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Good morning. As a huge fan of Novak Djokovic I was sorry about the circumstances that led to his disqualification on Sunday night. In an act born of frustration, he hit a ball which bounced to strike a lineswoman in the neck, breaking a basic grand slam rule against the physical abuse of staff. He apologised, both at the time and later on social media, expressing concern for the injured woman and relief that she was feeling better. But he also wrote about himself, saying that he felt ‘sad and empty’ that he was ‘working on his disappointment’ and hoped to ‘turn all this into a lesson for my own growth and my evolution as a player and as a human being’. This way of describing serious mistakes, such as a loss of self-control, as an opportunity for personal growth seems to have taken hold in recent years. You hear it from celebrities and politicians, you hear it in the classroom, you hear it on social media. But while it is good to learn from mistakes it is sometimes all too easy to put so much emphasis on the learning opportunity that the mistake itself gets pushed into the background. I know I’ve done this – using the language of what I have learnt – as a result, say of an unjustified angry outburst – as I way of preserving my dignity. And though in some ways the positivity of it is encouraging – I can get through this, can learn from this – it can be, If I’m honest with myself, a bit of an evasion, an attempt to ensure that the actual incident won’t reflect so badly on me. What I did was a lapse, not a true expression of who I am. By turning the spotlight away from the rules I have broken and the person I have actually hurt I manage to remain in some way innocent. One of the reasons I value the Christian faith is that it punctures this innocence. At its most radical, Christianity insists that we are all guilty of basic self-centredness: the illusion that the universe revolves around us, our projects, our desires, our personal needs. Christianity reminds me that I can only learn from my mistakes when I genuinely acknowledge them, when I learn to weep not for my shame, or for pain of exposure, but for what is really wrong with me, and the fact that I have done, as a traditional prayer puts it, what I ought not to have done. Facing reality does not leave me drowning in guilt or regret, it is actually liberating. Such honesty means, as one wise and holy priest once put it, that while we are free to take life with the utmost seriousness we are also free not to take ourselves seriously at all.