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.
I wonder how long it took until Christians were fully comfortable with the Apostle Paul. And they had grace, as we have grace, to be forgiving as God is forgiving.
I most certainly agree with Walter Wink, and I read Anthony Bradley’s post a little differently than you do. There is more to be redeemed from than just “sin” or acting out. Some of us carry around some pretty heavy damage that genuinely wasn’t our fault, and the evangelical church doesn’t have much to offer beyond repentance. My life has never fit into the standard “sinner meets Jesus hallelujah” version, and I know far more about the inner darkness of the redeemed than I would like to. The main reason that I handed in my evangelical membership card is that there is no room for my story, no room for me to tell the truth about myself, and no room for me. While there are individual evangelical Christians that I am still very close to, the evangelical sub-culture is not one in which I can survive.
Sometimes your posts annoy the crap out of me (other times, of course, I really like them), and I think I’ve figured out that the main reason is that we have such diametrically opposed experiences of Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, that it would be nearly impossible for us to see things the same way. My conversion out of evangelical Christianity feels as transforming and liberating as your conversion into it.
There must be a space somewhere for both of our stories to be equally valid. I’m just not sure where it is.
Christy, that’s an outstanding point. To put it bluntly, I’ve never seen myself as a survivor of another person’s sin or another’s evil. I was never molested, abused, etcetera; the greatest tragedy of my youth was my parents’ very amicable divorce.
I did experience myself as a perpetrator. Not a molester of minors, mind you! Not as a rapist or anything criminal, of course. But the reckless womanizing irresponsible self-destructive alcoholic black sheep? That was me. And as a result, to reverse Lear, I see myself as a sinner who sinned more against others than he was sinned against.
That makes my story very different from the stories of those who were abused or victimized, and I ought to be clearer about that.
Bless you, Hugo –
Conversion *is lifelong – which is why I shall ask you to pray for mine as I do for yours.
Like Christy, my conversion was *from evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity. It is very much ongoing. Sometimes it seems as though I’m being invited to sin “that Grace may abound [God forbid!]” in order that I might understand reality without the blinkers of my upbringing. Yours was very different from ours, I suspect.
*****
You write: “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.”
You leave out simple aging. This is also a factor. There are some things you simply can’t do anymore without hurting (even in *your physical condition) and multitudes of other things you’ve simply had enough of, or have perspective on. Please do not misunderstand me, *THIS DOES NOT DIMINISH YOUR CONVERSION OR THE WILL IT HAS TAKEN YOU TO CHANGE YOURSELF* any more than does, say, good health insurance.
Yeah, I’d have some Schadenfreude were you to screw up now. But you’re also my brother in Christ, and I’d feel real sorrow, too. You are forgiven, by the way, already. You were forgiven before you fucked up the first, second and thousandth time. That’s what the atonement means.
Careful of the self-righteousness of the convert, though. Really. God’s already forgiven you, but the rest of us might take a while…
hpb
Austin, TX
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Good post. Even, a great post.
My favorite conversion story is Dorothy Day’s, because it is so unremarkable. She talks about the awkwardness of being baptized and receiving communion for the first time — she didn’t know where to stand, the priest glared at her, she felt nothing extraordinary, just a sense that she was doing what she had to do. Her autobiography -The Long Loneliness- is a good read because it’s a story about someone who turned to God and continued to have a hard life — there was no magic, only grace.
I am a deep admirer of evangelical Protestants, whose ease with witnessing, whose spiritual vocabulary, whose sense of fellowship is much more developed than your average Catholic. But the evangelical habit of always speaking of one’s life as unmitigated happiness, as a problem already solved, as an infomercial on how YOU TOO can lead a better life — that really turns me off. Evangelical protestantism always seemed like a religion geared exclusively toward those with plenty of serotonin to spare. What’s kept me in the Catholic church is its endless supply of saints whose lives were tales of downward mobility and ludicrous agony. They always reassured me that trouble isn’t a sign that God has left you — trouble is a sign that you need God.
