Article July 11, 1994 Issue

Don't ruminate over the past

Louise Clarke Harsch

When Lot and his wife were told by God's angels to escape for their own safety from Sodom and Gomorrah, the angels told them not to look back (see Gen. 19:17). Lot's wife was not obedient to this warning. The Bible says she looked back and became a pillar of salt. This story led me to consider the subject of rumination over past events. It has helped me see that to dwell on the past, whether it seemed happy or unhappy, is to stagnate rather than to progress spiritually.

In Retrospection and Introspection, her autobiography, Mary Baker Eddy writes, "It is well to know, dear reader, that our material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man's real existence, and the dream has no place in the Science of being" (p. 21). On the following page Mrs. Eddy continues, "The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged" (p. 22).

Why do we need to expunge the material record? Because we need to establish in thought our real identity as a child of God. The child of God has never been in a dream, has never had an unhappy or discordant past, but has always existed in the harmonious realm of the kingdom of heaven, enfolded in the arms of divine Love. Christ Jesus preached that the kingdom of God is within us.

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