Divine Plagiarism

This seems tremendously obvious in retrospect. Most of these sorts of things do, I suppose. You can’t go back to the people who hurt you and expect that they’ll give back what they took from you. The way home, the way toward whole is always forward, never back. Even if sometimes that forward takes you through the past.

For one, the people who steal parts of your heart out are not typically the kind of people who would treasure that which they steal. The chunks of flesh that they took from you they’ve already discarded, the pieces of you they tore away were treated with the same measure of contempt they displayed toward the rest of you. There is little you can reclaim from a thief if he’s already disposed of the goods.

We all have our ancient wounds, daggers from adolescent arguments and grown-up lovers and a thousand other things. But daggers are not scalpels: they come to steal, kill and destroy and that’s all. There’s nothing in cold storage, nothing that they could give back even if they wanted to. Still, a part of our heart seems to think we could find the things we lost in the places where we lost them; if we could prove our interlocutors wrong, or if we could become the person they said they wanted, or if we were in some other way vindicated, then we would be whole again. We forget that there is only one Creator, and He is not our enemy; we are unmade by our interlocutors only as far as we choose to be.

Redemption is not amnesia, and in this is the deeper reason that we cannot go back. Jesus loves who we are, and part of who we are is what has happened to us. To obliterate the past is to remove part of a person that He loves. Redemption is not a return to a golden age, but the construction of a golden age from the rubble of the past. This is the magic of redemption: our tragedies provide the mortar for our future joy. So we move forward, reclaiming the past as we move ahead into Him. The One who made our hearts in the first place is the only One who can restore them to completeness.

There is nothing that Christine can give back to me, any more than the girl who called her a ‘white girl with a tan’ can declare her incontrovertibly Latina in the light of her achievements. There were parts of my heart that she tore out, parts of me she beat numb with her absolute contempt, parts without which I could not feel whole again. But words cannot be unsaid any more than daggers can be unstabbed. I have no illusions that she treasured anything she kept… there is nothing she could return even if she wanted to do so.

This expectation, I believe, poisons many of our efforts of reconciliation. If we believe that the other side is still holding onto the things we lack, then we cannot meaningfully restore relationship save its return. This is the simple truth: the things that were stolen cannot be given back. Reparations cannot restore shame and humiliation. But that which was lost can be mourned, and if it is mourned by both parties, then the relationship can be healed. Be it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or arguments between once-friends, relationship can only be restored when both sides abandon the idea of getting something back and both enter into the idea of making something together.

Sometimes reconciliation is not an option, though: it has to be wanted by both sides. Both sides have to be willing to mourn what was lost on all sides; both sides have to want a better relationship than the one that exists, even if better is nothing more than a distant peace. But reconciliation is not a prerequisite for healing. We were made by God’s hands alone; we can be remade by His hands alone. No one else gets a vote. So from the crumbling bricks of the city of man, He makes the City of God; from the wreckage of our past He builds for us a glorious future with Him. The way home is forward. We reclaim the past in the process.