Revising the Past

What describes better how you see your life? A journey which leads you to various places and through experiences, moving you forward, teaching you something new along the way, joined by travel companions while you feel the sustaining power of Life, good? Or a house which you start to build when you are a child, continuing to add individual rooms while you realize as an adult that you are forced to inhabit this house, your life. As if something is forcing you to keep all experiences, whether bad or good, cornering you tightly and constraining you to argue for all decisions that were made in the past - whether triggered by others or by yourself - obliging you to stay in your house, compelling you to explain over and over again why the house is built the way it is and sentencing you to inhabit it, for the years to come.

This analogy came to me recently while listening to the story of a friend in which he referred to the past often evidently in order to help me understand his present predicament. It sounded as if his life were not an open book, but, well, a house, built over time, a life as a permanent residence in your own past.

Life is holy, because it has a divine dimension, a spiritual openness, which stems from the fact that everyone has dignity, meaning, and infinite possibilities. It has been revealed already that man is God's child, that God is the only Cause of and reason for existing, and anything worthwhile in life has to do with a deeper understanding of God. I observe that this is no longer up for debate. Now let's see how this insight and acknowledgment helps us to rewrite the past and move on in the freedom of spiritual reality. It is the prerogative of spiritual thought to come to the rescue and retrieve what seems to have been lost: Deep peace, a sense of dignity, spiritual adventure, healing.

In an article for the Christian Science Sentinel (published weekly since 1898) Patricia Tupper Hyatt shares an experience and the spiritual reasoning that lead up to the healing. Her article has the fitting title "The Day I Rewrote my Life". You can find the article here.

And then was aired most recently a much shared and liked lift by Anna-Zoë Herr describing how she handled what she describes as the worst year of her life. In this Daily Lift (to which you can subscribe here, for free) she quotes a counsel by Mary Baker Eddy, from her autobiography Retrospection and Introspection:

The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged. (Ret. 22:1)

So lets get started!