Sorry seems to be the hardest word

The Retune Blog - 1st September 2023

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to speak on Psalm 6. Psalm 6 is considered one of the seven traditional penitential  psalms of the early church. This idea of penitential refers to being sorry, confessing what we have done wrong and then receiving forgiveness. Yet of the seven psalms that fit into this category, two of them, including this one, had an interesting quality; there is no indication that the author feels sorry. Indeed, it seemed rather the opposite. More a cry of poor me, I want revenge.

So, why am I telling you this? It led me to question what it means to be sorry, and why, in the words of Elton John’s song of the same title:

Sorry seems to be the hardest word.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. Deep down, we know we’re at least partly in the wrong, but on the surface we feel hurt and victimised. We’re determined not to apologise, even though we know that saying sorry may very well change the dynamics of a situation. As Elton would say:

It's a sad, sad situation, and it's gettin' more and more absurd.

So why do we find the s word so hard? Well sometimes admitting we are at least partly in the wrong is a difficult thing to do, Most situations aren’t straight forward. I know when I had counselling, I was discussing a work situation in which I felt I had been treated really poorly. My counsellor had the wisdom to acknowledge that what had happened to me was unfair, but that I also had a part to play in not being assertive enough about my feelings. As such it wasn’t just about forgiving them, but more so about saying sorry to myself and allowing myself the grace of acknowledging I’d also got it wrong and that this had an impact on my position.

Yet this isn’t just a cognitive, head-based thing. Returning to the lyrics of the song, we get a hint at the real difficulty:

What've I gotta do to make you love me?

This lyric hints at the idea that we often find saying sorry hard because we recognise saying sorry means we have to change something in our behaviour. And here’s the thing; being sorry isn’t so much about whose in the right and who's in the wrong. It’s not even about everything being made to be happy ever after. Being sorry is really about honest self-examination and working from where we are right now.

In the Psalm honest sorrow wasn’t expressed through saying sorry and everything magically becoming OK, it was an honest admission of where the author felt they were and a recognition that everything wasn’t OK. When we’re struggling to say sorry, honesty is the starting point. And when we’re really honest we can start to see that often we are part of the problem and the solution.