Church of the Holy City

Guilt and Feeling Guilty

Guilt and Feeling Guilty
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
September 6, 2009

Isaiah 43:15-25 Matthew 11:20-30

The past few Sundays I’ve been talking about unhealthy states of mind, like worrying and stress. In that light, I thought I’d talk about guilt today. That seems like a good candidate for unhealthy states of mind.
There are two ways to look at guilt. There is guilt, and there is feeling guilty. One can be healthy and the other is very unhealthy. By guilt, I mean the honest admission that one has done something wrong, perhaps regret over it, and the commitment to avoid doing that again. That is healthy. By feeling guilty, I mean a cloud that descends on one’s consciousness of negative feeling. It’s a strange feeling that one is bad, unclean, wrong somehow but not knowing just how, and the feeling that one should do something one wants to do but doesn’t do. I’m not too good at describing feeling guilty because I don’t feel it all that often. Swedenborg doesn’t have much to say about guilt. I looked up guilt in the Concordance and there is less than a page on guilt.
I think a lot of guilt comes from bad religion. I’m going to start by my impressions of a Catholic church I went into last year. I don’t mean to criticize Catholicism, because there is much I admire about it. I mean to be understood about only my personal impression of this church. The story I’m telling occurred when I was in the States at a peer supervision seminar. We took a break and were walking through La Porte, Indiana on a beautiful spring morning. We passed a Catholic church on the way, and it had its doors open, as they often do. One of our ministers had been a Catholic priest, and we walked into the church to meditate. I was immediately struck by a huge, larger than life sculpture on the wall behind the altar of Jesus hanging on the cross. I found this sculpture very disturbing, and not conducive to peaceful meditation on my part at all. I got up and walked around the church. All around the inside walls were the stations of the cross. These are scenes of Jesus suffering and crucifixion. One is a scene of Him being tortured by the Romans, another is Him carrying the cross, another is when He fell carrying the cross, and the stations of the cross end, I believe, with the tomb. The message, clearly, was Christ’s suffering. Another minister I know told me about the stations of the cross. He, too, was a former Catholic. He said that as a boy, he was told that all those stations of the cross in which some aspect of Christ’s suffering were depicted were each and every one because of the sins that this boy had committed. He said that he found it hard to understand how what he did today could have made something happen 2,000 years ago. He also said it made him feel guilty. The larger than life crucifix and the stations of the cross seem to me to inspire that unhealthy kind of guilt. The overriding message was Christ’s suffering. Seeing Christ suffer as a result of my sins would give me a diffused kind of guilt that I would carry around with me wherever I went, no matter what I did.
In my Swedenborgian faith, I was taught to worship the risen Christ. The whole purpose of the incarnation was for Christ to come to the human race who had lost their way. And the power of the risen Christ was that now God in His Divine Humanity could reach us as a Human in our own humanity.
A diffused, general guilt for something way back in the past clouds over the real, useful kind of guilt we need to recognize. I need to own up to my actual wrongs, and make a commitment to avoid them in the future. And even in this, I need to be realistic as to what I want to pay attention to. For instance, I don’t feel guilty when I eat a chocolate bar, or drink a milk shake, or even when I eat a bacon double cheese burger. Though, perhaps, maybe I should feel some kind of guilt over that bacon double cheese burger. But if I let my lower nature motivate me, it may be a good idea to exercise some restraint. It may be time to pray, and to get a handle on my behaviors.
Sometimes we can become conscience hounds. We become conscience hounds especially if we tend toward being a perfectionist. Then, we can imagine that we are the worst people who have ever lived. There is a good story I heard a rabbi tell about conscience hounds which I would like to share with you.
A rabbi moved to a farming province in central Russia. From a high hill, he could look over the whole landscape and note the different farms of the people in his synagogue. He was puzzled, however, by one piece of land that didn’t seem to have any crops growing on it. All the land around it had fertile soil, and the rabbi couldn’t understand why this one plot of land wouldn’t produce crops. He decided that he would pay the farmer a visit. He went to the farm, and found the farmer on his hands and knees. He looked down and saw that the farmer was picking up each seed and cleaning it off and placing it back in the ground. He would go up and down the whole plot of land, pulling each seed out of the ground and cleaning it off, and putting it back. He was so obsessed that he didn’t sleep well. The rabbi grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “Get up! You need sleep! Come, let’s go into the house and get you to bed.” But the farmer said, “No, I have all these rows of seed to plant. I can’t take time off to sleep.” The rabbi insisted, and finally got the farmer into bed. He left him to sleep. The rabbi took a few steps, then turned around and shook the farmer and said, “Are you asleep yet?” The farmer said, “No.” The rabbi then turned to leave, took some more steps, and turned around and shook the farmer and said, “Are you asleep yet?” “No,” said the farmer. He did it again, shaking the farmer and asking him if he were asleep yet. I don’t know how many times the rabbi did this, but eventually he did leave. Exhausted, the farmer quickly fell asleep. He awoke much later, worried about his crops. He went to the door and looked out, and there in his field were little sprouts coming up through the soil.
This story illustrates how unhealthy we can be about our guilt. We can study our behavior under a microscope and fill our minds with what we should do and what we shouldn’t have done. We can over examine ourselves to the extent that we become paralyzed with guilt. Swedenborg tells us that the hells love to torment us by bringing up memories of bad things we have done in the past. Swedenborg writes, “When a man is tempted . . . evil spirits call up only his evil deeds that he has done . . .and accuse and condemn him” (AC 751). To us, it feels like we are the ones accusing ourselves, but, in fact it is the influence of the hells that bring up those deeds from our past, along with the accusation that we are no good and guilty.
We need to be reasonable when we evaluate our deeds. We need to accept our frailties with grace, and recognize that we are only humans, and we will make mistakes. We also need to recognize the goodness of heart we also have in us from God. Swedenborg tells us that if our hearts are good, then the evils we commit don’t condemn because they reside on our outer personality, not our inner intentions.
Healthy guilt is open admission that we may have been wrong. We accept this; we don’t condemn ourselves for it; make amends, and get on with our lives. Imagine we are walking down a residential block, looking for a friends house, and the house numbers are getting higher when we want them to get lower. What do we do? Do we feel guilty and continue walking in the same direction? No, we recognize that we are walking in the wrong direction, turn around and go visit our friends. This is what I mean by healthy guilt.
Feeling vaguely bad accomplishes nothing. And even worse than that, it can get in the way of the healthy guilt that will bring about self-improvement. We are all walking up the mountainside. We are all shedding unhealthy attitudes and mindsets and taking on more healthy and loving personalities. Healthy guilt in one step in this process. We can even feel good about guilt when it is healthy self-improvement. Perhaps the word I want to use isn’t even guilt at all. Perhaps appraisal would be a better word choice. The main point I want to make today, is that there is a healthy way to grow, and an unhealthy way to feel bad about ourselves. We can use whatever words we want to for this. I have chosen the pairing of guilt and feeling guilty and I’m not going to feel guilty for my choice of language.