Holy Regret

A friend and I were talking early this morning about our respective experiences in the institutional church. The conversation was like a ride in a crop-duster, full of swoops and dives and wing-waggles, sometimes peaceful, sometimes thrilling, constantly flowing.

And after the conversation, I sat at my desk, thinking about the things he’d told me and the things I’d told him, and I reached a conclusion.

I’ve committed many sins and made many stupid decisions over the decades. But I don’t regret any of those things with the intensity and shame that I feel when I think of the pious boilerplate that I offered so many people when talking about the things of Christ.

Looking back as best I can into the dim past, I believe I’m being truthful when I say that at the time I committed them, I believed I had good reasons for doing the things I did and making the decisions I made.

But all my gales of auto-blather about God, the church, religion, holiness, Jesus, theology…such stuff was a perfect example of the nervous chatter of my false selves (and a hat tip to Bruce Charlton for providing so many opportunities to meditate on the real self vs. false selves).

I cannot undo anything that I have done. All I can do is hope that I have learned from the errors and transgressions and that I can avoid them in the future. And I hope that if anyone ever again asks me anything along those lines that I can offer a crumb of honesty instead of a tub of spiritual Cool Whip.

~ S.K. Orr