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young man, probably in his late 20’s, came to the Cottage Grove, Oregon, newspaper office and asked to see the publisher. Our receptionist found me back in the production area and told me someone wanted to see me.
I came out to the reception area. I introduced myself and asked him to come back into my office. When we sat down I noticed that he was carrying a paper bag with something heavy in it. And he looked very nervous and agitated. He avoided looking me in the eye.
Immediately my brain started to think about my recent editorials. Had I recently written anything about a highly emotional topic like gay rights or gun control? I thought to myself: great. Here is a nervous guy carrying a bag with something heavy in it—something about the size and weight of a handgun.
Now, while I have always advocated for a free press, I had no inclination to become a martyr for the cause. I asked the young man why he wanted to see me.
He fidgeted. He was very uncomfortable, but he did not look angry or aggressive. He began by telling me that he had worked at the newspaper about ten years before, just after getting out of high school. He had worked part time in the darkroom as a technician, developing film and printing photographs. This had all occurred at least five or six years before I came to the paper as the new publisher.
He went on to say that he had just gotten a job in another city and was about to move away.
“This is very strange,” I thought to myself. “Why is he telling me this?”
Then he said that he had to make something right before he left. He picked up the bag and reached down into it. “Am I supposed to be seeing my life flash before me?” I wondered. And yet there was something about him that was not threatening.
He opened the bag and pulled out an old camera. It was a twin lens reflex camera. One never sees them anymore, but they were popular once. I suspect that a few of our members have one stored away somewhere. They use a larger negative than a 35mm camera and can take wonderful photographs, but they are a bit unwieldy.
The young man then told me that he had stolen the camera from the newspaper a decade before. He had come across it as he packed his belongings. He said he had felt guilty about this for years and had decided to make things right.
Well, luckily I had the presence of mind to thank him for returning the camera. I told him he had done the right thing, and wished him well in his new life.
By the way, I am sure no one had ever missed the camera. I’m certain that old camera had not been used for 15 or 20 years before he came. Someone at the paper had probably just stuck it on a shelf in case it might be useful one day.
He left with his burden of guilt lifted from his shoulders. He had carried that with him for a decade. He was ready to begin a new life feeling cleansed. It was a touching moment.
Think of a time you felt guilty. What a rotten feeling. Imagine what a rotten feeling it is to feel guilty all the time.
Guilt, of course, plays a central role in our religious history and in religion today. Sin, guilt, confession, punishment, forgiveness, and atonement have been at the center of religion for thousands of years. Indeed, a cynic might suggest that orthodox religion is largely concerned with inflicting guilt upon people and then providing a path for people to deal with the very guilt that religion imposed on them to begin with.
Just look at a summary of orthodox teaching in Christianity. It goes something like this. Every one of us is sinful and therefore guilty of offending God. We are all guilty no matter what we might have done, for we are conceived and born in sin. Eve, mother of us all, sinned by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. We have all inherited this sin through the transmission of a kind of moral DNA. This is the doctrine of original sin. “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” We are born deserving to go to hell.
And, the teachings proceed, we surely will go to hell unless our sins are payed for. Alas, we cannot pay for them. So God sent his son Jesus to pay the price for all of our sins. Jesus was executed in order to pay for the sins of all humanity. However, we have to accept his death as payment for our sins. This is why we must accept Jesus as our savior. This is the ancient, but still widely taught, doctrine of atonement.
By the way, all the people who never heard the Christian teachings are going to hell because they, too, were born with original sin. The fact that they never got an opportunity to accept Jesus’ death as payment for their sins is simply their bad luck. (I am not making this up. Many of us in here were taught this.)
Now, someone completely unfamiliar with the tradition might think that that was the end of the matter. Accept the atonement of Jesus and all sin and all guilt are gone. Alas, it isn’t so. Accepting atonement only counts for the sins you and I have already committed. The sins we commit after we confess and accept forgiveness have not been paid for. Sins, you see, can not be paid for in advance. And, since we are sinful by nature, we are going to fall victim to temptation again and again, no matter how hard we try to be good.
And so begins a cycle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness followed by sin, guilt and forgiveness until we die. And the really important thing is to have all our sins forgiven just before we die so that we die in a state of grace.
The other amazing part of this process is that none of it works without guilt. Simply acknowledging our sins does no good. We can only be forgiven if we feel guilty, if we are truly sorry.
So orthodox Christianity has a kind of fixation with guilt. The entire practice of orthodoxy is a powerful cycle of sin, guilt, remorse, confession and forgiveness. Guilt is the power that keeps the cycle going.
Now, happily, many progressive Christian churches no longer dwell on heaping great doses of guilt on people. However, the theology I have been describing is being taught in hundreds of thousands of churches this morning. Guilt is being doled out by the truckload.
Our own religious movement was, in large part, born as a reaction against this. Our Unitarian and Universalist forebears could no longer swallow this theology. On the Universalist side, the teaching was that a truly loving God would not create humanity in order to send the vast majority of us to hell. The Universalists taught that eventually everyone would be saved. Now, coming out of a Protestant tradition that was much given to arguing fine points of theology, the Universalists argued passionately about whether we would all go straight to heaven or whether there was a kind of rehab period between death and heaven.