Of course, there are problems with that worldview too. But it was just what your post made me think of.
Please know there are strangers who pray that your conversion is not a sham, but a genuine lifetime process.
Thank you so much, prefer. I get more comments on my more inflammatory political posts, but this one is near to my heart. Your words mean a great deal.
“Christians have never dealt well with the inner darkness of the redeemed.â€
I love this quote – it hits the nail right on the head. I’ve spent years wrestling with the darkness of chronic depression and the most important Bible verse to me is Christ saying “I leave you peace, my peace I give to you”. I’ve clung to that through some dark days.
I am a deep admirer of evangelical Protestants, whose ease with witnessing, whose spiritual vocabulary, whose sense of fellowship is much more developed than your average Catholic
If you’ve got the serotonin, yes, they can be very friendly. But I never had much and I could not fake it, so I too have fallen in with Catholics. It doesn’t hurt that at every mass, I’m remided that Christ gives me His peace.
I’ve been trying to forgive evangelicals (Southern Baptists, in my case) for not having a place for me and pushing me to the fringes in just the same way that the secular world did… that’s an ongoing process, too.
I really enjoyed this post. I think one of the things I liked about church (I was raised Catholic) is that I always felt like there was room for my regrets, that it was a safe place to confront the rotten things I had done and steel my resolve to do better. At a time in my life when I had just done several things which I still feel some regret for, lo, these many years later, visiting the churches on or near campus (empty or full) soothed me and strengthened me like nothing else.
I’ve never been to a “twelve step program.” I don’t understand the line “We will not regret the past or wish to shut the door on it.” I found an article that attempts to explain it, but even there, I see regret. The memory of that “last drunk” is a painful memory, one that the person would not wish to see repeated. That sounds like regret to me.
I see regret as a sign that a person has the capacity for empathy, for understanding the effect of their actions on others. Wallowing in regrets is not productive. I could see where that might lead to more substance abuse and more regrets. But not having any regrets strikes me as pathological. The only people I’ve ever met without true regrets are sociopaths.
So what am I missing? What’s the 12-step program trying to get across that I don’t see?
In AA, regret is seen as dangerous because it can quickly become a weapon with which to beat ourselves up — thus making us more prone to a slip.
Where we can, we make amends for what we’ve done. We ask forgiveness. We change our behavior and do everything we can to make things right. And then we move along.
Of course, that line was written in 1939, when AA was only four years old. I’ve been sober more than twice as long as Dr. Bob and Bill W. had been when they wrote about conquering regret… perhaps they were naive. I don’t know.
I haven’t read here in quite a while, Hugo, and clearly that’s my loss. In particular, I appreciate this entry very much. (The Wink quote is very good. That’s a keeper.)
I would suggest that sometimes people who look for us to “mess up” because they don’t trust that conversion really can happen, tend to (unknowingly?) act out what they believe about God. There are plenty of people, Christian and non-, who believe God is just itching to catch us messing up and waiting to zap us for it. And with the “predatory evangelism” (another great turn of phrase!) that abounds out there, it’s no wonder that lots of those whom they target would believe that about God. That’s the “brand” of Christianity they peddle.
The fact is, there are a whole lot of us “elder brothers” (ref: the story of the Prodigal) out there who would begrudge God the right to wipe some pretty messy slates clean. We’re the laborers in the vineyard who’ve been working there since dawn, peeved to the max that God dares to pay those who’ve only worked an hour the same wage we’re getting. We think there ought to be extra rewards for our “greater” faithfulness. We refuse to find genuine joy in the return of a wayward son or daughter to God. We think they ought to have to pay more dearly for the privilege of such status than we did.
No, that’s not what the Christian faith teaches, but it is what some Christians model for the world and each other. Thank you for making me look rather uncomfortably at myself today, and especially for making me think.
Keep shining the light, brother. It is appreciated.