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Good morning. When the American actress Sofia Vergara broke up with her millionaire boyfriend, Nick Loeb they had two frozen embryos in the deep freeze. They had also signed a legal contract stating that they could only be used if both agreed. Vergara is now engaged to someone else. But Nick Loeb is mounting a legal action to get custody of the embryos with a view to having them implanted in a surrogate. He has talked about his longing to be a parent and I can well imagine how he has come to invest his hopes and dreams in those two scraps of potential human life. Sofia Vergara says this is just selfishness and that he must stick to the contract they made. I have no answers to this unhappy dilemma.

But there is something really sad about those embryos suspended in time; belonging neither to past or future. With their parents estranged they no longer represent a shared tomorrow and hard choices have to be made. Who do they belong to? Should they remain frozen, or be used, or destroyed? There’s a poignancy about unrealised possibilities, relationships that never developed, roads we never travelled.

Physicists tell us that at subatomic levels events can’t be predicted; the smallest particles exist in states of probability, in more than one place at once. There is a theory that every time something happens a whole universe is spun off in which that something didn’t happen. I wonder whether this theory of multiple universes has affected the way we think our lives. We are fascinated by our unrealised possibilities and even hesitate to make decisions because every one we make is a sacrifice of what we might have been. So we strive to stay uncommitted, unwilling to let go of the glamour of choice.

But whether that theory of the universe is true, we actually live in this world, now, where the arrow of time goes only one way, from past to future. We can’t get into those other worlds, if they exist. We can’t live our unlived lives, however much we sigh, ‘what if’. The human vocation is entirely bound up in time, where what we do today affects tomorrow and where yesterday cannot be wound back. To realise this involves a loss of innocence because we have to live with our choices even when they bring us suffering and regret.

But this does not mean we are condemned by what we once decided.

For me, the great insight of faith is that though the past cannot be undone, it can be redeemed because the present moment is the place where human beings meet the grace of God; that life-giving, hope-filled energy which is always seeking humanity, not by pretending that the past did not happen but by weaving bad choices into new configurations. Our personal histories are full of mistakes (mine is anyway) but out of those mistakes we have a chance to learn wisdom and humility.

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