I have often entertained serious doubts about reality's ultimate reality. Indeed, I think it is full of holes…Modern physics seems to support my doubts. In his book Other Worlds, the physicist Paul Davies…comes to the conclusion that 'objective reality is an illusion' and that 'there is no agreement among physicists either on the nature nor existence of reality'…..

Yet who can deny that on the level of our individual experience, on an existential level, there is a reality….When I am hungry or thirsty or sick, it is real. Our daily lives consist of realities: I passed my bar exam or I flunked it. I got tenure or I didn't. I married my sweetheart or she ran off with some other guy. I inherited a million dollars or that great-uncle of mine left it to his girlfriend. Somebody lost his young wife. Somebody else is an alcoholic. Somebody's child suffers from Down's syndrome. The doctor told me that I have one more year to live…

These are realities of existence, [sometimes] desperate realities…These realities that together form fate, the fate of an individual or of a group of individuals, are in part realities about which we can do something, that we control, and in part realities about which we can do nothing, that are beyond our control. The demarcation line between the two is sometimes hard to establish.

[But in addition], there may be a deeper truth: for isn't it true that by accepting the unchangeable, we do change it? Accepting it not in a fatalistic spirit of resignation, but as a prelude to action, to doing something, not about it for that is impossible, but with it.

The Road Not Taken: Meditations on Regret
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, March 2, 2003

I want to begin this morning by sharing with you part of the poem that inspired my reflections on the road not taken and what we do with our regrets. It's called "The God Who Loves You", by Carl Dennis, and was published in the UU World last summer. Dennis writes,

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week --
…Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you…
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing…

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

There are a couple of things that grab me about this poem. I like the silliness of the idea of a god who tallies up our happiness points and frets over what we've missed. It's actually the logical extension of the images of God many of us internalized as children: put infinite love together with absolute omniscience, and you've got a God wakeful in the night as he grieves for all we didn't end up getting. That's a God tormented not by a single road not taken, but by countless unwalked roads, millions of turning points that might have gone differently for us.

But for me, this poem isn't actually about God at all, but about us. It's about all the ways we ourselves imagine the difference between what is and what could have been, and how our fretting over it can remain sometimes many years after we chose our road and started walking. We don't need an agitated celestial being in order to second-guess ourselves and our choices, to live with whispers of doubt in our minds and an image of how things might have been different if only.

Some of us do this in very large and persistent ways: if only I had stopped drinking a year earlier, maybe my marriage could have been saved. If only I had taken that job out in California, I might have work now that would be so much more creative and satisfying than the job I've got. If only I hadn't been driving so carelessly, or had paid better attention to my college advisor, or had stayed with my girlfriend and worked it out, or hadn't smoked for so many years, or had really made something of my life.

Sometimes it doesn't have to do with our own choices; it's lingering grief over the choices somebody else made, or the events that life has simply dealt to us: If only she hadn't died so young; if only my brother hadn't enlisted in the army, or my daughter had traveled with a different crowd of friends, or this disability hadn't fallen on me.

All of these tendencies toward regret, toward wishing things had panned out differently, are ways in which we argue with our reality. Our own imaginations serve as the omniscient god in Carl Dennis' poem. They let us cast our minds out into the realm of infinite possibility and then wonder what might be different in our lives, how we might feel or look, what we might be doing and who we'd be doing it with, if we were walking a different road.

The imagining isn't all bad, of course. It's that same imagination that lets us dream large dreams for ourselves, allows us to see a horizon in our mind's eye while it's still invisible and turn ourselves toward it. Casting ourselves toward new possibilities is what allows us to imagine a world at peace, or a country built on more economic justice. It's what let's us change direction, hone our skills for a completely new career, prepare our lives for the changes brought by children. The imagination in this sense is about as God-like as we ever get to be. It allows us to draw an idea out of emptiness and then turn our hearts and hands toward its creation, to bring it finally into the realm of reality where we can live it, where others can live it.

The trick is to figure out the guiding lines and keep ourselves within them. Where is the line between creating a vision to strive for, and fixing our gaze on an unattainable fantasy? Where is the line between recognizing, with remorse, an error we made in the past, and losing ourselves in a sort of paralyzing regret? Where is the line between appreciating, even honoring a road not taken, and pining over it?

It seems to me that discernment of this sort is part of what we hope for from our spiritual lives. When we join a religious community, or when we take on a spiritual discipline, part of what it's for is to gain a clearer sense of how things fit together in our lives. We're hoping for better vision: not only so we can see how things are but so we can see who we are, what meaning our lives might have, how we can best be of use.

It always starts, as everything has to start, with the willingness to accept where we actually are. Sometimes this means painful relinquishment of old hopes or dreams. Sometimes it means a gentle unbinding from the past, however seductive the memories. Sometimes it means a hard work of acceptance because what's in front of us isn't what we would have chosen, isn't what we had in mind, isn't happy or comfortable. Nevertheless: there is no other ground on which to walk except this one, the true parameters of this life we're actually in.

