Guilt Free?
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 13, 2011
This is one of those "fools rush in" sermons that I, well, rush into now and then. Trying in any way to unpack as loaded a subject as guilt can take you all kinds of places. So I'm going to try to get a toe-hold by sharing a couple of readings, which, I feel do a pretty good job of pointing out some rather conflicted sentiments on the whole matter. The first is by Wayne Dyer in a book he published some years ago called Your Erroneous Zones. The chapter title is "The Useless Emotions: Guilt and Worry." Here's some of what he writes: "Throughout life the two most futile emotions are guilt for what has been done and worry about what might be done. Guilt is the most useless of all erroneous zone behavior. It is by far the greatest waste of emotional energy (as it leaves you) feeling immobilized in the present over something that has already taken place and that no amount of guilt can change."
A counterpoint to Dyer is offered by a psychiatrist and author, Dr. Willard Gaylin in his book Feelings. His book has been sitting on my shelf for much of the time I've been in the ministry. I continue to get good mileage from it. Gaylin opens his chapter on guilt by going right at Dyer - without using his name. Here's some of what Dr. Gaylin has to say on the subject: "In one of the recent books supplying prescriptions for happiness, a chapter heading reads: 'The Useless Emotions - Guilt and Worry." ... The author has managed with this title to dismiss the basic props for individual survival and group responsibility... The failure to feel guilt is the basic flaw in the psychopath or antisocial person...Guilt is not only not a useless emotion, it is the emotion that shapes so much of our goodness and generosity. It signals us when we have transgressed from codes of behavior which we personally want to sustain. Feeling guilty informs us that we have failed our own ideals...Guilt is the guardian of our goodness."
As is frequently the case in point/counterpoint positions or postures, there is some truth to be found on each side; and while my sentiments lean more towards Dr. Gaylin, I'll see what truths we might tease out from these two as we go along here. But first, a story: Like the one I shared a couple of weeks ago on our Snow Day Sunday, this one goes back to my central Wisconsin days in the mid-1970s.
I had just moved to the town of Stevens Point to be the campus minister at the UW campus there. I got myself this neat little bachelor apartment, and decided the thing that would make it even neater would be a good stereo system. So I drove down to Madison (you've heard of Madison - it's been in the news lately) where I linked up with a couple of my more techno-savvy friends who helped me with my purchase. It was the first time in my life I'd ever spent any really great sum of money on something strictly for my own pleasure and enjoyment.
I got me a good set of these great big speakers, a big ol' receiver with an AM/FM radio, and a state of the art turntable. [Anybody remember turntables? You put these thin, black discs called albums on them and they played really cool music thru your nice big speakers.] I guess I paid between $400.00 and $500.00 for the whole works; which in the mid-70s was an even bigger chunk of change than it is now.
I felt pretty good about the whole thing until, when alone in my car, I made the two hour drive back to Stevens Point. From who knows where, I got this strange feeling that I'd done something vaguely wrong. All this nice, new stuff that I'd loaded into my car was giving me this completely unexpected message. Actually I do know where it came from.
You've heard me--those of you who were here last Sunday--talk about how hard my father had to struggle to raise his family. So all I could think of as I drove through the Wisconsin night was that I'd spent more money on all this fancy equipment than my father sometimes made in a month when I was a kid. How could I go throwing money around like I just did in such a self-indulgent way?
The feelings, of course were completely irrational. I was earning enough to allow for an occasional expenditure of that nature. I was only supporting myself at the time. I wasn't impoverishing myself or taking money away from any kind of family needs. But somewhere inside of me came this message: "You don't really deserve this; you're supposed to live within certain means that do not permit this kind of 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 about how I felt about myself at that moment as I drove along.
I'm glad to report that the tape did play in me for very long. Once I got everything set up and running and listened to a few...ah...albums the guilt soon went away. But it did have me going for a least a little while.
You may not be responsible for where your negative, or blaming, messages come from, or how you got them, but you are responsible for what you do with them and whether you continue to believe them or not. One I got myself straight on that score I was fine.
If Wayne Dyer had known of my little episode he might have used it in his book as a classic case of irrational or useless guilt. And he would have been on the mark. Without making a hard and fast equation out of it--and at the risk of some oversimplification--I would say that the lower one's level of self-respect and self-valuing the more prone one is to irrational or useless guilt. I know it's much easier said than done, but the best antidote for irrational guilt is a healthy degree of self-knowledge, self-understanding, and most important, self-responsibility. By self-responsibility I mean knowing who you are, and being able to recognize the effects of your deeds on others. Self-responsibility also means being able to distinguish between the deeds and actions and attitudes you have that may indeed be harmful to others or yourself, and take responsibility for them--and the ones that are not.
If, to stay with my story, I'd been supporting a family that was struggling financially, in the way my father had to do, and went out and blew a bunch of money on an extravagance, then I could have rightly been called on it. I would have had a good reason to feel guilty about what I did. Since that wasn't the case, then I was free to take my guilt-free pleasure in my purchase.
Okay, so I'll give Dyer his due. Now it's time to give Dr. Gaylin his due, and time for another story. In this case it's not mine but it took place during a pretty formative period of my life, a time I remember very well. It's about a woman named Katherine Power, who was a student at Brandeis 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. These were times, as just noted, that I remember well as Ms. Power and I are around the same age.
Her escalating involvement in this movement took her out to a fringe, however, to which very few of us back then went. In her case it went clear out to helping procure weapons to be used in a bank robbery in the Boston area - supposedly to get money for the cause. Ms. Power did not take place in the robbery itself; she was about a half a block away, driving a getaway car. In the course of the robbery, very tragically and senselessly though, a Boston police officer was shot and killed. While not directly involved in his killing, Ms. Porter was charged as an accomplice to the murder. The two men who actually did the killing were caught and jailed for life.
