One motif that runs through the novelist D. H. Lawrence's (often controversial) books is the desire of his characters to have no past, to have no history, to live free and unencumbered by the memories of what to them is now gone, the events and ideas that had once surged through their lives but which, as they would like them to be, are no more.  Why?  To have no past is to have, in effect, no beginning, to live in a state of not being, but becoming, a state in which nothing matters but the immediate moment, a state of continual and, inevitably, often unsettling discovery and renewal.
     On the one hand, this is a grand vision.  We live fully in the present, liberated from all the regrets of the past.  What is gone no longer matters.  On the other hand, it is a debilitating vision.  Without a past, we do not know what it means to have a present.  We will not know what discovery, much less the renewal that often springs from it, are.  We have no starting point.
     It is the past that gives meaning to the present.  When Jesus, as the apostle Mark records him doing in the first chapter of his gospel, announces that, "The kingdom of God is at hand," it was his audience's memory of the past that gave his words genuine weight and worth.  It was the past, with its listeners' rich recollections of God working in the life of the nation--and then seeming to leave it--that reminded people just how important his announcement was.  After centuries of promising to do so, God had returned.  What had been in the past had now, again, become the present.
     And it would be a present that would change the world.  Yet it was a present that could only do so because of the past that had enabled it, a past that, though it was long gone physically, was a past that, in the grand newness of God, had now become forever and unmistakably present, physically as well as spiritually, in the life of the world.
     Though we may want to forget the past and the incomprehensibility of some of its moments (who wants to entertain bad or troubling memories?), we need the past.  We need the past to tell us what is coming which is, in this instance, the fact of our future presence in God.