Above the treetops embers died, as one by one they tried to fly high into the tar-like sky. Where they came from? Down, down, down—until pause. There I am. I stood bare chested on a half-rotted stump with a crown of twigs around my head. Below me a ring of stones hemmed in a fire as it snapped, crackled, and popped. I exhaled. The kind of thing you do when you resign yourself to a decision you’d rather not make. Lifting a brass cup to my mouth, I let the rim linger there for a moment, wanting to savor the cool metallic touch on my bottom lip. Something man made for man. Then tipping the cup back, I let the liquid flow and swallowed as my larynx pumped it down my throat.
After emptying its contents, my arm went slack and I dropped the cup upon the forest floor. The small thud jolted the critters of the night to attention. They stopped their chirping and chattering and looked in bemusement at a son of glory seemingly inebriated.
I turned to the dark woods, and screamed, “When I demanded life, God gave me love!” I waited, though for what I am not sure. An apology, from the place that ridiculed me? Not likely. Still standing, though teetering a bit more, I kept going, “And I tried, I really did try to get rid of it.” I waited in a bit of a stupor. Still nothing.
This wasn’t going anywhere. No one would reply.
I have this horrible tendency to get drunk on the past. Especially when remembering past love in my life. You see I’ve gotten to a point now in life where I am looking back as much as I am looking forward. I feel the consequences of earlier decades. The pain is catching up with me. Physical pain, yes. That I expected. The pain though from regret, that one is a bit of a surprise. Sure, I’ve always felt the pinpricks of regret for as long as I’ve been making decisions. But so long as you keep running, well, you don’t feel them as much. You’re not running into them. They’re just scratching you along the sides as you run for the nearest clearing.
I am not exactly sure how I got to that spot. As Dante says of his arrival in the dark woods, “How I entered, I can’t bring to mind, I was so full of sleep just at that point when I first left truth behind.” (Inferno, 1:10-12). How many times do you have to kill off love before you start to regret it? How many loved ones have to die, before you start to regret how you loved them? Whatever number that is, I hit it. I came to the threshold of my breaking. Though I had visited this threshold before—I’ve broken and mended and met the Maker too—this go around felt different.
A thicket of thorny regrets ensnared me. And every time I tried to get out, those thorns would press into my flesh in so many unexpected ways. Regret is an incredibly nuanced emotion and tricky to define. As Daniel Pink writes, “If the precise definition feels elusive, the reason is revealing: regret is better understood less as a thing and more as a process.”1 This process has three elements: sadness, an act of the will/a decision one made (responsible for outcome), and a wish or imagining of a different outcome (better than what happened). What does this typically look like though? To paraphrase Daniel Pink’s assessment:
Discontent with the present, we mentally return to the past where we made a decision, once there we negate what really happened, and substitute an alternative decision we prefer instead. Then because we reconfigured the past, we jump forward to an imagined present much different than the one we just left moments earlier. It’s a present where we are content and fulfilled. The emotion becomes regret when we compare/contrast our actual present with what might have been. Then we assess blame. Regret is your own fault, not someone else’s.2
Now, I don’t pretend to know much about regrets. Frankly, I haven’t lived long enough, nor dealt with enough of them to speak authoritatively on the subject. But I do know that you can’t just ignore them. Nor pretend that you will somehow get out of this life without them. In dealing with my own, I found it helpful to distinguish between the regrets I currently have, and the fear I have of regrets. Someone once told me that they feared what they did not know. And I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I think we fear what we do know, what we have experienced, and in those empty spaces, we imagine those horrible experiences intensified. So when I look at the fear I have of making a decision I might regret, it is in large part because I have made decisions that I have regretted. I have felt the pain and consequences of my own choices. Those fears are rooted in a present reality. And I think, maybe, the way out of fear, is to actually address the source of that fear. I have found for myself at least that the only way to get over the fear I have of making the wrong decision, is to actually address the “wrong” decisions I have made in the past, and the subsequent regrets I still hold.
Queer folks in the church resonate with this in a unique way. For generations, we were taught that we choose our sexual attractions, and that the deep affections and attractions we have for others (even if they are not sexual) should only be for someone of the opposite-sex. Should we err in this, we were condemned to hell. This meant that when beauty incited love within a queer person, before we could even respond, we already regretted the love we felt because we were taught that the love we felt condemned us. I wrote in a journal a while back, “I don’t know how to love without regretting it. I don’t even know if that’s possible.” Looking back at what I wrote, what I think I meant was: I don’t know how to remember the love in my life without regretting it. For generations queer folks have been conditioned to remember the love in their lives, and regret it.
In a sad way, it was only in regretting love that I knew it was real—that it mattered, that it had significance in my life. Either I didn’t regret it because the love was not real and had no weight or impact on my life, and therefore not dangerous. Or, the love was real and had significantly impacted my life and therefore condemned me (something to regret). And how often are those the only two ways the church has taught queer people to think of love? “You can have pain and regret when you love another man, But you cannot have life and joy.” Is it possible for love to have weight or impact on my life, and not regret it?
When I examine the inventory of relationships in my life I find that because of this conditioning, I’ve had to poison memories with regret in order to feel that the love was real. There are plenty of things I have done wrong, and should repent of. Many of them I think I have. But I challenge the voice in my head and whatever its source, which demands that I should only look back at the love in my life through the lens of regret. I don’t find that in scripture, and I don’t believe it is in step with the Spirit. Regret will leave you in a place of torment, and to stay there is to deny the outstretched arm of Christ. To linger in a place or process of regret because it’s your only access point to love, is to turn away from the love that beauty incarnate incites.
To my queer and straight siblings alike, I’ll say this:
You don’t have to hold onto your regrets to remember love, to remember that you have the capacity to love. It happened. You loved and were loved by someone deeply and intimately, in a way that forever changed your life. Wallowing in your failures and “what-if’s” doesn’t make it real. It already is real. Love is eternal. You are drawn to the beauty of others, and regurgitating the regrets you have for how you expressed that love or did not express that love is not the way to life. Doing so does not somehow make this experience true. You don’t need to pour regret onto every memory to make it come alive…all you’ll get is a zombie (trying to bring the past to life), or a fantasy (an elusive future imagining). Neither one is truly alive. But you are. And so is the love in your life.
If you’ve made mistakes, confess and repent. But don’t regret that which is good apart from your own mistakes. There is no need for you to poison and then drink from the same well.
I told my mother I was working on a little piece on regret. She wrote to me that, “while it’s important to acknowledge the regrets in your life, they have a tendency to linger too long and will eventually stunt your growth.” She advised, “Best to live a well-intended life, riddled with purpose…this requires the regret to stay long enough to take its coat off, but leave before tea is served.”
For myself, I think I’m going to let some of these regrets go. They are no longer needed. I don’t need to get drunk off of them in order to remember the love in my life. I don’t need to wear them as a badge of repentance to make others comfortable with my past or present. I’d rather be sober in mind and heart when looking back at something as precious and life-giving as the love the Lord has given me. Really I just want to sit under a tree on a cool evening with my savior, sharing a drink. And in that moment find peace in a simple faithful obedience.
Daniel Pink, The Power of Regret, p.17
Ibid., p.18, 22