You ask God to strike a song and a show from your memory as though they were a tumor to be cut out. But tell me, what sin have you committed by remembering them? Is it a wicked thing to recall a childish tune? The memory is a treasury given by God; you want Him to smash open the chest and cast out a few harmless coins because they annoy you. This is not the sober mind of a Christian grown to maturity. The Apostle says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” He does not say he prayed for God to zap them into oblivion; he put them away by the force of a renewed will, filling the mind with better things.
Consider the true deliverance God promises. We are delivered from the curse of the Law, from sin, from the wrath to come, and promoted to sonship. That is the mighty act of the Incarnation. Yet you fix your gaze on a puppet show, begging for an erasure that serves no purpose for the soul’s salvation. The evil one delights when we trade the great weapon of prayer for such trifling petitions, making the heavenly medicine appear foolish. You would do better to pray, “Lord, teach me to despise what is worthless and to love only what is pleasing to You,” than to ask that a memory be cut out by the roots.
Forgetting, in the divine Scripture, hath a noble sense: “Forget also thine own people and thy father’s house, so shall the King greatly desire thy beauty.” That is the forgetting of sins, of idolatrous customs, of the old life of the passions. It is not a forcible blanking of the mind, but a turning of the heart away. When the soul is taken up with the beauty of Christ, it has no leisure to dance to foolish ditties. The melody that once stuck in the mind withers like a plant pulled from the soil, because you have stopped feeding it with attention. God does not need to perform a surgery on your brain; He asks you to shift your sight. As often as the loathed song creeps in, say a prayer, recite a psalm, call upon the name of Jesus, and you will find it retreating. This is the slow, certain work of the Husbandman, not the magician’s flash.
You must also examine why this troubles you so. Is it not a trick of the enemy to make you anxious over an echo, while serious wounds in your soul go untended? I have seen many who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. They obsess over a stray thought while living in malice, envy, or foul speech. If that song led you into actual sin, then indeed flee from it, but flee by running to Christ, not by demanding the amputation of your natural faculty of memory. God gave you recollection so that you might treasure up His sayings and “receive the word with great power.” The same mind that involuntarily replays a tune can be trained to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night. Which would you have it do?
Let not your prayer be, “Take this away forever,” but rather, “Grant me such a love for Thy truth that all childish things lose their savor, and even their memory becomes as chaff blown away.” This is how the hearers of the word are transformed: not in one stroke, but after many strikings. A tree may take ten blows of the axe and still stand; then the eleventh fells it. Yet it was not that last alone, but the cumulative work. So it is with the soul. Continue in the hearing of the Scriptures, in fasting, in almsgiving, and in the prayers of the Church. Then that which seemed so firmly fixed will suddenly be gone, and you will wonder why you ever thought it so sturdy.
Be not a careless hearer of this counsel. For if I had not spoken, you would not have had the same measure of responsibility. Now you know that the remedy lies in the stretching forth of your own will, helped by grace, towards higher things. Strive then to forget what is behind and press forward to what is ahead. Let the King see your beauty, which is not a face scrubbed clean of every memory, but a soul radiant with the adoption of sons, having put on Christ. Then those thin shadows will never again trouble your peace, because the light within you will be so much brighter.
Prayer Focus: God, Thank You for loving me. Thank You for loving me, Jesus. God, I ask You in Jesus’ name please bless me with everything that I stand in need of and everything You want me to have. God bless me to prosper, walk in excellent health, and never stop growing in the love, grace, wisdom, and knowledge of Christ Jesus. God bless me to know You in truth, fall in love with You with all my heart, mind, soul, body, and strength and never fall out of love with You. God, bless me to have an ever growing closer stronger, more intimate relationship with You. Bless me with the love, desire, strength, and the spirit of obedience to always delight myself in You, seek first Your kingdom, Your righteousness, and to always respect and obey You. Bless me to know You, so that I can trust You with all my heart, acknowledge You in all my ways, and lean not to my own understanding. Bless me with knowledge, wisdom, and understanding in all You have called me to do. 
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