Article December 21, 1992 Issue

Overcoming dark memories

We don't have to be victims of the past. Painful memories can be healed.

Sally Phipps O'Hara

It can be delightful and sometimes even invigorating to stroll down memory lane. Forgotten joys, friendships, acts of kindness, meaningful events, throng thought. Like the pages of a treasured scrapbook, the remembered joys of yesteryear bring dividends of good.

But what can we do about dark memories—those recollections that haunt, frighten, or depress thought? Past heartbreaks, injustices, griefs, or other troubles can seem inconsolable. We may, in fact, feel powerless to deal with them, much less overcome them.

Mrs. Eddy knew many sorrows in youth and as an adult—early widowhood, her only child taken from her, long periods of invalidism, and later, divorce. But in discovering Christian Science, she found the way out of the despairing belief of mortality—the source of all heartbreak. In her own book about her life, Retrospection and Introspection, she writes: "The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged." Further on she continues: "God is over all. He alone is our origin, aim, and being. The real man is not of the dust, nor is he ever created through the flesh; for his father and mother are the one Spirit, and his brethren are all the children of one parent, the eternal good."

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