I am on hiatus until August 29, and am re-posting oldies every few days. In the light of the current Kyle Payne story, and in particularly in light of this post of Derek’s, I’m reposting this. It originally appeared in February 2007.
Thanks to Rudy C., I found this interesting thread on men, faith, and regret at Anthony Bradley’s blog. (It’s hosted by World Magazine, not normally what I link to.)
Regrets. What are men supposed to do with them? The older I get, it seems, the more regrets I pile on my mountain of dirt. They are haunting, heavy, daunting, ever-present. My deepest regrets were lived out of in response to the intense pain of years 0-18 that have had devastating, permanent, long-term effects. Prayer does not make them go away. It just doesn’t. Sorry.
First off, I always rejoice when I read honesty like that from a fellow Christian. So many of us in the evangelical world have been taught the lie that “to be a good Christian is to wear the happy face all the time”. Especially for those of us in leadership positions as Christians, who serve as youth ministers or pastors or authors, we’re called on to show people just how exciting and wonderful and fulfilling it is to live a life in Christ. We’re allowed to talk about our problems, of course, but only when we can say “But Christ healed me of this, and the Lord took care of that.” We’re allowed to tell our wild, self-destructive stories — but only when they are stories of how we once were, not how we continue to be. It’s okay to have been the prodigal son, as long as you finish your narrative by telling how you came home to your Father’s arms and lived happily ever after.
And danged if I ain’t guilty of exactly this sort of insipidness here on this blog. Time and time again, I allude to a colorful past; I drop hints about drugs and divorces; about addiction, adultery, and anorexia. And then I tie it all up neatly in a bow and say “But it’s all different now since my conversion.” And of course, in terms of the actual behavior, it is all different. I really don’t do what I used to do, and I do credit that to God’s work in my life, as well as to my own will, some great therapists, wonderful health insurance, some loving family members, and the amazing woman who is now my life.
But reading Anthony’s short post about regrets — where he too alludes to “acting out” in response to early childhood trauma — I’m struck by how rarely I am willing to cop to my own regrets. For someone whose profession involves the study of the past, I’m remarkably quick, both on this blog and in my public persona, to dismiss the idea that I still struggle with regret. I spent years and years in a Twelve Step program, and whenever I hear the term “regret” I think of a section of the AA Big Book called “the promises”. Referring to what will happen in our lives as a result of our spiritual work, the Book says:
We will not regret the past or wish to shut the door on it.
And more than anything in Scripture itself, that line from AA has stuck in my head for years and years. I’ve used it as a yardstick to measure my own growth. In my head, I’ve developed a formula: the absence of regret proves that my faith is strong and that Christ is working in my life. The presence of regret proves that I am flagging in my faith, and need to redouble my efforts. And I’m realizing this morning that that formula doesn’t get it right.
I’m fond of quoting Walter Wink’s famous line: “Christians have never dealt well with the inner darkness of the redeemed.” (I used it last summer in defense of Mel Gibson.) We don’t deal with the reality that our conversions are often lifetime processes, not single events. The hour we first believed might be sweet, but grace doesn’t obliterate all of our past, all of our shortcomings, all of the hurts we’ve inflicted. Grace gives us the strength to change, to reach out for help, to ask for forgiveness. But it’s not a magic bullet that erases consequences, and it doesn’t instantly alleviate regret, guilt, and heartache. Too often, in our exuberant singing and our public pronouncements, we Christians — especially we evangelicals — ignore the reality of this “inner darkness.”
Do I believe God has forgiven me for the things I’ve done — and the things I continue to do? Yes. Does that mean everyone else has forgiven me, or that I’ve forgiven myself? Hardly.
Even now, I know that some members of my family worry about me. I caused them so much heartache and fear; my parents and siblings spent several years fearing that I would not live much longer. I can still see that anxiety in my mother’s eyes from time to time; every once in a while, I catch it in my brother’s voice. And when I see it or hear it, I get overwhelmed by regret, regret that my recklessness, my addictiveness, and my destructiveness inflicted such deep wounds on those who loved me longest and best. The fact that my conversion is real and lasting means that I won’t ever go back to the places I went in those terrible years, but my conversion didn’t offer instant relief and comfort to those I hurt. I would be not only myopic and narcisisstic, I would be inhuman if I didn’t acknowledge that!
And some people may never fully trust me. There are people I hurt so badly that they have made it clear that they cannot forgive me. I have been told more than once in recent years that my “conversion” is a sham, that underneath this facade of a new life in Christ I am still the same old slick Hugo, self-indulgent and perhaps even sociopathic. They’re waiting, they tell me, for me to fall, to fuck up, to slip. I do not exaggerate or flatter myself unduly when I say that there are a number of people who would experience considerable schadenfreude if I were to be revealed as a charlatan and a fraud! I have earned some of that enmity through some really nasty behavior; the passage of time, my professions of redemption, and sincere attempts to make amends have not caused all whom I injured to forgive me.
I know that a lot of people love me. Even more are indifferent to me. Some dislike me for no apparent reason. And a small number really loathe me, and they do so with justifiable cause. Most of the time, I don’t think about this last group — but sometimes, in my darker moments, I do. And sometimes, I feel a wave of regret and sadness breaking over me. It hurts.
Becoming a Christian didn’t make me any less human. It made me more so. But the walls I built up over my first three decades of life didn’t all crumble the first moment I accepted Christ as my savior. Christ’s love has proved not to be a wrecking ball to those walls, but a slow drill that relentlessly bores through my defenses. Whole sections of the ramparts have crumbled, but some still stand. Sometimes, I climb up on the walls that remain, survey the wreckage of what was, and I get struck dumb by grief and remorse.
And ya know, that’s okay.
Don’t know where you are with those regrets these days, Hugo, but that promise always stuck with me too. I first came to AA at 18, which meant my first pass at sobriety was contemporaneous with becoming an adult, and with a desire to start my adulthood and put away a lot of bad things in my first 18 years, so I’ve struggled with this one myself, out of a desire to shut the door.
I’m not exactly as close to God as I might be these days, I think that might be because some of the experiences that I regret saw the version of Him as represented to me early on as rather cold comfort. I can remember times, cold, clear, bright, horrid mornings, when even through a four-Excedrin hangover, I could see in crystal clarity the things that I’d destroyed or thrown away the night or the weekend before. Then, the idea that I could ever be loved by God seemed absurd and obscene.
The parable of the lost sheep in Matthew 18 and Luke 15 always stuck with me too. If nothing else, it changes the paradigm somewhat. “More joy in Heaven”… MORE joy. But why? For what reason and to what end? I’ve known enough people whom I thought ought to have done, deserved to have done, a damned sight better than I would, who took with grace and gratitude things that I answered with scorn and skepticism, who eventually went back out there. A lot of them are dead. A lot of others are in holes so deep that it really will take the rest of their lives to ever get anywhere close to seeing the light again, if they ever do.
I’m ever the utilitarian and pragmatist, for better or for worse. The best that I’ve been able to come up with, in answer as to what I ought to do with what inner darkness I have or as to why and how any joy ought to attend my being alive, able and free despite it all, especially when others are not, is what I do with it, all of it, from here forward. I do my best to accept myself as the perfect product of imperfect circumstances, and to believe, if nothing else out of faith, that even the rotten things that I’ve known and that I’ve done are of some purpose and can be brought into some sort of right and sense and balance by what I do now. That, and working to reward the faith of those who stood by me in my darkest hours, and who still stand by me now, pushes me forward into my lifetime process. Seeking forgiveness and amends, all the 8th and 9th steps in the world, can’t and won’t fix everything. On our deathbeds, the best that others could say of us is that, on balance, we did more good than wrong in what we gave to them. The best that we could say for ourselves is that we did more good than wrong with what was given to us.
This is my favorite quote, written by Theodore Roosevelt in the last days of his life: “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell. At some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us. He who has never failed has never been tempted; but the man who does in the end conquer, who does painfully retrace the steps of his slipping, why he shows that he has been tried in the fire and not found wanting. It is not having been in the dark house, but having left it, that counts.”