Getting Past Past

Reading a review in The LA Times last week, I came across this intriguing quote by Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." It rings true. We are historical beings, the present culmination of our cumulative pasts. In that way, our past lives on inside us each new day making our past ever present. Our past lives on as memories, happy and nostalgic to be sure, but also in our soul wounds, both consciously and unconsciously. Faulker was right, our pasts are never really dead, but continually shape our future because they are alive and well in us up to the present moment.

As a pastor in particular, and I suppose just as a human being, I have attempted to assist others in getting past their past however feebly. My theology informs me that we all share a common brokenness as homo sapiens attempting to become human in a fallen world in which we sin, in which people sin against us, and just a lot of unwelcome crap, fairly and unfairly, knock on our door. My experience has led me to believe that to deal with one's past is really the only way to have any decent kind of future at all. As a person who comes from a broken home, marked by alcoholism, infidelity, and the like, and in my own forays and struggles with anger, sexual addiction, depression, and general insecurity - I happened to realize many years ago that if I didn't deal with my broken internal world, I was destined to ruin every relationship that mattered to me - including the one to myself. Years later, to no surprise to anyone I'm sure, I'm still a recovering sinner, and will always be, with my past ready and willing to rear its ugly head at anytime, threatening to ruin my today.

As Eugene Peterson once wrote, "The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In the communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor's responsibility is to the keep the community attentive to God."

As pastor/sinner (that might look nice on a business card!), I've tried to help a community of sinners stay attentive to God by staying attentive to him myself, however imperfectly, and also acquainted to their pasts by sharing my own, even as that past continues to unfold week after week in not so pretty ways. Partly because what choice do I have, but partly because I believe therein lies our hope.

I've come to the conviction that in Jesus Christ our pasts can be healed and redeemed. Not even God can change our pasts, but he can and does help us feel differently about those pasts. He can help us react differently, respond differently, choose differently in the present by helping us face our loses, our hurts, our injustices of the past. And he gently but directly encourages us to leave all of that past stuff at the cross where we in turn find love, comfort, acceptance, and peace in those wounded and painful places. This is the power of the cross, this is the hope of the resurrection. Our pasts go in on one side of the cross and come out the other - the same past, yet different - a redeemed past. And more importantly, what is different isn't just our past, but us. If Faulkner is right, we are our own living past. But because we see our past differently now through the eyes of God, we are different too. No longer tethered to our hurts in a way that hijacks our present, we move on in freedom, empowered to choose the good, empowered to choose the way of love and forgiveness, instead of the way of fear. After all, if we are the cumulative total of our past, we are adding a new chapter to our past each day. And it can be a happier, healthier, more healed story.

That's why I am often saddened, and occasionally frustrated, by the number of people I meet and travel with, who for whatever reason can't or won't deal with their past, even as it wrecks havoc on their present. So many hurts, so much pain, so much damage, so much inability to be honest, to have deep friendship, to know real acceptance - but without facing the past, no significant change either. The past is never dead. It's not even past. How true.

Frederick Buechner said this in the introduction to one of his books, "In these pages I tell secrets about my parents, my children, myself because that is one way of keeping track and because I believe that it is not only more honest but also vastly more interesting than to pretend that I have no secrets to tell. I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human."

I have found that the only way to share our secrets is to first face our secrets, which of course is another way of saying we have to open up the closet that is our past and take a look around inside. You can see inside because there is light there. But it's also dark. The grace of God is knowing he's always been there, that is, in our past, just as he is with us in the present. He is able to walk into our dark past that is now present in our hearts, or should I say throats to be more accurate - waiting to redeem them, and us. A past that is never dead can kill us, or it can make us alive. In the end the choice is ours. In a community of human beings sharing their secrets, there is Jesus among them. This is my hope for Epic. This is community as only community can be. Because through Christ, even the darkest stuff of our past can turn out to be the light that lights the way, making the past past.