Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Brave New World’ was first published in 1932. Huxley wrote a foreword to a later edition of the book. That foreword begins with a quite a remarkable and telling paragraph. Let me quote:
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
It seems to me that Mr Huxley hit the nail on the head. Starve the lizards… who wants to wallow in remorse? In Mr Huxley’s case the remorse he’s talking about concerns art – or more specifically some perceived faults in the first edition of his novel. He tells us that he’s not going to waste time being remorseful over literary sins that he may have committed twenty years earlier. Well, good for him!
The problem is that there are worse sins than literary ones. It may be relatively easy to repent and resolve to do better when it comes to literary mistakes. It’s much harder when our particular sins are relational in nature. I think of the man who walked out on his wife and children and took off with his secretary. After his second wife died he admitted that he had lived for many years with remorse. He confessed that he should have tried harder to make his first marriage work. Maybe you’re struggling with remorse. Your angry words scuttled a precious relationship… remorse! Your one-night-stand led to an unwanted pregnancy… remorse! You broke a confidence and now someone is not talking to you… remorse! I’m sure you’ll agree with Huxley that all such remorse is “an undesirable sentiment”.
However the problem is with Mr Huxley’s suggested remedy. He mentions three things that need to happen to get beyond remorse. First, he suggests there is a need to repent. But what does repenting look like. Some have suggested that it’s simply being sorry for what you have done. But isn’t that what remorse is… regret about what we did or said? Second, Huxley speaks about the need to make amends. But in some instances that is almost impossible. And then there is his problematic third condition for putting remorse to rest: to work at behaving better next time. But if, for example, you have problems with foot-in-mouth disease then that could be a tough call. Behave better next time? Yeah, sure, but what if our problem was caused by an addiction that we’ve struggled with for years?
I get the impression from reading Huxley’s Brave New World that Huxley didn’t have a particularly good grasp of Christianity. Nevertheless all three aspects of his remedy against wallowing in remorse are profoundly Christian. God does not want us brooding over our wrongdoing either. God knows that rolling in the muck is definitely not the way to get clean.
The Bible gives us the same three solutions: repentance, restitution and change. However, in the numerous places where the Bible calls for repentance it does not mean merely that we must regret what happened. Being sorry is certainly part of it. But the repentance that the prophets and apostles called for and that Jesus demands needs to be thought of as making a U-turn on a highway. It’s a change of direction. And in the Bible that kind of repentance is the flip-side of putting one’s trust in Jesus and thereby accepting His forgiveness.
The Bible is also big on making restitution. We need to do all we can to make things right again. However the Bible is also very realistic that restitution may have its limits. Paul, for example, calls us to be at peace with others but only so far as it depends on us. And as for making every effort to behave better next time…? Well, it was for that very reason that Jesus gave us His Holy Spirit… to be the great agent of change in your life and mine.
John Westendorp