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Guilt
Reverend Brian J. Kiely,
Unitarian Church of Edmonton, January 21, 2001
When I was a boy, about eight years old, I did something so horrible
that I thought for a brief time that I was beyond forgiveness. For
days and days I moped around the house. My mother noticed and wondered
what was wrong, but I couldn't tell her, I was so terribly ashamed.
I had trouble sleeping. I had trouble ...well, okay, this is me we're
talking about so I won't say I had trouble eating, but I did have
trouble sleeping and I didn't enjoy my meals very much.
I was burdened by heavy guilt. What was this great crime? A few
of my friends and I (all boys, of course) had run around the ringleader's
basement naked on a dare. Nothing even as serious as playing ‘doctor'.
We had just run around naked for awhile. But we did it guiltily.
I don't remember anyone ever teaching me to be ashamed of my body,
certainly not my parents. I just knew that somehow this was wrong
and dirty. And so I felt this terrible guilt. It lasted a couple
of weeks until, finally, I dragged myself to confession. Remember,
I started out Catholic. I was so ashamed that I didn't even go to
my own parish for fear that the priest would recognize my voice out
of the couple of hundred other little boy voices he would hear.
I don't know where I learned that shame, and I have long since come
to a place of respecting and enjoying my body, but I do know that
the promise of confession's miraculous forgiveness was drummed into
me in parochial school. The priest was kind, the penance light, almost
as light as I felt leaving the confessional. That was my introduction
to the paralyzing power of guilt.
Unless you are a sociopath, you know about guilt. For most of us
it appears in our lives touching us with anxiety, resentment and
fear of consequence for things done and things left undone. In its
most virulent it can bury us under its weight, paralyze us. In its
most gentle form, it can spur us to try to put things right, to try
to change our ways. If the human being can be compared to a great
stew made up of so many ingredients, guilt can be likened to a strongly
flavored spice. In the right amount it adds a certain piquance that
makes the meal splendid. Added with a heavy hand it renders the dish
inedible.
As a rule liberal Unitarians are wary of guilt. We treat it with
caution and suspicion. We may not be libertines, thinking that absolutely
anything goes, but we do tend to bare our teeth and raise our hackles
when we sense that someone is trying to make us feel guilty.
On the whole, I think that is a good place to stand in relation
to guilt, for in its history it does have a dark and shadowy side.
It is a useful tool for those who would bend us to their will. Parents
have used it since forever to persuade young children to behave.
Less scrupulous parents locked into an unhealthy family system have
continued to use guilt as a way to control growing and adult children
long after they should have released them to live their own lives.
I can't tell you how many of the people who have come to me for
pastoral care have been struggling to throw off the burden of parental
guilt.
It's an accumulation that happens almost imperceptibly. In his book
of short stories Snow and Guilt Giorgio Pressburger tells of a group
of Jewish friends walking through snowy mountains engaged in rabbinic
debate of scripture. In one passage the character Chaim Peretz speaks
to the insidious way that guilt can build over years.
Snow is like guilt because it begins to fall very gently, in tiny
fragile flakes, like little transgressions, little wants of attention
first toward's one's family and then toward's one's neighbors; tiny
guilts, practically infinite, like flakes of snow. We don't even
notice them and then, as they settle on the ground with gentle fairness,
lo and behold, they've covered everything. That's what the Book says:
guilt is like snow.
I suspect many of us understand at a deep level what it is to be
snowed under by years of accumulated guilt. It's not necessarily
even our own sense of sin involved, but rather our failure to meet
a set of often slippery and changing expectations laid on us by others
who have some kind of power over us, whether that be parental power,
or the kind of power a teacher has over a student or the boss over
an employee, or one life partner over another, or sometimes a child
over a parent, or even a religious leader over a congregation...if
they're not Unitarians.
Like snow, the guilt falls on us and it becomes so familiar that
we begin to cling to it like a blanket. Even when spring comes, when
lives change, when we move away from home or shift jobs or leave
a difficult relationship, still that blanket can cling to us. In
some cases we even go out of our way to make ourselves feel guilt
over nothing. We fall into a pattern of being late so we can have
something to apologize for. We read contempt and condemnation into
benign or indifferent emotions coming towards us from others, just
so we can have something to feel guilty about. The really advanced
practitioners can even feel guilty after receiving praise or affection.