In his book Learning to Fall, written as he was dying of ALS, Philip Simmons writes: "Heaven has its place, and our desire for it may guide us, ethically and spiritually, to work for the good. But in our desire always to be elsewhere than here, we can lose what measure of heaven may be ours on earth… I don't know what awaits me after death: reincarnation as a houseplant [maybe]…But I do know that whatever communion with the Divine I may have when this life is done will surely be prepared for by my seeking always to dwell in the Divine as I find it here, in this life, in this very moment. In each unfinished and imperfect day I struggle to find myself at home in this body, however flawed and failing, in this breath, however labored, in this speech, however halting. Each day, I work to make my home among the people I find about me."

That is surely the first task of the spiritual life -- the first task of the truly mature life, which I often think is the same thing: the willingness to live where we are, with this body, these circumstances, these people around us. Only then can we discern with some hope of clarity what might be in our power to change and what surely is not. And it's there that we can begin to observe our regrets, and figure out how we might lay them to rest.

For some of us, the regrets don't have much to do with a road not taken. It would be more apt to say the regrets clank along with us on the road we have taken because they're part of our current life -- a part that chafes at us with every step. The father whose love comes to us only with entangling strings or manipulation. The sister who cannot keep from telling us how to live our lives. The adult child still estranged despite all the overtures, the entreaties, the therapy. The angry ex-spouse; the drug-addicted child; the aging or disabled body we live within, with which we cannot manage the simplest task without becoming breathless and exhausted.

There are hundreds of ways we argue with our lives, struggle against those things we cannot change or control. Because we are smart and self-aware people, we know that in these circumstances the key to our freedom is not out there in the circumstances but within us, in our response.

We know this, because we get glimmers from time to time of equanimity arising. It gives sweet relief even in the face of great suffering, even when, like Philip Simmons, we are in the dwindling last days of our lives. What is it? How do we pull it from within ourselves?

Sometimes it's easier to learn from the arguments or regrets we carry of the smaller sort, what Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein calls "feather-weight" regrets. It isn't that this kind doesn't matter -- she also recollects the child's riddle: How much does a ton of feathers weigh? A ton, of course. So even our feather-weight regrets, if we accumulate enough of them, burden us and weigh us down.

Sylvia Boorstein tells a story about one of her 'feather-weight' regrets. She was traveling with a friend on a road along the Hudson river, enjoying the beautiful day and the sparkle of sunlight on the river below. And suddenly a memory arose, triggered by that familiar territory near the city in which she'd grown up. She remembered a time more than forty years earlier when she had hurt someone, through carelessness and disregard.

She'd been asked out by a shy boy, someone she didn't think of very highly, asked to join him on a school boat-ride. And though she accepted and went as his date, she discovered a group of boy scouts on the boat who appealed to her more, and she spent most of the ride in their company. The old memory that arose unbidden for her was of a sad-faced boy taking her home at the end of the day. That's all it was: not a large sin, as these things go, and one far in her past, one she hadn't even remembered during all those intervening years. It was something she couldn't do anything about: she had no idea where the man would now be living or even if he were still alive. It would be impossible to make amends or even to apologize.

What she did with the memory and the regret is what I find instructive. She simply noticed: noticed she had caused someone pain, although so long ago. She held the image of the sad-faced boy in her mind's eye for a time and she wished him well, riding there in the sunlight along the river. And then she harnessed those whispers of old shame and regret in the form of commitment: to take more care, to be more attentive. And then she let it go.

I wonder whether this sort of practice might offer us something even for the much larger and more present regrets of our lives. When we can do something about damage that's been done, surely our freedom itself lies in doing it. That's one of the great insights of the twelve-step programs: the recognition that great freedom becomes ours when we can undertake what they call the 'fearless moral inventory', with a commitment to make amends to those we've hurt whenever it's possible.

But there are plenty of times when it isn't possible. The person we've harmed is long dead, or too far out of our lives to find them again. Or our regret is linked not to something we ourselves have done but something done to us, or a life circumstance we cannot undo. Even so, there is a way to make some peace, to lay down the battle and touch that place of equanimity. The way is always, I think, through the compassion that arises when we remember we are all in this together. We all make mistakes that cause harm to others and regret in ourselves. We all have loss that comes to us and wounds us grievously. We all suffer. We all die. It's hard, sometimes, to be a human being, to reside in these bodies that sicken or grow weak, to live within these minds that remember errors and grievances so clearly, to be compelled by nature to study the gap between what we strive for and what we actually do.

The Buddhist meditation practice called metta, or loving-kindness, is a way to open ourselves to these deep commonalities. In this practice, after letting the mind grow quiet, we imagine ourselves at the center of concentric circles of relationship. Starting with that center, with ourselves, we practice the softer heart. We wish ourselves well. It might be as simple as, "May I be free from suffering", or "May I be free from this regret", or "May my mind be at peace". After a while we extend that wish to someone we love dearly; and then to a relative stranger; and then to someone who is difficult or problematic for us.

It's a very simple practice. But somehow it has a way of nudging us open, gently widening our vision until we see how universal is the suffering, how much our own wish for healing is echoed by everyone around us. Surely compassion is the only response! And in a heart of compassion we can wish ourselves well, along this singular road of ours, and wish happiness and peace for one another as well, no matter what troubles we have brought each other. It's the work of forgiveness, and the work of relinquishment; but it's also the work of liberation. Philip Simmons writes, "Only in such work, in building a house of peace in the present moment, a house of peace not only for ourselves but for all who may be in our presence or our hearts -- only in such work can we be made whole. We are here, in the unfinished house of the now, for the duration. The joy is in the building." AMEN.