The Unitarians, for their part, emphasized the ability of people to be good. They believed that people, moved by God’s love and using their God given intelligence, could find truth and could come to lead lives of service and goodness. The Unitarians were much more likely to see human potential for good than human depravity.
This was all summed up in the famous saying by Thomas Starr King, who was ordained both a Unitarian and a Universalist. He said that the Universalists believed God was too good to damn people and that the Unitarians thought they were too good to be damned. That is a bit of an oversimplification, but not much.
So today we are about as guilt-free as religion gets. That is a good thing, mostly. In our religious education classes we teach children that they are precious. We teach respect, understanding, compassion and responsibility. In fact, the more conservative churches in our area do a good job of recruiting for us. I have heard more than once that a family with children first came to visit us when neighbor kids told their kids that they were going to hell.
And yet, sometimes I wonder if we haven’t gone a tad too far. I wonder if perhaps we haven’t overreacted to orthodox teachings.
Today I would have us reevaluate guilt. As I reflect on it, I have come to the conclusion that there is bad guilt and good guilt.
Bad guilt is easy enough to spot. I don’t think there is any good in feeling guilty for just being born human. I don’t think any good comes from telling people that they are inherently repulsive in the eyes of God.
Some of the guilt that is taught is literally deadly. Think of the enormous guilt and shame an adolescent feels if he or she comes to feel attraction to others of the same sex. For that matter, think of all the guilt inflicted on straight kids for having absolutely normal erotic thoughts. In the case of gay kids, though, the guilt and shame can lead to suicide. This is simply a kind of religious murder.
No one should ever feel guilty for how he or she was born. To feel guilty for something over which we have no control is debilitating. It crushes our self esteem, makes us timid, renders us frightened and paralyzed.
We have all felt some measure of guilt that is destructive.
And yet I would argue that there is good guilt, too.
Guilt is an essential part of the human experience. People in all cultures, in all historical periods, have experienced guilt. If you and I cannot feel guilt we are something less than fully human.
I believe that my capacity to feel guilt and your capacity to feel guilt is what makes us moral creatures. In Spanish one of the worst things you can say of a person is that he or she is a “sinvergüenzas’—literally someone without shame.
Making us feel guilty is how our conscience gets our attention. That feeling of guilt I get when I do something I shouldn’t is how is how my conscience says, “Hey, listen up. Pay attention here. I’m talking to you.”
That guilty feeling reminds me that I am responsible for what I do and for what I don’t do. If I do something to hurt someone, that feeling of guilt I have is actually a kind of compassion—a way of feeling some of the pain that I have caused. When my heart has become so hard that I cannot feel guilt, I have become insensitive to others. And when that happens I become capable of causing much more pain to others. Someone who cannot feel guilt is a sociopath.
If I drive by someone stranded by car trouble on a lonely road in the winter, I ought to feel guilty. If I say something insensitive that hurts someone’s feelings, I ought to feel guilty. If there is work to be done and I don’t do my share, guilt is just fine.
Of course, that feeling of guilt has to be the beginning, not the end. If I feel guilty for something I did or, just as likely, something I failed to do, the guilt is only good if it leads me to change my behavior.
Think of that poor young man who returned the stolen camera. He acted on his guilt. His guilt guided him to do the right thing. When he did act, that heavy burden was lifted. And yet, imagine how long he carried that burden. He could have saved himself so much grief had he acted on his guilt years sooner.
The only good guilt is the guilt we act upon. Guilt is useless as an emotion unless it leads to action. Good guilt not only motivates us to act, but it teaches us about how to live. If I feel guilty about things I failed to do for my dead parents, I can no longer set things right. If I simply dwell on that guilt, it can eat me alive. That kind of guilt is useless. However, that guilty feeling can also make me more sensitive and aware of people now. If it does that, my guilty feelings are good—for they help me the person I long to be.
Our task as religious people, as people who want to do what is right and to be faithful to our highest aspirations, is to listen to our guilty feelings. These feelings come into our lives with the potential to do us great harm or to be wise teachers. If we simply wallow in guilt it can eat away at our souls, making our lives a living hell of regret and shame. If we suppress these guilty feelings we render ourselves cold and insensitive.
We must choose a middle way. We must listen to guilt. Guilt is a wise mentor trying to teach us how to live. When we listen with an open heart our feelings of guilt can tell us when we have lost our way. They are the soul’s warning signs.
You and I don’t need to be free from guilt. You and I need to let guilt set us free. Guilt is not something to hold on to or to reject. Guilt is a voice to which we must listen.
May each of us learn to listen to the guilt that is the voice of our conscience. May we never let our guilt become a prison or a source of bitterness.
Let us listen to our guilt as we would listen to a wise teacher. May ours not be a religion that is free from guilt, but a religion in which guilt sets us free. May it be so. Amen.