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A Sense of the Past

One of the journals I regularly read is the National Catholic Reporter.  While I am not a Roman Catholic, it is important to me to know what the Catholic Church is doing.  I know there are over one billion Catholics in the world---about one out of every seven people on the globe is a Roman Catholic!  Those numbers are staggering to this Quaker who is used to dealing with small numbers.          

It is instructive to follow the Catholic Church through the lens of the NCR, as it is often called.  It routinely reports on the current Pope and current issues facing the Church.  Some of these issues are solely the issues of the Catholic tradition.  Some of the issues are also issues for Quakers and the rest of the Christian group.  And some issues are issues for every major religious tradition.           

I have been reading this periodical for so long, I have my favorite authors.  One such author is the Benedictine nun and activist, Joan Chittister.  I am not a personal friend with Chittister, even though I have been to her Benedictine convent in Erie, PA.  Sometimes I do not agree with what she writes, but I deeply appreciate her spirit, thoughtfulness and desire to be obedient to the God she follows.             

A recent piece Chittister wrote focuses on the wanton destructiveness of some holy sites in Iraq by the radical group, ISIS.  She says the column is about religious thuggery, which she decries when perpetrated by any radical group---Muslim, Christian, etc.  She used a phrase in the column, which grabbed me when I read it.  The phrase has to do with history and tradition.  She understands the thuggery was an attack on history.  It attempted to wipe out some statues that represent a culture that is nearly 10,000 years old.  In effect, Chitterster says the vandals were attempting to wipe out the past.           

Listen to her words as she describes the upshot of this wanton destruction. ‘Without a sense of the past, life becomes monochromatic for everyone: There are no colors against which to compare the colors of plans and policies and principles emerging everywhere because there is no history of ideas against which to gauge them.”  I like the way Chittister talks about history as a “sense of the past.”  We have this as individuals and we have it in our communities and our country.  A sense of the past is constituted by our memories, but they are memories shaped into a story.          

For a community and a country, the sense of the past is the story of culture.  Chittister is insightful when she says a sense of the past gives us a chance not to live a life that is monochromatic---a colorless life.  I immediately think of North Korea as a country that is monochromatic.  The leader determines the color of the nation’s story.  As Chittister suggests, we need a sense of the past to think about and judge contemporary plans and policies.  This is what the wanton vandals wanted to wipe out.  They want to impose their own version of the present---which they want to be the only story, the only way to see life in the present.          

Notice the way Chittister describes it.  “To destroy the past is to make the present our idol -- untried, untested, untempered by anything but the passions of the moment.”  I find this to be a powerful statement that applies not only to the unfortunate actions of destroying statues in Iraq, but perhaps a reminder to myself and others of what can happen in our own lives.  Let’s apply it in that fashion in the rest of this reflection.           

I wondered whether I have ever made my present an idol.  On the surface I would naturally respond I would never have done that.  Perhaps I do not fully understand what it means to have an idol---to worship something that is not God.  I have not worshipped the present.  But I do think that I have valued it in undue fashion.  I pick up the last phrase Chittister uses---“the passions of the moment.”  Surely I have experienced those passions and, doubtlessly, I have been captivated and captured by those passions of the moment.                     

Those passions can distort truth and reality.  They can lead me to be egocentric---to live with myself at the center of the universe.  To be captured by the passions of the moment can wipe out everything I know from the perspective of history.  I become shortsighted and even manipulative to make the world bend to my will.             

A sense of the past will always tell me I cannot manipulate life.  My own sense of the past tells me that I am a human being with all the potential glory of being God’s child and with the sobering reality that I have sinned and fallen short of that glory.  To retain this sense of the past gives me the best hope for my future.  I live with the truth of the past; I do not destroy it.           

But the past sets me up to plan life in a way that can lead me into a life of faith and obedience.  I can embrace the promise of grace and the potentiality that God is working with and within me to enable me to become a child of God. 
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