Everyday Grace: Thoughts on Remorse

Friday afternoons before a home football game are quiet times for professors. Students are already gearing up for the game and rare it is that a student, on such an afternoon, feels a need to consult a professor. It was mildly surprising, then, when someone knocked at my door on a football Friday several years ago. My visitor, it turned out, was not a student but an elderly “subway alumnus” who was in town for the game but wanted to speak to a theologian. In his wanderings, he found me at my desk.

After the usual pleasantries, he told me the reason for his visit. A summation of his tale went something like this: as a young man he did a terrible thing that has haunted him all of his life. He has gone to confession to seek absolution many times, sought out priests for counsel, prayed incessantly, but he found no peace, nor a sense of forgiveness. In fact, he told me, not only could he not erase that event from his mind, but he was obsessed with the conviction that he was destined for damnation because of his youthful act. What, he concluded, was I to make of this and did I have any advice.

The ball, figuratively speaking, was now in my court. Just to get the ground rules in place, I told him that I was not a confessor, a professional counselor; not a spiritual director, nor a spiritual master. I study such people and their writings. Nor did I inquire about the nature of the act that so agonized him. He had confessed it many times and rehearsed it frequently in his own head, so any inquiry on my part was just picking at a wound that was already inflamed.

There is a useful word in the Christian spiritual vocabulary for such conditions; it is called remorse. The word itself comes from two Latin words: re and mordere which mean “to bite repeatedly.” It is that condition in which a moral failing in the past haunts the person by lacerating the soul. Remorse can take the form of those terrible words we say to another that we can’t take back or the lashing out at a loved one that is hard to heal. The variations are infinite, but they all hold this in common: they torture us as we rehearse them in our minds. My visitor suffered remorse to such a degree that it shaped his entire life by racking him with such guilt that he was near despair.

What was I to say? I resisted pinning a psychiatric label on his problem, although I was becoming convinced that he probably needed professional help. So, I did not say that my visitor was suffering from obsessive-compulsive behavior or what the spiritual writers call “scrupulosity.” My approach, based on my suspicion that he always received kindness from the various persons whom he consulted, was to give him a little tough love.

Look, I said, I don’t know what you did in the past but one thing I do know is that your greatest sin is that of overweening pride. When he simultaneously bristled and looked puzzled, I pressed on. You seem to think that of all the persons who have ever walked this earth, you alone have invented an act which is beyond the mercy and forgiveness of God. Go and talk to any priest on this campus who is an experienced confessor, and he will tell you that hearing confessions is a repetitive task for the precise reason that we are all pedestrian sinners. Rare is the moment when the experienced confessor says that he has never heard that transgression before. The most egregious sinners recorded in history have not done anything new but have merely multiplied the usual sins by magnitude. “The murder of one person is a tragedy,” the cynical Stalin once said, “while the death of a million is a statistic.”