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I confess that I’d never heard of the French composer Charles Dumont before his death was announced this week. His most famous song, however, feels as if it’s been part of my life for ever. 'Non, Je ne regrette rien' – I regret nothing at all – was written for the legendary Edith Piaf.

My French was just about adequate to get me through the old GCE O-Levels but it’s rusted seriously since I was fifteen, so I’ve only just got to discover the lyrics beyond the first line.

They reflect a turbulent life, for sure. Piaf was abandoned as a baby by her alcoholic mother, brought up by her grandmother in a brothel, and apparently blind for three years after meningitis. She earned a pittance by singing on the streets of Paris, gave birth to a daughter at 17, but the child died aged two. Success came, eventually, but also many disappointments in relationships and struggles with health.

Plenty to regret, then. Isn’t anyone who insists they have no regrets simply in denial of their own pain – and maybe of the pain they’ve caused other people? Don’t the words betray a distinct lack of self-awareness?

Many church services encourage honest reflection on our failure as individuals and as part of a community.. ('Sir, What’s wrong with the world? I am', as G.K.Chesterton once wrote to The Times). Starkly, the ancient words invite us to confess that ‘we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.’

Acknowledging that we’re imperfect is not meant to depress us, but rather to move us on to specific issues we need to address, apologies to be offered, situations where, however inconveniently, we are the ones who need to step in.

Alongside such challenges is a promise. In the words of the Old Testament psalmist, The Lord ‘knows what we are made of; he remembers that we are dust….As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our sins from us.’ And the apostle Paul speaks graphically of God cancelling 'the unfavourable record of our sins' completely ‘by nailing it to the cross of Christ.’

To my surprise, I’ve learnt this week to hear Edith Piaf’s defiant 'Je ne regrette rien' less as arrogance – ‘I’ve done nothing wrong and make no apology - than of recognition of the need for a new beginning. And the opportunity is there. Whatever is haunting from the past has been dealt with – as she sings: ‘paid, wiped away, forgotten,,,,all swept away…I am starting again from zero.’

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