It may be my stage of life or the fact I have recently attended many anniversary events, and some funerals, but we find ourselves often talking about the past. Truth to tell, the past is often a less threatening place! But it is not a place to live. Memories are a great gift, but we need to know what to do with them. I want to suggest some things about living with the past, but not in the past.
Living with the past is a positive responsibility, in both personal and social aspects of our lives. I have known some leaders who have acted and spoken as if the universe, or at least the community they lead, began on the day they took office. Nothing prior to then mattered to them. This is not just a narcissistic stance. It is seriously destructive. We all have come to where we are as a result of others and their efforts, contributions, and some faults or failings. To ignore all that is foolish and frankly disrespectful.
We all have personal histories, too: relationships from which we have learned much (not always easy stuff!), been given encouragement or challenges, as well as the simple realities of life: home, food, early learning, and so on. And we have all done things: journeyed through education and training, work, and relationships, family and community.
To live with our past is to acknowledge all of this. There will be some regrets, as well as some achievements. To live with all of this requires acceptance of ourselves and our realities. There are things we did not do, some we ought to have done, and some we could not have done. There are things we achieved which perhaps we never imagined possible. I have found most of us stress the things we didn’t do and down-play the things we achieved. To live with our past is to acknowledge and accept both, as well as acknowledging too when they are past.
The most helpful advice I received when dealing with a major trauma was to be able to say to myself, ‘This really did happen. But now you are here.’ In effect, the event is over, and I can now work on moving on. Choosing to deal with it is a choice to live, to live with the past, but most importantly to exercise that choice.
Another critical reality is to live from the past. I have been privileged to know and work with a number of really good historians, and of late to join in some historical projects of my own. Many people are exploring family histories and local histories, and we in Australia are very slowly beginning to engage with the cruel realities of colonisation and all that has been done to the First Nations of this land and country.
When I speak of living from the past, I am not meaning making one’s living from the study of history. I mean seeing and drawing from our history as a source of life-meaning. We can be guided by the past: not always with positive examples, but often so.
One thing that struck me recently was a quite sweeping generalisation I noticed in some commentary about events in a Christian community. One person was celebrating that in our life-time many churches have affirmed the ordination of women to Christian ministry. Another commented that this was a common practice in the earliest centuries of the Christian era, but then patriarchy took over, in the Imperial Church, for the next 17 centuries or so. There is a broad truth to these assertions. It is simply not true that the ordination of women is a modern invention, and it is also true that the history of patriarchal domination has had many appalling consequences.
But there are other elements to this history as well. Despite the official position of the Church regarding ordination to priesthood, for many centuries women have been engaged in ministry in so many ways—including preaching and leading communities, albeit not in the cathedrals! Indeed, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, many communities were formed outside those official orders, offering teaching and preaching, as well as service and care. These communities resisted the official structures, because they were seen as corrupt and too closely aligned with the political powers. Such groups included women and men, in various ways. The initiatives of Francis of Assisi are just one such example. What this shows is that efforts towards ‘reformation’ were not begun in the time of Luther, but have in fact been a dimension of the Church’s life all along— and that women were included in and often led many of these efforts. The patriarchy continued to win out, in the official halls of power. But that is only a part of the story.
These things will provide us with one other opportunity and that is to live for the past. Here I am not meaning that we live ‘in’ the past, but rather that we live in a way that values and builds on it.
We can be encouraged to take our own steps towards reform, even dramatic change. We can also learn to be more nuanced in our representations of the past. Most importantly, I think we can learn to respect and appreciate those who have gone before us, learn from their dedication and vision, and honour them. We do so not by copying their actions, but by finding our own ways to meet the challenges of our time.
And in our own situations, we must acknowledge those who have provided for us, and who preceded us, and we should make sure to record and preserve the records of their achievements. Yes, we need to be careful in what we celebrate: and this may in fact require us to critique the values established in past regimes, the statues and honour boards established, and those never mentioned. There are things to be exposed and confessed, and other people and things never recognised that may now be celebrated. All of this will allow us to live for and from the past, but not in it. It is in this way, I think, that we can find our own way forward.
Long ago, an unknown prophet wrote that the exiled people of Israel should not ‘dwell upon’, or get stuck in the things of the past: for their God was even now doing a new thing. They were invited to reach out in hope. (Isaiah 43. 18 & 19) But that same prophet declares this hope on the basis of much that has gone before. They have known those things, and on that basics can now see this new thing. The people are not to live in the past, but may learn from the past, value it, and now live from it.