| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 10 |
Page 3 |
Yet there is a way of remembering sorrow which brings no blessing, no enrichment – which does not soften the heart nor add beauty to the life. There is an insubmissive remembering which brings no joy, which keeps the heart bitter, which shuts out the sunshine, which broods over losses and trials. Only evil can result from such memory of grief. In a sense, we ought not to remember our sorrow. We certainly ought not to stop in the midst of our duties and turn aside and sit down by the graves of our losses, staying there while the tides of busy life sweep on. We should leave our griefs behind us while we go on reverently, faithfully, and quietly in our appointed way of duty.
There are many people, however, who have not learned this lesson; they live perpetually in the shadows of the trials and losses of their bygone days. Nothing could be more unwholesome or more untrue to the spirit of Christian faith than such a course. What would be said or thought of the man who should build a house for himself out of black stones, paint all the walls black, hang black curtains over the dark stained windows, put black carpets on every floor, festoon the chambers with funeral crape, have only sad pictures on the walls and sad books on the shelves, and should have no lovely plants growing and no sweet flowers blooming anywhere about his home? Would we not look upon such a person with pity, as one into whose soul the outer darkness had crept, eclipsing the beauty of life?
Yet that is just the way some people do live. They build for their soul houses just like that; they have a memory like a sieve, which lets all the bright and joyous things flow away while it retains all the sad and bitter things; they forget the pleasant incidents and experiences, the happy hours, the days that came laden with gladness as ships come from distant shores with cargoes of spices; but there has been no painful event in all their life whose memory is not kept ever vivid. They will talk for hours of their griefs and bereavements in the past, dwelling with a strange, morbid pleasure on each sad incident. They keep the old wounds ever unhealed in their heart; they keep continually in sight pictures and reminisces of all their lost joys, but none of the joys that are not lost; they forget all their ten thousand blessings in the abiding and absorbing recollections of the two or three sorrows that have come amid the multitudes and unremembered joys.
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