Good Guilt?

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, January 9, 1994

It was on a Monday morning some six weeks ago that I was using my day off to put the house in some order and I switched on the television for a little diversion. I got diverted so much that the housework never got done. One of the Boston stations was carrying live the pre-sentencing hearing of Mr. James Porter, the former Roman Catholic priest who has now been sentenced and jailed for years of sexually abusing young boys--for the most part--while serving parishes in several working class towns in the Boston area some 20-30 years ago. Most of you are familiar--at least through media accounts--of James Porter's, and the Catholic Church's, role in this tragic and devastating episode and I'm not out to reiterate all of it now. I want to use just one piece of the Porter case as a way of moving into this larger subject of guilt.

In the hearing some of the people who as children had been abused and molested by, then, Father Porter were being given an opportunity to testify as to the lasting effects of the abuse had had on their lives. They were mostly men, with a few women, now in their 30s and 40s, each taking no more than 4 or 5 minutes to talk about how not only the violation of their young bodies, but how the violation of trust in an institution they had been taught to revere above all others, wrecked havoc with their childhood, teenage, and adult lives. I generally take a very dim view having the most tortured parts of a person's life made into fodder for the airwaves, and an even dimmer view of TV talk show hosts who have built multi-million dollar careers for themselves by enticing others to put their dysfunctionalities on parade. But this hearing was being conducted in such a way that it did not cater at all to sensationalism. I give a lot of credit to the judge for that who maintained the aura of decorum and respect that are warranted in a court of law, and who did not try to play Geraldo.

It was an incredibly painful thing to watch. Some 15-20 people must have spoken and for many of them it was a real struggle to do so. It was something they also seemed to need to do in order to get at least some measure of closure for themselves over their abuse, and gain at least some measure of healing. And the thing that struck me the hardest, and practically had me in tears, was the recurring references to feelings of guilt; not Mr. Porter's guilt, which was pretty obvious, but the recollections by those who were abused of feelings of guilt on their part. Repeatedly, one after another said that the thing that kept them silent for so many years was their own feelings of guilt and shame. This is a man of God, so their young reasoning went, so if something wrong is going on here I must be the one who is doing it or causing it: I am bad, I am guilty, I must hide my shame. Even as adults, and even with the ability to know intellectually that they were not to blame, those deep seated feelings of guilt, along with the rage and anger, would not go away. It was as cruel a vicious cycle as one could get caught up in. The abuse brought on feelings of low self-esteem and low self-respect, and that low self-esteem and low self-respect in turn perpetuated the self-blaming and self-inflicted guilt right on into adulthood. For these men, and some women, to come forward and tell their stories and, in so doing, to take some measure of control over their lives was at least a beginning step in breaking that cycle.

(Lest I come off as self-righteously throwing stones at Catholics, I must quickly add that a somewhat parallel, but less publicized, episode surfaced within our own denominational family about five or six years ago. This one involved adult women rather than young boys. A minister of one of our very large West Coast UU churches had for years been taking sexual advantage of a large number of women--about 15-20 eventually came forward--who had been coming to him for counseling. One reason for their silence was the same as that in the Porter case: This is a very well respected UU minister; if something is wrong here I must be the one causing it; he is so good that I must be the guilty one. I will endure my guilt and shame in silence. Except that a few chose not to be silent any more, and all the stories came out. I don't know what the legal outcome of all of that was; for obvious reasons the man has been dismissed from the UU ministry.)

I also do not know what kinds of mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual demons Mr. Porter and my former colleague in the UU ministry wrestled, and continue to wrestle with. They have some very reality-based guilt to deal with in whatever ways they can, and with whatever ways may be available to them. I can only hope that they are getting such help. I know this is a pretty heavy duty note to open up a sermon on, but bear with me now for one more episode which has nothing to do with sex abuse, priests, or UU ministers. Now that I have introduced the term "reality- based guilt" let me offer an example of what I mean by that. I'll lighten up a little now; instead of sex abuse, I'll talk about.... murder.

