Time travel is dangerous, but necessary
Time Travel takes the difficult-to-eradicate evils of our past to God's repair shop
As they were stoning Stephen, he called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”; and when he said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:59-60))
Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter
Acts 7:51—8:1a
John 6:35ab
You may think I'm kidding. The title of this blog appears overtly prankish. I am not joking. I believe we can travel in time. Yes, really. We don't need a machine. Not even a cup of coffee, a credit card, a suitcase, or a helmet.
The trick to Time Travel requires facing a trauma from our past head-on with the raw intensity of our present. We can travel in time without actually going anywhere. Only leave the comfort of our present to face the pain of our past if a trauma nags at us, and only travel back with God.
Yes. God must be involved, or revisiting our past is a terrible idea.
I've manufactured this discussion from a talk I heard by John Eldridge. He gave a conference ten years ago that revealed the Time Travel technique. He didn't call it Time Travel. He's a professional, not a goofball. He did offer a caveat, which I should paraphrase. "Don't attempt Time Travel without a professional to contact if things go wrong." That warning is a pretty important thing to remember.
Think about your confessor. Get one if you don’t have one. Do you have a spiritual director? Get one of those, too. Siblings often aren’t the best soul partners, because your past perceptions rarely match up, though I have had the great fortune of having a holy brother, sister, or two. Fellowship, God-fearing friends, and fellow Time Travelers are terrific, too. Heck, get as many Godly confessors, spiritual directors, family, and friends as you can.
Get old, and Time Travel pops up all the time. Mainly for the good stuff, reliving our sentimental, often rewritten and edited, memories. I’m focusing here, instead, on the bad past.
Time Travel to past pains isn't for the faint of heart. Mundane, run-of-the-mill observations of history are not fully engaged Time Travel experiences. That kind of Time Travel is already part of your life. I'm talking serious stuff, and not the nice moments. Think of it as holy repairs in our history—something God wants us to do with him.
We can’t change the past, but we can change our perception of the past.
Many better thinkers than I begin with the supposition that we cannot change the past, so move on. Well, those smarty pants are right, except for one thing. The traumatic pasts we remember are not the full report on what happened.
In essence, we need to update the past. It’s impossible to know what God was doing in the bygone times when we were only fixated on our fears, shame, and regrets. These are essential elements of our history, yet based mainly upon perceptions. They may be right, but they’re likely incomplete.
We have traumatic events in our past and more to come. Trauma is the byproduct of a sinful, broken world. It's not OK that we live in such a world. I'm not going to even hint at that. Trauma is a stupid, undesirable thing. Yet, the consequence of our willful existence, multiplied by everyone’s willfulness, involves people breaking things, being deceitful, causing pain, and doing bad stuff on purpose. All that happens amid a tireless divinity. God is cauterizing, patching, and even upending the course of time. Sure, our Father God allowed all this awfulness to occur, but we have no idea how much did not happen.
God has an angel ready to step in at innumerable moments during our day, for all of us. Saints prompt us through their partnership with the Holy Spirit, who lives in our heart and mind. Forget the notion that God was vacant in our past, unaware, or busy with somebody more important to him. His love for you and me is inestimable, beyond the combined affections and love of everyone we know. God’s collaborators also have multiplied as creation has exploded. The demons have too, yet they are frantic wasps, limited in their breadth, unable to read our minds, and though chaotic, they are spiraling into oblivion.
This is how we exist now, tethered to the Trinity, heavenly hosts, and the Communion of Saints. So, too, did that divine effort inhabit our past. Consider, then, the significant truth that our traumatic episodes involved God’s inexhaustible attention. How does that change our perceptions?
Trauma isn't a misplaced plant that looks like a weed or things in the wrong place that are perfectly OK in a proper state. Trauma is the result of blatant evil. That's why it's no fun to review. We don't have "Let's go visit past traumatic events!" on our bucket list. Unattended traumas, however, won’t go away.
Nobody wants to review traumas. That's why psychiatrists get paid so much money. When we're eventually forced to face the perceptions we have of our past because we're a mess, or we're making messes for others, we need assistance, monitoring, and a guide who knows how to keep us from completely cracking up.
For those who have compromised their lives and believe that past traumas were good things (you know who you are), I say, "Au contraire." My view of creation doesn't place traumas on the manufacturing line. Bad things happen to everybody, but the reasons they occur are seldom, if ever, good. "Never good" is my go-to position.
You might argue that God uses trauma to awaken folks, change societies from implosion, etc. That still doesn't make trauma good. It just confirms that God is good. God makes good out of everything.
God hates sin. Evil cannot face God. God descended into hell and stole the righteous, taking them into himself. God is with us in our sin and also with the ones we injured, the innocents. God allows horrendous acts of will to harm entire nations. That process is all God’s and not ours.
We must focus on how God repairs and urges us to repair trauma through two human exhortations of the will — forgiveness and repentance. Those two things effectively cancel evil's superiority because God changed the framework for trauma's free exercise upon the universe when he conquered death. He's recruited us as his sons and daughters to witness that fact, and to die with joy into his arms.
With our forgiveness and repentance, we join God in repairing the universe. So, revisiting traumas in our life, evils that are far back in the past, brings God and his needle and thread to stitch the world back together. Our perspective on our past will change when God fills in the rest of the story of what happened. Why? He was there.
Our past will haunt us without our cooperation with God to repair the universe. Spoiler alert: He will do so whether we cooperate or not. Haunting might even be self-inflicting. We end up twisting awfulness into good if we accept its destruction. If we can help render our past, repaired by God, then we should.
I'm not suggesting that we revisit past traumas that have already been reconciled. That's not helpful. I'm only offering up the traumas still poking us in the gut, flaming our guilt, and squeezing us so hard that we still cry as if the pain just happened. Traumas are logical invitations to Time Travel back with God. He can fix our perspective on unattended pasts.
Unattended trauma may end up killing us. All kinds of psychology and medical data exist to pinpoint potentially fatal glitches from emotional traumas that hang onto our souls. Glitches in both our psyche and our body will rot and ruin us through their hidden, but all-encompassing and gnawing chaos.
We should forgive and repent our pains into the place they belong — God's repair shop. He began repairing our trauma the very second it took place. We can't remember such a thing if we don't bring God back with us.
I’d advise that you not do this alone. Some small things, of course, demand only your attention.
That’s the rub. If you can’t identify partners for Time Travel, you must ask God and those in the fellowship of the Church to find them for you.
See how God works?
He offers solutions that draw us together for the good of us all.