Article March 10, 1973 Issue

Are We Prisoners of Our Past?

BETTY PARROTT

"We are all prisoners of our past," said a saddened speaker in a country torn with civil conflict. But are we—any of us—really prisoners of our past?

Christ Jesus certainly accepted no such belief. To a despised Samaritan, a woman with a background of doubtful morality, he revealed his spiritual identity, the Christ. He released a Gadarene from an appalling history of insanity; he restored sight to a man born blind; he straightened a woman bowed double for eighteen years; and he healed many others of lifelong disabilities.

In their own eyes and in the eyes of those around them, all these people must have seemed hopeless prisoners of their own or their parents' past. But not in Jesus' eyes. He no more allowed the past to have reality or authority over them, than you or I would allow the fading memory of a nightmare to influence our day. With infinite compassion he recognized only their present Christly ability to witness to man's perfection as the image and likeness of God, the Father of all. Jesus' awareness of the omnipresent omnipotence of God, divine Spirit, expressing only good, eliminated from human consciousness the false pictures of evil as having any reality or power, past or present.

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