Healing our past hurts

The mental pull to stew over past hurts tempts us all. These hurts might seem to define us to ourselves and, we may fear, to everyone else. We might even try to heal past hurts through outward changes such as trying to become famous in order to feel others are validating our worth.

The good news is that enduring worth doesn’t depend on how popular we are with others. It depends on seeking and finding validation of who we are in a love that doesn’t wax and wane: God’s love. We feel this love when we seek, find, and build on the rock of Christ, the ever-present healing influence of God evidenced in Jesus’ ministry.

No matter how long an ailment had endured, Jesus’ love lifted the hearts of those who were struggling, first to a higher hope and then beyond hope to resolution. He didn’t ignore the past record that seemed to be, but he understood that that history was very different from what God, Spirit, always sees and knows – the record of our lives as His creation. Jesus’ perception of this reality cured a woman of hemorrhaging suffered for a dozen years, restored the sight of a man blind from birth, and transformed the lives and characters of so many others.

Today, the same Christly perception can redeem us from the conviction that material events determine who we are and how we are seen. Christ illuminates how our creator knows us. This is being well known in the highest sense. It is being known as ceaselessly valued by our creator and as of boundless value to others in the many unique ways that we express God’s goodness. When we realize that this is what’s true, we recognize our uninterrupted worth as God’s wholly spiritual offspring.

Whatever hurtful past may seem to spoil this view of ourselves, our spiritual identity remains the accurate record of who we are. Our primary need isn’t to have others see us as we desire them to see us but to know ourselves as God knows us. As we do, we see that those things that have hurt us, and the thoughts of them that haunt us, are no part of our spiritual history, which is the track record that counts.

To the degree that we become aware of and accept this true history, the concept of our being a corporeal mortal subject to concrete hurt and fragile happiness is undermined. This true history points to the truth of spiritual Life, our reflection of God.

In “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” Mary Baker Eddy describes what is required to gain and sustain this higher view. She says, “We apprehend Life in divine Science only as we live above corporeal sense and correct it” (p. 167). This correction includes distinguishing between a transitory history of hurt and the permanent reality of harmony, then refuting the clamor of the former and yielding to the truth of the latter. Holding to God’s view of us is distinguishing between the false conception of the divinely unreal, matter-conscious mentality called mortal mind and what’s known to divine Mind. This undermines the very basis of past hurts, which is the mistaken sense of being something less than the infinitely loved and ceaselessly loving image of divine Love, God.

This truth doesn’t suggest we can willfully dismiss the history trying to play on repeat in our heads. It means that we can lean on the power of God to uproot the lie that mortal mind is trying to impose as our history and rightly rewrite that material history with the goodness of God as the formative source – the only source – of our genuine past, present, or future.

This enables us to move beyond aspects of our experience that are weighing on our thoughts. We see that God has never known or sanctioned victimhood, sorrow, loss, or lack and cannot, and does not, associate these with us. So we can eschew our own sense of association with these beliefs and claim and gain what Mrs. Eddy describes as the “conscious worth” of being and doing good that “satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can” (“Message to The Mother Church for 1902,” p. 17).

Knowing ourselves in this way ripples out in thought and deed to bless others. We express greater compassion, affection, and joy. This might sometimes be recognized and acknowledged by others but will often go unnoticed, except for the healing that results and glorifies the real source of all good, God.

Adapted from an editorial published in the June 3, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.