The End of Memory by Miroslav Volf
This rainy afternoon, I’m thinking about peacemaking, and inevitably that takes me to those who have suffered grievous wrongs and yet continued to hope. So, today a word from one of my all-time favorites, Miroslav Volf:
“Grievous wrongdoing doesn’t just wound the body and soul, and it doesn’t just worm its way into our identity. It also entraps us. Like a ball chained to a prisoner’s leg, it drags heavily on our spirit and prevents it from roaming freely, stretching itself into the unknown, playing with new possibilities. Susan Brison describes with deep insight how a wrongdoing endured robs a person of the future. “The past,’ she writes, ‘reaches toward the present and throttles desire before it can become directed toward the future.’
“Even more definitively, in Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities – a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, no matter how devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise — if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it – they will, in Kelsey’s words, enter a world ‘marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves.’”
Volf is also quoting in this section David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption
