Weird Theology: The Place of Your Regret

About once a month I revisit a town where once I lived for nearly 30 years. This gives me a chance to observe the process of change: the jazz café is gone, the shops are getting more chic, the buildings are modernised and styled up. It makes me confront the truth the Buddha pronounced: change is constant, inevitable, and even from moment to moment nothing remains stable or still.

            Why, then, so many regrets for my less attractive actions of ten, twenty or even more years ago? The part I played and the place I occupied in the net the Norsemen knew as Weird: the filaments binding together everything on the face of the earth, so that the actions of one affect others even into distant times and places. There’s no way to go back and fulfil that commitment that bitterly disappointed someone when I let myself become so exhausted that I bowed out of what I saw as a voluntary exercise. If I’d been able to foresee the end that came to that person, would I have acted differently? Would I have that power, given the state both physical and mental I had attained by self-neglect?

            And then there were the flashes of temper, aimed at people who turned up unexpectedly, when I wasn’t concentrating on my behaviour but only on my goals. There were mistakes of judgement, leading to suffering for animals and people. My sorrow can’t take away the pain my dog carried because I didn’t stay with him for that rough examination at the vet, for example, although he lived well and was loved for many years afterwards: I still have my regrets. If we could see the end, would we be able to act differently? Maybe I’m thinking of a morality of mortality.

            Ignatius seems to indicate that when in desolation we should revisit the possibility of consolation, and in this context it’s good to remember the many times I did support the one I disappointed and the best of care I gave my beloved dog throughout his life: the happy times I had with them. The net of Weird does consist of good as well as doubtful actions. But there’s real pain in letting others down and no recourse except forgiveness. The dear human heart, so easily bruised by changes and separations, continues to beat to the pattern established through our thoughts and actions.

            In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he makes reference to the mutable (or changeable) that must become immutable: changeless. On the face of it, this is impossible, given the nature of the world, yet Paul implies that this would be no voluntary process, but the result of a divine fiat. I think the activity of forgiveness, incarnated in Jesus Christ, is all that can still our joys and our regrets, knowing that we can’t know all consequences, but that the point of balance can be found. We live eternally in the presence of the forgiveness of sins, yet too often we forget this, and self-forgiveness is the hardest task of all.