Читать книгу The Bartender - Michael McNichols - Страница 4

Do nothing without deliberation,but when you have acted, do not regret it.

Sirach 32:19

It is an awful thing to regret one’s own life. A person need not be old to carry such regrets. All that is needed is the awareness of the accumulation of wrong turns and poor choices accompanied by the shuddering realization that hope has been lost.

People who lack religious affinities can embrace regret once they recognize that something is horribly wrong with the world and there is no solution to be found. These people might become open to a new search for meaning in life or they might look for the desperate courage to extinguish their own lives in order to eliminate the pain of hopelessness.

Religious people can also embrace regret. Those identifying themselves as Christians—followers of Jesus—are just as vulnerable to the pain of regret as are other human beings. It would seem that Christians might be the brokers of hope, since they seem to hope for heaven after death, hope for a better life before death, and hope that the lives of other people might find meaning and peace with God.

Yet, Christian people still embrace regret and often lose hope. Their reasons differ from the non-religious types in that they do believe there is a solution to the wrongs of the world and that the solution is to be found in Jesus the Christ. Even while believing that, however, they often fear that the paths they have chosen in life have turned out to be outside of God’s true preferences. They sometimes fear that God has always had a perfect plan if only the faithful will remain sufficiently devout to find that plan. They cry, “Your will be done!” only to puzzle over what that will might be. God begins to emerge as the astonished and secretive parent, watching the errant child wander (often in good faith!) through life, getting everything wrong. It seems to be only when it is too late that God reveals the irreversible truth that God’s will has been missed. The liberating claim, “God is light” now morphs into the dark epitaph, God is deceptive.

Those for whom faith and hope in God remain elusive, regrets become grounded in personal failure. The misguided conclusion might then be drawn that God rejects those who fail.

Those who have found their faith coming alive as they have trusted themselves to Jesus might find regrets that are grounded in disillusionment. They would not cry, “God is dead!” but, rather, Jesus, what the Bible says about you just doesn’t work.

This is a story about regrets.