Each "I" has a past

      The past is the "place" where everyone has become what it is, where some potential were implemented while others have not found flowering or have made so small; because the past is part of our lives, we can say that the past is within us rather than behind us. We are born with a body and a face, in a given geographical location and within a specific family, welcomed us and shaped an established culture that, like the air we breathe, has become part of us. And all this was done without our deliberate choice.

     Relationships, emotions, events, occasions and hardships, obstacles and opportunities, joys and sufferings have accompanied and marked our lives: it's me because I have this story[1]. Part of my story is simply given or received, at least, suffered; in part I can take the responsibility of gestures, actions, mistakes, choices that have accompanied my progress. But in both cases one thing is certain: we can not change our past.

     "Marina, a woman approximately 30 years old was asked to narrate his own story in the context of a vocational discernment. His story seemed to proceed by leaps: a narrative depth of infancy and childhood,  few bars about adolescence, a detailed reading of youth to the present. After several personal meetings, the guide asked Marina why the story about adolescence was so narrow. Marina said she did not remember much, but after some resistance, burst into tears saying she had experienced some difficult experiences in those years, but that all should have already been solved because some years earlier had revised her painful adolescence in the context of an accompaniment and not could accept, after all this time, to hear once again the suffering of her history."

Refusal, resignation or liability?

      Perhaps each of us can share an experience like this: there are painful events or toil of our history that we have already addressed and we expect not to feel their influence in our lives. But this is an unrealistic expectation: reworking or taking a difficult experience of his own history does not mean delete it from the mind or heart as if it never existed. Even when we had the opportunity to open some wounds and be helped to enter into a healing process, we may sometimes be affected by this of old wounds, especially if some actual event resembles what you experienced in the past.

     The crucial question is not so much that this will happen, that I may suffer the pain, but what attitude I take in front of it: an emotion we feel, in this case of pain or discomfort, it is always a kind of "messenger ". Indeed, it tells us something about ourselves, our relationship with reality and who is beside us, and awakens in us the questions. What about the pain that I feel today, but at the same time belongs to the past?

      "So Marina took the challenge proposed by the spiritual guide allowing himself to listen again the wounds of his adolescence. Long ago he had made a right about the abandonment of the family by the father, when Marina was ten years; in the same way he understood that the reactions sometimes impulsive and sometimes depressive mother, and that both were wounded Marine,  were not an expression of indifference to her daughter, but simply the only way he was able to react to abandonment. "

    We can return to our past for very different reasons! I can hide behind the mask of my past or passive resignation stating that "I'm so, I can not help it," avoiding responsibility for a possible growth and openness to the future that require realistic, however, effort and commitment.
     Or I can turn a painful past in a research for compensation, often childish, "Since I have suffered so much, now the life, you owe me compensation and you have to take care of me." The past can also become paradoxically convenient anchor to which to cling: better a past that I know and that, despite its limitations, gives me the safety, rather than a future that asks me to accept the insecurity and, inevitably, to take the risk (and the risk of faith)[2].
Not infrequently some people with attitudes that become the negation of the past when the memory is selective and minimizes or eliminates shadows exalting – at most in unrealistic and imaginative way - the positive and pleasant experiences: "In my history is gone forever all right, I would not change anything "(familiar picture style "mulino bianco"!).

All these attitudes that sometimes we can take or see around us, are not certainly expressions of acceptance of the past. The genuine agreement calls for the person an humble and responsible taking on/ for recruitment of the data (what happened and its consequences) and, opening a new and deeper understanding of himself and his history, it strives to cope with new situations. It is not, then, returning obsessively reading an old chapter in their lives, but to write a new one: "Behold, I make all things new" (Rev 21.5).

A healing touch

       If we wake up at night because of a passenger discomfort and after a short time of waking, dreaming back, easily in the morning seems to have more impact on us half an hour of lost sleep rather than the many hours of rest. Not infrequently we use the same criteria when we look at our history: if there are any injuries or fatigue, they seem  to have the power to cancel, in our perception of our inner and remember the good received, lived, donated. There is a past without shadows or "perfect" childhood. Our humanity, fashioned in the image and likeness of God, is mysteriously inhabited by a size limit which, in our existence is expressed in concrete  intellectual, physical, spiritual, emotional, moral limits that we are more or less aware. This means that as men and women we love so limited and, similarly, we received a love marked by limitations, but it never ceases to be love.

      Appropriating again of the past, coming into an healing contact with their wounds, is a necessary journey that every person is called to do. This operation is human, psychological and spiritual at the same time, an operation that can help discover uiourney ith childhoods the mysterious work of God in the dark folds/wrinkles of our history.

       “Little by little Marina was able to legitimize her suffering, giving herself the permission to suffer the pain caused by the emotional absence of the mother or the hardness against her. But Marina was also able to grow into a sincere attitude of empathy towards her mother trying to understand the great pain that she had lived with the abandonment of her husband and realizing that at that time the mother could love his daughter only in that limited way. Then Marina also tried to reconnect  with her father and to take again a dialogue with him."

       But the reading of personal history was not only therapeutic value as regards to the suffering experienced or lived trauma; it is also the typical action of the believer who, in history, looks and contemplates the signs of the active and transforming presence of God. He made of the human history  the place of his presence and if he chose to go down in history means that he considers it  worthy place of his dwelling.

      In the Bible God repeatedly calls for Israel to remember and celebrate the passing of God in his life:  to recall that means a memory, that is possible today to live and enjoy the fruits of an event chronological distant (cf. Dt from 8.2 to 5). In the biblical mentality that it applies to the people is also valid for the individual believer: it is my job to learn to read and live my history as salvation history, namely as the specific place where God chose to meet me and make friends with me .

      The active integration of past, present and future, that accepts with respect and  responsibility for its history, this implies living in a project dimension, as a call to love, to an encounter with another human being and with God. When the past is taken in a mature way and with an attitude of faith, without denying it, and without becoming imprisoned, like Abraham, we can leave our country and go where the Lord will show us. Past and future have a syntesis in the present where, in fact, we are living.

      This was clearly understood by St. Therese of Lisieux, as the verses of her poem evidenced "My song today": "You know, my God, that to love you on earth I have nothing now! I love you, Jesus, tend to you my soul ... Be thou my sweet support, reign in my heart, give me your smile, for a day just for today, for today! Who cares, Lord, if the future is dark ... No, I can not pray for tomorrow. Keep my heart pure, cover me with your shadow, and that is only not for today."[3]

 Samuela Rigon
Formatrice vocazionale e psicologa
samu.rig@libero.it