I built a section of a sermon last fall around the Katherine Power case, and I'm going to revisit it briefly today. Power was a student at Brandeis University in the late 60s and early 70s. She was young and impressionable and quickly got caught up in the near apocalyptic intensity of the anti-war movement. Her escalating involvement in anti-war activities led to her becoming involved, in an indirect way, in the murder of a Boston police officer which took place in the course of a bank robbery. Power had helped procure the weapons used in the robbery and drove a back-up getaway car. She was not at the scene of the crime itself. Nevertheless she faced charges as an accomplice to murder, became a fugitive from justice, and lived a life-in-hiding under an assumed identity in Corvallis, Oregon until turning herself in just last September. Under an arrangement made prior to her surfacing, she is now serving a prison term. By all indications she was pretty safe and secure in her reconstituted life in Oregon, complete with a stable marriage and a 14 year old son. Why did she come in, and willingly go to jail? Part of it, to be sure, was due to a desire to be reunited with her parents, who were getting on in years. But a big part of it--according to Ms. Power and her therapist--had to do with guilt. However skillful she'd been at hiding from the powers of law enforcement, she couldn't hide from herself and her knowledge of her role in another person's losing his life just for doing his job. Like the people who came forth at the Porter trial, Katherine also had been living a life of silence surrounded by guilt and shame. So intense was this guilt that it resulted in her suffering a clinical depression. Unlike the guilt of those who came forth at the Porter trial, however, Katherine's was brought on because of some choices that she purposefully made. Choices, to be sure, that were made in the heat of a frenzied time and with something other than a clear head, but choices for which she was and is responsible nonetheless. For the sake of her own healing and reconciliation she has acknowledged that responsibility, and--as noted--is now serving a prison term.

I offer the Porter and Power cases as two very visible and stark examples of the dual nature of guilt. Guilt can inflict a lot of suffering, pain, or--at a lesser level--needless self-recrimination for the most innocent of persons; but it can also call to accountability those who do in fact need to be held accountable for their misdeeds. While the differences are pretty stark and explicit in the examples given, the line between needless or unjustly imposed guilt on the one hand, and what I'm calling reality-based guilt on the other can get rather thin and blurred at times. How that line gets drawn, how we can recognize it, and how we figure out which side of it we are one are among the things I shall attempt to deal with for the remainder of this sermon.

The two readings I used earlier provide a point/counterpoint approach to the subject of guilt. Wayne Dyer is a therapist, and at the time of his book's publication, a professor of psychology. His book Your Erroneous Zones gave him his day in the sun during the salad days of the human potential movement during the late 70s and early 80s. Willard Gaylin is a M.D. and a psychiatrist and a founder of The Hastings Center, a now quite prominent and well-respected medical ethics think tank. According to Dr. Dyer, guilt is the most useless of human emotions or feelings that there is and well worth getting rid of (how we actually do that he never really says). Dr. Gaylin, on the other hand, in his book Feelings, regards guilt as a human emotion or feeling that is absolutely essential for the survival of the human race. As he puts it, "guilt is a guardian of our goodness." While I regard Gaylin's treatment of the subject as the more thoughtful and serious one, the reasoning by both of these gentlemen is, with all due respect, quite flawed. They each remind me of the well known fable of the blind men and the elephant. They describe what they are touching well enough, but they don't see--or they don't acknowledge--the complexities of the entire phenomenon. I'll be playing off of these two as we go along.

Why do we have guilt to begin with? Here I agree with Gaylin. Its a mechanism for human survival, or for the continuance of human community. I don't know if animals have the capacity to feel guilt and shame, or have a conscience, or not. Its not a debate I care to enter into this morning. But we human beings do. At some point in human evolution we developed a conscience, i.e. some internal mechanism for both keeping ourselves i check and for feeling some sense of responsibility for others. Hand in hand with this evolution of conscience, I would surmise, (and a number of anthropologists would bear me out on this) that somewhere in the process of human evolution we also became aware of our human ability and capacity to inflict great harm on one another. Something in the human psyche recoiled in fear at such a tendency. We didn't stop inflicting harm, but we couldn't quite accept it either; or could only accept it up to a point.

Recall the Old Testament story of the brothers Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel in a dispute and then he hears the voice of God calling him to account for what he has done. His response is "Am I my brother's keeper?" I read that as a mythological account of that very likely prolonged period in human evolution when we human beings realized what we are capable of doing to one another, and began asking questions--albeit in a very primitive mode--about who we are and what our relationships and responsibilities to one another are. Its a question we are forced to continue asking, by the way, especially after certain horrifying events: After a holocaust, after a war, after or during attempts at genocide.

