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Mistakes. The longer I live, the more clearly I know that I’ll never quit making them. So, one skill that I have honed to a fine point is that of apologizing.

I certainly didn’t learn it growing up. As a kid, to apologize was to lose that most prized possession of my nuclear family: Being Right. My father used to say, and he was only half joking, that if he ever did something wrong, he would be sure to apologize. Honestly, in my life I only remember him apologizing to me once—and I treasure that moment of humanity and humility.

Not apologizing and not being apologized to was very much connected to never admitting mistakes, and that was the environment where I grew up. Lies, obfuscation, blaming other people, remaining stonily silent—all were viable options in a household where to be vulnerable was to be in danger; to admit fault was to be heaped with blame. Safety meant just don’t admit you did it. We were all good candidates for political office.

I remember the first time I made a real, heartfelt apology. At my junior high youth group at church, we played “Sardines”—a kind of reverse hide-and-go-seek where, when you found the person who was “it,” you hid with them, until everyone was piled into a closet, bathroom stall, etc. During one game, I accidentally broke a door. When our youth group advisors asked who did it, I kept the kind of silence that was customary at home.

This time, however, a different scenario unfolded. The young couple who were our advisors looked very sad when we all said we didn’t do it; the young woman began to cry.

As she and her husband went off into a nearby classroom and spoke to each other in low voices, the other kids began to glare at me. One of them looked me in the eye and demanded, “Why don’t you tell them you did it?” I was stunned. At home, we hung out in a cloud of denial which both condemned and protected all of us. No one ever suggested direct communication. Looking around at the group, I saw many heads nodding. Go talk to them.

Incredulously, I walked slowly towards our advisors. I still remember the cold tile floor on which I crouched before this young couple, hanging my head and owning that I was the one who broke the door. We had a meaningful conversation full of contrition and care. For the first time, I saw how a genuine apology, met with love and forgiveness, could be a doorway to freedom.

Over time I realized that the people who interested me most took full responsibility for their behavior. At some point, I joined Adult Children of Alcoholics. Though my parents weren’t alcoholics, they were themselves children of alcoholics, and some of the patterns I grew up with were patterns of alcoholic families.

The Twelve Step program for recovery has one step where people review their days and “when wrong, promptly admit it.” This is vital to spiritual and emotional health, and therefore to staying out of addictions or other bad patterns. I found the daily practice of making amends for things I’d done wrong to be a healing practice, rather than letting many tiny molehills build up into mountains.

Professionally, I had a great mentor in apology—Kay Montgomery, then executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Association. She was my boss for years. One remarkable thing about Kay was how safe I felt calling her when I’d made a mistake, even a serious one. “Don’t you hate that!?” she’d exclaim. Other times she would moan with me. And then we’d talk about how to fix things the best we could.

Kay also taught me the finer points of apology. “It takes nothing off me to apologize,” she said. I do agree, it takes nothing good off me—only guilt and disconnection.

I’ve had many, many opportunities to apologize, and I am confident I will have many more, so long as I am drawing breath. Here’s what I have found as key: I stay centered on how genuinely sorry I am that the person I’m apologizing to is hurt. Whether I made a mistake because I was distracted, whether my intentions were good and

I “didn’t mean it,” whether I didn’t know or didn’t do something I should have—none of that matters. Something I did, or didn’t do, hurt someone I care about, and I am genuinely sorry.

Apology, of course, means nothing without “making amends,“ as the Twelve Steps say. Making mistakes is absolutely human—and some mistakes aren’t fixable. But doing the best I can to clean up after myself is guaranteed to make me feel better.

I used to envy my Catholic friends—they could go confess their mistakes anonymously each week through a curtain and be forgiven. Now I think that opening the curtain, looking squarely at the person I hurt, and apologizing is a much deeper form of healing for me. There are times, of course, when I can’t. Even in those times, I try to make amends in the present, finding ways to come back to myself and to right relationship with the others around me.

There is simply no way to live in the world without making mistakes, but there is a way back into connection. Our calling is not to be perfect. Our calling is to be in caring, honest relationship.

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Rev. Meg Riley

Senior Minister at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Meg has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than twenty years. As a UU kid in West Virginia, she quickly learned to enjoy being "different," which has served her well in a "different" life. Meg lives in Minneapolis, where she enjoys walking by lakes, gardening, reading and writing. She also lives online, where she enjoys hanging out, keeping up with people, and playing the occasional game of Scrabble. She is the parent of a teenager, and the companion of a number of four legged friends.

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