Regrets, I’ve Had A Few

Far Too Many To Mention. And That’s Just Fine

This morning my wife, who’s about a thousand times smarter than I am, said five words that nailed our collective Covid-19 journey in explicitly Christian, but also simply human, terms.

“We’ve been in yearlong Lent.”

Ain’t that the truth. And it’ll continue after the six-week pilgrimage believers make to the Cross, to Good Friday, and Easter.

I’ve mentioned the word “wilderness” a lot lately, because it gets to the scriptural heart of Lent – Jesus’ 40 hungry days in the desert, wrestling demons, fighting temptation, listening to God and filling his heart with the Holy Spirit. Every year we Christians make that journey with Him, metaphorically; we face our sins, our weaknesses, our shortcomings, and turn back to God in whatever fashion the voice inside tells us to. For many, it’s giving up sweets or TV or social media; for others it’s filling in perceived holes in one’s existence with action, or service, or simply by “counting our blessings” and acknowledging the gifts, talents and capacity for love that we’ve been given.

Of course, you don’t have to be Christian, or a believer in any unseeable force or grand plan, to take that journey once in a while. Indulgence, denial, growth, retreat, the fight against chaos, the search for balance: All part of being fully human.

And, if you’re like me, a self-flagellator from way back, you feel some regrets for what you did or didn’t do the past year, or beyond. The pandemic has only sharpened that blade of semi-shame for a lot of folks, and I’m one of them.

I had big plans when the lockdown began, especially since my full-time job evaporated a couple months earlier. Some panned out, like becoming a better cook, learning to grow sourdough starter and bake bread, building and planting and harvesting a garden, and reading a bunch of books. In all cases, mission accomplished.

But then again, I should have done more to get that person elected. I should have delivered more meals to shut-ins. I should have worked on that novel, listened to more people who didn’t agree with me, should should should.

“Don’t should yourself,” a wise man once said.

But still …

I was gonna learn ukulele, then rudimentary guitar (actually, this goal goes back years). Didn’t happen; both instruments are sitting right behind me and my standing desk, and I’ll pick them up maybe once a month to tune them, scratch out a couple chords, then set ’em down. Maybe I’ll switch to piano and pick up the adult lessons I started taking about 25 years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed. Nah. Well, maybe.

I was gonna get in shape and counter all that cooking with a daily exercise regimen. I kept up a semi-regular yoga practice thanks to my good YouTube friend Adriene, but fell off the mat for a couple months and I’m just now finding my way back. At least the dog won’t let me off the leash when it comes to walking, and when I would sneak out to play some (socially distanced) golf with my buddies, I often walked, too – including four glorious autumn days with my son at Bandon Dunes, where walking is mandatory and we knocked off a good 45 miles over the seaside landscape.

OK, I guess that wasn’t a total loss.

I was gonna keep in keener contact with many friends around the country, and got off to a solid start, even using the telephone now and again. It felt good to commiserate and catch up and laugh and bitch with someone outside my immediate bubble, but my loner-introvert nature took over and I let that slip, too.

As the fall spikes set in, I started to think that the coronavirus was changing the brain chemistry of everyone, including the uninfected, to just accept the social isolation, even embrace it. Dangerous stuff, so I talked myself out of it. I need people, and they need me.

I was reminded of that recently when Carl Wilfrid, one of those golfing buddies, a longtime friend and my former pastor at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, gave a guest sermon for our Valentine’s Day YouTube church service. It was also, more importantly, the Sunday celebrating the Transfiguration, where Jesus climbs a mountain with three disciples and he’s suddenly clothed in dazzling white, joined by Moses and the prophet Elijah, and identified by a God in a booming voice from the clouds, “This is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him!”

To me, that also means to listen to the loving, accepting voice in your head. A little later in the sermon, Carl picked up this thread: “Being in conversation with Jesus is crucial – not in a ‘who’s right/who’s wrong’ sense, but in a ‘how can we disagree, respect, and together perhaps arrive at truth’ sense.

Arriving at the truth? What a concept, including when it comes to the subject of regret, which, still later, Carl names as something not to be avoided or denied, but to channel into something good, healthy, and life-affirming.

He gives the personal example of not inviting a local Black pastor to continue giving guest sermons at our (heavily white, but working on it) church, as his predecessor had done. Then he makes the personal the universal.

“I become uneasy when I hear someone say, ‘I don’t want to have any regrets,’ or ‘I don’t want to die with any regrets.’ If that signals a determination not to put things off, good. But I think if you get to old age with no regrets you haven’t really cared about anything or anyone! To be human is to fall short.

“Here in church we sometimes ask God’s forgiveness for ‘what we have done, and what we have left undone.’  Regrets.

“The late psychiatrist/author Erik Ericson said that the primary developmental task for people age 65 and older is dealing with regrets.  Not ‘wallowing in regrets’ or ‘beating yourself up over regrets.’ Surely I’m still dealing with it at age 76.”

As am I, at age 60. I used to think I had to at least make a passing effort to “set things right,” clear the slate of old regrets, and “get right with God” before I shed my mortal coil. And sometimes, a nagging regret will serve to piss me off enough to get off my butt and do something about it, to act on it rather than wallow. But, as Carl once said to me, when I came to him for counsel after doing something all-too-common and all-too-stupid, something that could have cost me much more than the money, embarrassment and self-respect that it did: “God stopped looking for perfect Christians long ago.”

So I’ll keep falling short, staggering, succeeding, failing, crying, laughing, and loving, right alongside you. I’ll be infuriating, convivial, inspired, trite, wrong, and right. A blessed mess, with open arms, mind, and heart. And in this case, no regrets.