No Regrets? Not Me!

“In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself”

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.
--Wislawa Szymborska

That makes me feel better. Sometimes my head is clear, my sinuses are clear, my goal is clear, but my conscience is never clear. I’ve never understood people who tell me they have no regrets, that if they could live their life over, they would change nothing.

I am good at understanding. I have a very strong imagination. But I cannot understand, I cannot imagine living with no regrets, for “there is none good, no not one.” All have sinned and come short, not only of the glory of God, but of most any set of human standards of conduct. That implicates me. Much that bothers my conscience is irreversible. The damage has been done and cannot be undone.

Although I don’t have a clear conscience, I have found that I can, nonetheless, live with peace in my heart, peace like a river. In Christ forgiven, I am accepted and set on the road to wholeness. My regrets are real, they are strong, but in Christ I do not allow them to haunt me. I don’t know how all of those wrongs and all that pain was made right, redeemed in an incarnate God/Man; I do not understand with clarity how his death, raised--by the purpose and power of God--in newness of life, has reconciled all alienation and estrangement and has transformed suffering into joy and peace. I don’t understand, but I accept and can lie down in peaceful sleep, because my conscience has been cleared through no doing of my own.

But to say I have no regrets would add insult to injury to so many I have wronged. Are there actually humans who like the jackal do not understand remorse? If so, I ask and Szymborska asks if they are indeed human? Perhaps, apart from Jesus, called Christ, there are not true humans.