Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
January 30, 2024
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/013024.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we read one of the saddest lines in Scripture.
You have followed the story in these daily passages. Absalom rebels, designing to usurp his father’s throne. A massive battle rises between them. David, as commander-in-chief, remains behind, but gives instructions to his generals to spare Absalom’s life. Joab ignores the command, killing Absalom in a moment of vulnerability.
David is devastated.
Jean Colombe
I think there is no more wrenching human emotion than regret. When I ministered for nearly a decade as hospice chaplain, and later in the hospital emergency room, I saw so much regret.
People who had waited too long to say “I’m sorry”, “I forgive you”, “Let’s start over”, ” It was my fault too..”, “Thank you for all you did for me”, “I love you”…..
Instead, these people stood at lifeless bedsides saying things like, “I should have”, “I wish…”, “If only…”
Life is complex and sometimes difficult. We get hurt, and we hurt others — sometimes so hurt that we walk away from relationship, or stay but wall ourselves off.
We might think that what is missing in such times is love. But I think it is more likely truth. In times of painful conflict, if we can hear and speak our truth to ourselves and one another, we open the path to healing.
If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth.
Listen to the secret sound,
the real sound, which is inside you.
~ Kabir
That healing may demand adjustments, agreements, even a willingness to step apart in mutual respect. But if the changes emerge from shared truth, restoration and wholeness are possible.
David and Absalom never found that path because they were so absorbed in their own self-interests. Theirs was the perfect formula for regret – that fruitless stump that perpetually sticks in the heart.
I remember a trauma surgeon leaving the hospital late one night after an unsuccessful effort to save a young boy who had been shot. The doctor carried the loss so heavily as he walked into the night saying to me, “I’m just going to go home and hug my kids.”
As we pray over David and Absalom today, let us examine our lives for the still healable fractures and act on them. Let us “hug” the life we have. Regret is a useless substitute.
Poetry: The Eyes of My Regret – Angelina Weld Grimké
Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston on February 27, 1880. She was the daughter of Archibald Grimké, who had been born a slave in Charleston, South Carolina, and Sarah Stanley Grimké, a white woman and the daughter of an abolitionist. Named after her great-aunt, the abolitionist and suffragist, Angelina Grimké Weld, Grimké grew up in liberal, aristocratic Boston society. She attended the best preparatory schools in Massachusetts, including Cushing Academy and the now defunct Carleton School.
My readers might be interested in Sue Monk Kidd’s excellent historical novel “The Invention of Wings” which tells the story of the poet’s abolitionist great-aunts, the Grimké sisters.
The Eyes of My Regret
Always at dusk, the same tearless experience,
The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path
To the same well-worn rock;
The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun
The same tints—rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey
Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily;
Before me the same blue black cedar rising jaggedly to a point;
Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars,
Two eyes, unfathomable, soul-searing,
Watching, watching—watching me;
The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will dusk after dusk;
The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the night, chin on knees
Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly miserable,
—The eyes of my Regret.
Music: When David Heard – Eric Whitaker (The piece builds. Be patient. Lyrics below)
When David heard that Absalom was slain,
he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept,
and thus he said;
My son, my son,
O Absalom my son,
would God I had died for thee!
When David heard that Absalom was slain,
he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept,
and thus he said;
My son, my son.
Lavish Mercy 
Much needed reflection however difficult to sit with.
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Crippling regret is so right!
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