that while we live an ambiguous existence, we are accepting the divine invitation to be moved ever more closely into the divine life, the kairos moments in the midst of our day-to-day.
WHEN JOSH AND I were planning our wedding, we asked my friend Sandhya Jha (a multitalented pastor, writer, and activist, and the same friend who suggested I listen to David Gray’s song on repeat while writing chapter four) to sing in the service. She agreed, and then the hard work began: finding a theologically appropriate song for a wedding. Something about romantic love, and the holy within it; the feeling of finding the one with whom you could promise to build a life, with whom you were willing to take this leap of faith. One floated option was “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes: Yours is the first face that I saw / I think I was blind before I met you. Another was “Don’t Let Us Get Sick,” a Warren Zevon tune: Don’t let us get sick / Don’t let us get old / Don’t let us get stupid, all right?
Our pastor vetoed these: “You don’t want to say that; you’ve both been in love before; those experiences shaped you. You don’t want to pray that bad things won’t happen; they will. You want to ask for the sustaining grace to stay together through all the things, good and bad.”
In the end, Sandhya wrote us a song, because her multitalented nature wasn’t obvious enough already: Everything in life takes some risk, the chorus proclaimed.
We need courage to take the risk of building intimacy with other people, we need courage, too, to look clear-eyed (bright-eyed?) at our past and interpret it. People regularly try to simply push hard memories aside; the harder the memories, the less I blame them. Survivors of sexual violence experience panic attacks at higher rates than normal, and sometimes exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. If their families, or communities, or institutions do not provide the support needed to clean out their emotional wounds, they may well have those wounds close up, harboring an infection inside that can fester and cause additional pain. It stings to clean a wound, to poke it and prod it until certain that any contagions have been excised, but we want to heal.
Healing requires courage, especially if it means reopening old wounds. If those old wounds include sins wrought by others—sins both criminal and mundane—part of healing may bring about accusation or conflict, something that could be even more traumatizing.
There’s no short road to healing. Wesley noted that having experienced justification by no means ensures that we now live in constant peace, tranquillity, and joy. Nor does it inure us to further suffering or prevent us from committing further sin. But:
At the same time that we are justified, yea, in that very moment sanctification begins. . . . We are . . . born of the Spirit. There is a real as well as a relative change. We are inwardly renewed by the power of God. . . .
Temptations return and sin revives, showing it was but stunned before, not dead.14
We feel two forces within us—sin and temptation, brokenness and endless aching; and the grace and love of God. But there is good news: “they find one or more of these [hurts and sins] frequently stirring in their heart, though not conquering.”15
The grace of God, the kairos moments of realization, is present throughout our lives, but after the first moment of assurance, that grace strengthens and empowers us to live more fully in love. That love enables us to remember the grace and steadfast love present in our histories, and to gain critical distance and, we hope, healing from the brokenness we may have known.
As we grow more perfect in love—that is, as God’s sanctifying grace grows in us—that work, or healing and healthy distancing, grows easier. As that work grows in magnitude, we may be more able to seek justice where it is needed and to hold lightly the ambiguities of our past.
Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes it haunts us; sometimes it reminds us happily of who we’ve been and from whence we’ve come. William Faulkner once famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past,” and he’s got a point. The mistakes, the hurts, the joys of what has come before all linger, and they affect the present in incalculable ways. But. With grace, with reflection, with the quest for healing and the experience of salvation, the past’s influence can wane. Only if we attend to it will this happen. But as it does, we may find that we are ever more able to be present in this moment and its relationships.
I love “Amazing Grace”; I know it by heart. However, it’s not the oft-quoted first verse that makes me cry; it’s this one:
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.