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Guilt—normal, balanced, healthy guilt, guilt without pretense and without neurotic exaggeration—is the
mark of a basically good and decent person who has failed to meet their own ideals. This is the kind of
guilt that seeks repair. But how?

How do we fix, without doing even more damage, what in some cases never even looked broken? How
do we make up, even to ourselves, for what has been damaged, if not in the other, at least in
ourselves? Like a crack in crystal, it is always there, just enough to mar the perfection of the glass,
never enough to shatter it completely. It says only too clearly, “I am not what I want people to think I
am. What I look like is not what I know myself to be.” How do I repair damage that no one even knows
has been done but that goes to every mirror with me, day and night, eating away at my image of my self?

And therein lies the key: “repair” is repair; it is not replacement. Something is different after it has
been repaired. The dent is gone, perhaps, but the color of the piece, for instance, is also just slightly
deeper, or darker, or thinner than before. And yet, it is also, in a way, new again, too. It has had
another beginning, another point from which to mark its wear, another moment after which things can
be different, can even be stronger than they were before.

Once that moment comes, the task is to accept the newness of the thing, not to mourn the mistakes
of the past. It is a matter of becoming whole again. I may be forever sorry that a thing has happened,
but I cannot be forever paralyzed by it. Life goes on, and so must this relationship, so must I, and in
whole new ways.

In Buddhist philosophy, karma—the notion that behavior has consequences, that the goal of life is to
“make merit,” to practice doing good so that good can follow—is basic and never impossible. There is
no such thing, to the Buddhist, as eternal damnation.

Failure, to the Buddhist, is not the end of us and all the good we’ve ever done. It is not necessarily
destructive at all unless we choose to wallow in the pit we have made for ourselves, to cease striving,
to forget to begin again. On the contrary. If we stumble, our one obligation is to get up and start over.
In fact, if the damage we have done is not satisfied in this life, it can be satisfied in the next. What we
do not do in this life, Buddhism reminds us, we can, if we will, repair now or carry into the next life
until we do.

Our own great sins help us to understand two things in life: how easy it is to allow ourselves to sink
into moral nothingness; and how little it takes to be a decent human being.

What we are in the end is the sum total of what we have learned from everything we have done in the
past.

--from Welcome to the Wisdom of the World and its meaning for You by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)
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