What is Our Past Good For?

Nov 13

…To stay focused on our present moment!

As kids, my mother used to tell my two sisters and me, “The Holy Spirit is never far away. If you can’t find Him, look just a little ways down the road where He waits quietly to fathom what you need, and where to help you.”

It is the Holy Spirit who constantly helps us with our everyday weaknesses. In fact, the Holy Spirit takes great delight in helping us through a storm, when we slip, and especially when we need someone to lift us and get us back on our journey.

The Spirit does it with God’s Divine strength or grace. The Holy Spirit is praying deeply within us even when our hearts seem silent. It listens to our most authentic desires, even those we hardly knew we had!

There are desires formed and uttered, even if only whispered in us, by the same Holy Spirit who shares the mutual love exchanged by the Father and His Son. Their mutual love is ours because it comes with our baptism.

Since God made us in His image and likeness, He plays a big part in helping us navigate our life’s journey. Why you ask? Because God created us for Himself and made us so we can never stay lost. Therefore, every experience, whether past or present, and every person God places in our lives are perfect preparation for our future which only God can see.

What God wants from us is that we try to understand how we got to where we are today so we can better shape our tomorrows.

Mark Twain writes, “The two most important days of our lives are the day we are born and the day we discover why.”

If we need to reach back to our past for some event or happening to help us live the present better, then trusting in God’s good pleasure we do it. However, we never reach for our regrets or hurts or even the deep throbbing wounds left from our past only to relive the hurt and pain.

We all have different experiences from our past and different destinations. If we never stop to understand them, we lose their meaning and how they can help us live our present.

St. Francis de Sales never wants us to revisit the past solely to mire in past hurts, pains, or failures. Healing a past difficulty for St. Francis is better done in the time left before us rather than in time spent.

Even though we favor the present moment, how can any good come from long gone past years? Of course, we can reflect on our individual pasts to gain a better understanding of who we are today and where we are going in the future.

St. Augustine wrote, “Whoever finds themselves among weeds don’t give up. The command ‘to cut’ hasn’t been given yet. Therefore, don’t be tomorrow what you are today.” This is good advice telling us to be more than we were yesterday.

We need to learn to trust God and try to see its meaning for us right now. Keep in mind the whole of creation is God’s delight. Sometimes we lose this insight because many want us to see the dark side of our world believing God is not happy with His creation. God is always inviting us to move forward and become the person He wants us to become.

This may be partially true because evil still exists, but evil can never drown out goodness. No matter how small the good act is. Goodness can never be measured for its impact on creation i.e. the tiny Crosses, the assorted variety of flowers, and prayers spread over the homemade gravesites of those massacred in the last hurtful senseless shoot-out!

As my grandfather understood and told me, “I can’t imagine a person becoming successful in life who doesn’t give the game of life everything he or she has.” When we hear this, we know we can’t go back and start over!

However, we can embrace this present moment and start from here. God doesn’t care where we began. He is always there to boost us when we decide to begin. God's love helps us to become better than we are now.

As we gaze into the eternal mirror, we see clearly our sinfulness. Then, gazing upon our sinfulness, we see God and there we find our true self. We see now all the things that happened to us. And are judged not by what we thought, but by what we did or did not do.

Thomas Merton wrote, “The whole climate of the New Testament witnesses the flowering of ordinary possibilities that are hidden in everyday life. God’s advent (coming) asks for our receptivity, our ‘yes’ to the invitation to let love come alive in these fragile earthen vessels.”