Those of us raised under a snowy blanket of guilt grow so comfortable
with it that we become our own travel agents booking our personal
guilt-trips to those frost covered lands of ‘undeserving' and ‘not
good enough'.
Those are not healthy places to visit but the trip becomes an ingrained
habit. It's as if we have had guilt buttons installed in us at a
very early age by parents or guardians or any of the adults that
had power over us. Like lab rats we come to expect those buttons
to be pressed, even if they bring bad feelings. When the installers
leave our lives, many of us seek others who will find and push those
buttons for us and so we repeat patterns and seek out the people
who will lord stuff over us. The more advanced among us learn how
to push the buttons for ourselves.
"Worthless, stupid, ugly, lazy, sinner, dirty, clumsy..." these
are a few of the words used to instill feelings of guilt. If they
resonate with you, then maybe you know what I am talking about.
If you're here, in this liberal, welcoming and accepting church,
chances are you have recognized your predicament and have or are
trying to dig yourself out of the snowbank. That's good, and take
heart, for you are not alone. You are in a place where we affirm
your inherent worth and dignity. Affirm, give affirmation, celebrate
your gifts and even the challenges you face on your road to wholeness.
We are all on the road to wholeness in this place, travelers sharing
a pilgrimage, sharing that which sustains us along the way, be that
food for the body or food for the soul.
We are on the trip to wholeness, and that's not a guilt trip.
Now guilt is not an altogether bad thing. Although some of us have
been abused by it, the fact is it is a useful tool, a spice for our
lives. I spoke of the relief of confession for that eight year old
boy I used to be. I had broken God's rules I thought, and so I felt
guilt. Fortunately for me, I also believed in the possibility of
absolute and complete forgiveness, and I received it. Or perhaps
I should say I accepted it, for true forgiveness has to come from
oneself, not from someone outside. That story now stays with me mostly
as a tribute to the maxim that confession is good for the soul and
also to the deep belief I hold that forgiveness is always possible.
But I have come to believe that the critical moment wasn't the ritual
of confession or the absolution, but the examination of conscience
that preceded it.
My Dad taught me that. Before entering the confessional a good Catholic
takes time to meditate in the church thinking back over their lives.
They compare their actions against the rules and standards the church
teaches as well as those personal standards they have set for themselves.
They look for anything missing, anything discordant. The first step
to forgiveness is the acceptance of what is rightly their piece to
correct. Forgiveness and absolution, I now realize, come not from
God nor from the priest, but from ourselves.
In the same way, we form our own standards of behavior. We may draw
from codes of secular and religious law in forming those standards,
but those rules given to us will be reshaped and redefined by our
own experiences and our inborn inclinations. We watch another child
kill a bird, and somehow we know that's wrong. We watch one parent
emotionally abuse another and that shapes how we view acceptable
and unacceptable behavior when we grow up and form relationships.
And as we shape our personal principles for living, the ability to
feel guilt and remorse become both tools for reflection and warning
systems.
We do something that later leaves us feeling guilty. It helps us
add to our own personal code of right behavior, and hopefully prevent
us from doing that or similar actions later. This is where guilt
has value. We are creatures who learn best from our mistakes. Guilt
plays no small role in that learning.
The character of Hillel Goldstein in Snow and Guilt has a different
interpretation from Chaim:
Snow is like guilt because it covers everything, grass, shrubs,
bushes; it covers everything with its white, glittering, apparently
eternal mantle. Then in the spring, everything melts with the first
rays of the sun, the clods of soil drink up the snow that turns into
water and disappears (as does the appearance of guilt), but the earth
soaks it up, drawing from it nourishment to feed the beauty of nature,
colours, flowers, leaves. Everything feeds on water as it does on
guilt, which is absorbed, which becomes the essence of things. That
is how guilt can be compared to snow.
A child learns not to touch the stove by burning its fingers. We
learn to not sin against others or ourselves through guilt which
is but a reflection on past actions. It its healthy form, guilt serves
us and spices our lives. It should not be a force so overpowering
that it controls everything we do, defines every action we take and
prevents us from trying new things. Nor should guilt be so absent
from our make-up that we become sociopaths, unable to feel for others
and therefore capable of unspeakable horrors. We need guilt to call
us to reflect upon our deeds. We need to examine the conscience,
so we can let those reflections shape us as we take the next step
in our lives.
Guilt is part of us, a spice in our lives. Too much is overpowering,
none at all is deadly, but in the right amount it makes life tasty
and enjoyable.
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