So we, as a human race, devised laws and codes of behavior to protect ourselves from our baser selves; and when people were, and are, found in violation those laws or codes they were, and are, pronounced "guilty" by the rest of the community, through whatever processes that community has devised for establishing guilt or innocence. Gaylin is quite right, therefore, in maintaining that there is a rational basis for guilt that serves human good, just as he is right when he says that "the failure to feel guilt is the basic flaw in the psychopath." His blind spot, however, is that he seems to assume--at least on the basis of this particular essay of his--that all guilt is rational. Dr. Gaylin probably doesn't really think that since he's a very intelligent and humane individual, but nowhere in this essay does Gaylin acknowledge that there is an irrational, if not destructive, dimension to guilt itself.

Dr. Dyer, on the other hand, sees nothing but irrationality when it comes to guilt. For him guilt is a self-inflicted, or family inflicted, or culturally inflicted, or religiously inflicted mechanism that is keeping you from your own self-fulfillment and self-affirmation; and keeping you fixated on a past you cannot change. You have internalized all the negative messages you've ever gotten about yourself--consciously or not; and you've internalized all the rules you've been told you "should" live by--consciously or not; and you've continued to blame yourself for all kinds of events in the past that you can't change at all; and it all adds up to one big wad of guilt that keeps you from realizing you true and essential humanity. That, basically, is the gospel according to Wayne Dyer and he's right, too! He's right, that is, in describing the particular piece of the elephant that he's got his hands on. The "good guilt" that Gaylin extols, can be very easily manipulated and corrupted.

Religion is especially good at such manipulation. As I said in my newsletter notes on this sermon, one oft repeated remark I hear from people who are attracted to Unitarian Universalism is that "you people don't seem to have all that guilt". This is often noted by people who grew up in a religious environment where they practically felt guilty for their very existence. That, in fact, is what the doctrine of original sin teaches; that you are guilty just for showing up! This is where the doctrine of original sin also collapses under the weight of its own illogic, by the way. If you are, in fact, born into an irredeemable state of sin then you can't possibly be held responsible for that, and therefore have nothing to feel guilty about at all. (I didn't come up with that on my own, incidentally. It was also pointed out by Rev. Hosea Ballou, one of the founders of American Universalism, nearly 200 years ago in an essay called A Treatise on Atonement.) I happen to believe that religion has a very ennobling role to play in human life. I wouldn't be doing what I am doing if I didn't feel that way. But its a very shallow and manipulative form of religion--of whatever variety--that relies on guilt to keep its followers loyal; a guilt that says one is inadequate in the eyes of God if he or she does not specifically adhere to the letter of the law when it comes to certain rules, practices, and behaviors.

But religion is hardly the only, or even the main, culprit when it comes to irrational or neurotic guilt. It is in that mysterious and hard-to-chart realm of our own sense of self-worth and dignity, and in the ways in which we define and regard ourselves, that guilt can emerge and ensnare us in some pretty surprising ways. I've got a story on this that I have to reach back close to 20 years for. I remember it because it was the first time I ever spent any sizeable amount of money strictly for my own pleasure. I had just relocated to a town in central Wisconsin. I was single and furnishing a new apartment which wasn't much more than a couch, a mattress on the floor, and a few bookshelves. I decided I wanted a good stereo instead of the little piddlywink thing I had. So I went down to Madison and got together with a few friends who knew how to shop for such things and got me a pretty good set--speakers, turntable, receiver, AM/FM radio. CDs, and even cassette players, were still things of the future then. I believe I paid close to $400.00 for the whole works, which for me was a terribly extravagant amount of money at the time. And I drove from Madison to my new home in Stevens Point with all this stuff in my car feeling like I had done something wrong. All I could think was that I'd spent more money on a stereo that my father sometimes made in a month when I was a kid. How could I throw money around like that in such a self-indulgent way? The feelings, of course, were completely irrational. I was earning enough to permit at least an occasional expenditure of that nature. I was hardly impoverishing myself or taking something away from anyone else. But somewhere inside of me came a message that said "You don't really deserve this, and besides, you're supposed to be living within certain means that does not permit this kind of self-indulgence." It was an old tape, but it still played. The guilt--and this is the essential point--had nothing to do with what I'd done; instead, it had everything to do with how I felt about myself. Fortunately for me, the tape didn't play for very long. Once I got everything set up and running and listened to a few records I was able to set the guilt aside. But it really had me going for awhile.

