Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
There are some Christians who will tell you to forget the past and whatever negative events you experienced during that past. An attempt to therapeutically work through what happened is, they say, a waste of time better spent living in the present and pressing on towards the future in Christ. In fact these spiritual advisors (who, by the way, are sometimes presenting unsolicited advice) often go beyond calling such work a waste of time and tell us that it is actually a sin. Dealing with issues from our past is, to them, just another aspect of the “psycho-heresy” that has invaded the American Church in recent years.
The verses of the Bible they point to as a proof-text for this view are almost always Philippians 3:13-14 which read as follows:
“Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize of God’s heavenly calling in Christ Jesus.”
This, of course, sounds very convincing of their point. “There it is in black and white,” they say. “How do you refute that? It is the word of God.” True, it is the inerrant word of God. What it is not is a truly contextual interpretation of that word and because of this it is, in fact, not an accurate interpretation.
In the first chapters of Philippians, the Apostle Paul has just finished telling his readers about how he tried to earn God’s favor through ritualistic and ethical works before he came to Christ. When he talks about forgetting what is behind he is referring to forgetting that effort, to not resting on it as any kind of way to be justified before God. He is not using it to tell people that emotional wounds from their past are something that should be ignored.
The fact of the matter is that we cannot ignore those injuries without jeopardizing our growth as Christians and our flourishing as human beings. Untreated and unhealed physical wounds can eventually become septic, and when they do they threaten the body that has sustained them. The same is true of the invisible wounds that come from trauma and/or abuse. Without some kind of cleansing of those wounds we become increasingly soul-sick , even warped of heart.
If you examine the degree of depression, anxiety and other psychopathologies that manifest themselves in the Church today, you will find evidence everywhere of these untreated maladies that are anchored in our pasts. These are the illnesses that often defy the best efforts at increased Bible study and formulaic prayer, which tend to be the prescriptions the wounded in our midst are given by those who consider examining one’s earlier life a sinful waste of time. Many hurting people spend years trying traditional spiritual disciplines as a remedy for their pain and end up no better for the effort. It is not that such disciplines are somehow bad. They are not. The problem is that it is hard to get the benefit of them when what you really need is to heal now from what you never healed from then.
The author knew deep depression and anxiety as nearly constant companions during the first 15 years of his Christian walk, a walk that was both serious and sincere. It was not until I discovered that beneath my depression was anger and beneath anger there was a crushing sense of loss from very troubled formative years. Fortunately I was able to enter a period of intentional grief work in Christian counseling and truly let go of a past that had finally had to be squarely faced, mourned and released. All of this was accompanied by much prayer for a dependence on God to be with me in my grief. Based on how my life has improved over the past decade since embarking on this course I can only believe that He heard my prayer. Another verse in scripture tells us to “Mourn with those who mourn.” I believe that God mourned with me over what had happened so many years before.
When that grief over un-mourned losses was consciously allowed to come, the tears I cried were in the here and now, not the past. In fact it was as if I were reliving the past and finally grieving its losses now in the way I needed to back then. The fact that I did not go through this process then had been a huge reason for my own emotional sickness, a sickness that robbed me of some of what should have been the best years of my life.
So, in a sense, what we are talking about in this context isn’t even about the past. It is about what is happening right now as a result of that past, what is holding back our healing and growth right now. It does us no good to pretend that we are not being affected in the present by our history if that history included being deeply wounded by whatever it was we went through. If the past is ever truly to be “left behind” it must be reckoned with, grieved and healed in the present. It is in this present work that we lay the foundation for a future worth living, both in this world and the next.