It’s About Time

How Time Heals by Henri Nouwen

“Time heals,” people often say. This is not true when it means that we will eventually forget the wounds inflicted on us and be able to live on as if nothing happened. That is not really healing; it is simply ignoring reality. But when the expression “time heals” means that faithfulness in a difficult relationship can lead us to a deeper understanding of the ways we have hurt each other, then there is much truth in it. “Time heals” implies not passively waiting but actively working with our pain and trusting in the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.

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It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will… time is always ripe to do right…. We will reach the goal of freedom… all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

—Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,”April 1963

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It’s about time we made this happen. But we must work to make it so. The wounds of festering ancestors are real, but white folks foolishly repeat, “I had no slaves.” And we didn’t.

It’s not a question of personal guilt; it’s about collective guilt.

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The basic and most fundamental problem in the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is in us. We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul. And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control. The sacred attitude is then one of reverence, awe and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of our inmost self. In silence, hope, expectation, and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as to an arbitrary and magic power whose decrees must be spelled out from cryptic ciphers, but as to the stream of reality and of life itself…. The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. William H. Shannon, editor. Sam Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004: 55.

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Merton is speaking of personal guilt, but he gives us a clue as to how we might deal with our national guilt also. We must see racism (resulting in slavery, Jim Crow, etc.) as evil. And we must prepare ourselves so that life and healing and ultimately the freedom of which King spoke can spring forth. It is a question of national spirituality, and it is the only way our wounded nation will ne made whole. It’s about time we get it and set ourselves free. Time is on our side, if we would only make it so.

All emphasis mine.