Well, that's a pretty lightweight story from a long time back now, but it gets at what I believe to be a basic truth about guilt that I want to look at for the next few minutes as I move to a close. Our capacity for feeling guilt, both the needlessly, and at times destructively, burdensome type, and the healthy or reality based kind, is directly tied to how we do, or do not, value ourselves. Without making a hard and fast equation out of it, I would say that the lower the level of one's self-respect and self-valuing is--the lower the opinion one has of oneself--the more prone that person is to the kind of irrational guilt that Dyer describes. That low level of self-valuation may come from, and may be imposed by, any number of external sources: Family, religion, the culture at large. In my conversations with gay and lesbian persons, for example, the biggest struggle some of them tell me they have is in trying to throw off that larger cultural message that says there is something wrong with you just because of who you are. As long as I believe that--they come to realize--then I'm not going to respect myself, and I'll keep going around feeling guilty about my very existence.

Well, you may not be responsible for where those negative messages come from, or how you got them but, like it or not, you are responsible for what you do with them, and with whether you continue to believe them or not. That was what the people who came forward at the Porter trial were doing. They were saying, I'm not responsible for the way I was treated when I was 10 years old, and I'm not going to carry that guilt and shame around any more. But I am responsible for who I am now, and if I'm going to live a life a self-respect then I have to get this irrational blame off my shoulders and put it where it belongs. Obviously not all forms of irrational guilt are as destructive and devastating as that felt by survivors of abuse--sexual or otherwise. Irrational guilt can arise over something as comparatively trivial as my momentarily feeling bad about purchasing an expensive (if indeed it was) stereo set. But the common denominator all along that spectrum is a low level of self-valuing. A problem I had with Dyer's writings on guilt is that his solution to getting rid of it boils down to, "well, just stop feeling that way." That has about as much viability as former First Lady Nancy Reagan's three word solution to America's drug problem: "Just say no." I could offer a similarly simple means getting rid of irrational guilt by saying that the three word solution to it is to "Just say yes" to who you are. And I would be right. But, in a more honest vein, I would also have to say getting to that "yes" can be a long, winding, and hard-traveling road for many people. Its a road that has to be traveled nonetheless if one is to live with a basic stance of self-affirmation.

There is a flip side to irrational guilt that I'll turn to now in concluding. There are times when an acknowledgment of guilt is necessary for one's self-respect. Go back to my opening examples once again. For James Porter's victims, renouncing their guilt was necessary for recovering their self-respect. For Katherine Power, the recovery of her self-respect necessitated an acknowledgment of guilt. There is, after all, nothing irrational about feeling guilty over being an accomplice to murder. Ms. Power knew that she had violated certain standards of behavior and attitudes she held for herself--violated them in a way that resulted in another person's losing his life. One necessary ingredient for having self-respect and self-esteem, I would maintain, is having certain standards for oneself. I know this is tricky, because a lot of unnecessary guilt gets generated when people's expectations of themselves are set unrealistically high. Conceding that point, I would still hold that the maintaining of self-respect and self-esteem includes the ability to look at oneself when the occasion warrants it and say "This is not the way I want to be acting, behaving, thinking or feeling. There are certain attitudes and behaviors that are not consistent with the kind of person I want to be; and I'll call myself on them--and welcome others calling me on them--when they arise." If there is such a thing as "good guilt", then that is what it is.

Dr. Gaylin is right when he notes that this "good guilt", as I'm calling it, is necessary for the survival of human community. "There is no such thing as individual survival" he notes, going on to say that we human beings will make it or not make it as a human community. To be sure, there is a big place in life for individual self-fulfillment, and whatever irrational guilt gets in the way of that fulfillment needs to be dealt with accordingly. But beyond the fulfillment and affirmation of our individual selves is our necessary participation in that larger human community. And the standards we set for ourselves as human beings--realistic and necessary standards--should be ones that make our contributions to that larger community positive and life enhancing ones. These are the kinds of standards to which we should indeed hold ourselves accountable.

We've each been given a life to live. A life that needs care and feeding and nurture; a life that needs respect and affirmation; a life that should not be needlessly burdened with irrational guilt. It is also a life that needs to be called to responsibility; a life that reaches beyond the self to validate the worth, dignity, and self-respect of others; a life that is accountable for the well-being of other lives. Keeping all that in balance is not always easy, but it is one of the essential tasks of being human.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

Good Guilt?