Today we celebrate various birthdays - including Edith Piaf's.
Edith, short on height (several inches short of five foot) but with an amazing voice, was plucked to fame from the back streets of Paris.
Born during the First World War, she was famed before the Second. Edith was not noted for her Christian devotion (to the extent that the Catholic Archbishop refused to take her funeral in 1963). She died at 47 years after a depressingly (literally and metaphorically) familiar story of broken relationships and addictions brought to an early conclusion by a liver that could take no more.
On the plus side, in this famously iconic song Non, je ne regrette rien she hit on the Gospel (admittedly accidentally).
. . . No I regret nothing
It's paid for, wiped away, forgotten . . .
. . . swept away my love stories
And their troubles
Swept away for good
I'll start again from zero . . .
Ah, Edith.
Your liver was lost but your soul did not need to be. This is the Christmas joy - Year Zero, a unique opportunity for the human race to start again, no longer in the line of Adam (or the apes - for the benefit of Mr Dawkins) but in the Last Adam, Jesus. Every life can have no regrets, its debts paid in full, its hope come alive!!
Anyhow, a great 20th Century song, eh?
Except that Piaf's recorded bitter deathbed words (expletives deleted) were something like, "Everything you do in this life, you pay for."
Which seems to show that she was not convinced by the song she made famous. I suppose the liver drowned out the song. May God grant us that understanding of the love of God in Jesus that washes away all the regrets in the blood of Jesus. His Son and Mary's Son.
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