Ms. Power, however, worked out her own version of a witness protection program. She managed to become a fugitive from justice, got herself a new identity and lived a reconstituted life - which came to include a husband, a son, and a job out in Corvallis, Oregon. Twenty three years of her secret and reconstituted life went by before Ms. Power - whose son was 14 at the time - came forth and turned herself in, after making arrangements with an attorney to do so. She was given a 12 year prison sentence and served six before being paroled. Her case later became the basis for a Law and Order TV episode. Today, now in her early 60s, Kathy Power works for an outfit called Cambridge Cares About AIDS, an AIDS awareness and advocacy organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
So why did she come in after 23 years of freedom? Part of it had to do with her wanting to be reunited with her aging parents while they were still living. But a big part of it - according both to Ms. Power and her therapist - had to do with guilt. However skillful she'd been at hiding from the powers of law enforcement Ms. Power could not hide from herself, and from her knowledge of her role in a police officer losing his life just for doing his job. So intense was her guilt that it resulted in her experiencing a clinical depression. She eventually had to face the choices she'd made--choices made in the heat of a frenzied time and with less than a clear head - but choices for which she was responsible nonetheless. Her prison term was part of a reconciliation process for her as she acknowledged that responsibility. She even turned down an offer of an earlier parole than the one she finally accepted.
Of course, I realize there is a vast middle ground between momentary guilt feelings over purchasing a stereo and being an accomplice - unwitting or not - to murder. And most of the guilt we find ourselves dealing with is generally somewhere in that vast middle ground. If we look, then, at Dr. Gaylin's treatment of the subject we can get some guidance on how to sort out the useless from the useful, and necessary, types of guilt.
In his book Feelings, Gaylin treats a wide range of human emotions and feelings as survival mechanisms we human beings have developed over the course of human history. He has chapters on several of them, including one on guilt which I'm using today. Gaylin's bottom line of the subject is that "Guilt is the guardian of our goodness."
The origins of guilt - as Dr. Gaylin claims and with which I tend to agree---is that it's a human emotion or sensation which we human beings developed, as just noted, for the sake of our survival and for the continuance of human community. At some point in human evolution we developed a conscience; that is to say, some internal mechanism for both keeping ourselves in check and for feeling some responsibility for the safely and well being of others. Hand in hand with the evolution of conscience, came our human awareness of our ability and capacity to inflict hurt and even great harm to one another. Something in the developing human psyche recoiled in fear at such a tendency. We human beings - tragically enough - have not stopped inflicting harm on one another, but we can't quite accept it either; or we can only accept it up to a point.
To get Biblical for a minute or two here, recall the story in the Book of Genesis about the brothers Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel in a dispute. He then hears the voice of God asking him where Abel is, and calling on Cain to account for want he'd done. His response to God is a question, consisting of very well known words: "Am I my brother's keeper?" While there's no literal or historical basis for this story, it is still very useful and instructive 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 about what our relationships and responsibilities to one another are.
So we, as a human race - in response to this dawning awareness, and in fits and starts - devised laws and codes of behavior, both to protect ourselves from our baser selves as well as to elevate our better selves. When persons are found in violation of certain of these codes and laws they are pronounced "guilty" through whatever justice processes their community has devised for the establishing of guilt or innocence, and for the punishment of guilty deeds. 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 "the failure to feel guilt is the basic flaw in the psychopath."
The fascinating thing I find about these two learned gentlemen is that neither seems to want to give any ground to the other. They do offer, as noted, a helpful point/counterpoint when it comes to guilt, and then leave it to the rest of us to sort it out and find the middle ground.
For me, in the end, it really comes down to a pretty simple bit of self-inventory and a pretty simple question--even if the answers do get a little complicated at times. It's a question of: What is it that I can and should rightfully regret when it comes to how I've treated others, or how my acts and words have had a harmful or hurtful effect on others, and for which I bear responsibility? I can come up with a pretty good personal list with respect to all that. I can come up with a reality based regret list or guilt list. But anything that's not on that list, and which I still may be somehow feeling guilty about, is probably useless and irrational.
One piece I haven't touched on yet when it comes to guilt is religiously manipulated guilt. I'm saving this one for next Sunday because it is a sermon topic unto itself, a sermon which I've titled "The Meaning of Atonement for Religious Liberals." I hope you can be here next Sunday to hear what I have to say (and I hope you feel guilty if you don't show up!). If you do feel guilt about that, then you still haven't shaken off useless guilt!
I will give a quick sneak preview: One often repeated remark I hear from people who are attracted to Unitarian Universalism is that "I love it here because you don't have all that guilt." This is most often said by people who grew up in a religious environment where they were made to practically feel 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 also where the doctrine of original sin collapses under the weight of its own logic, or illogic, by the way. If you are in fact born into a predetermined state of sin then how could you possibly be held responsible for it or have anything to feel guilty about?
This was the point made by one of our Universalist ancestors, Rev. Hosea Ballou, in an essay he wrote a couple of hundred years ago called A Treatise on Atonement. An act of atonement, in its most literal sense, is something you feel you need to do to make up for something you regret doing and are feeling guilty about. It does have certain religious implications which we will take a closer look at it next Sunday.
I'll quickly add this for now. I happen to believe that religion has a very ennobling role to play in human life. I wouldn't be doing what I've been doing for some forty years if I didn't feel that way. But it is 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 personal behaviors; or by adhering to certain beliefs.
I'll move to a close for today by making one more pass at our two guilt spokespersons for this morning. Dr. Gaylin is right when he notes that there is a kind of "good guilt" that is necessary for the survival and nurture of the human community, and the human race, itself. "There is no such thing as individual survival" he notes, going on to say that we human beings will either make it or not make it as a human community or as a human family. 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 recognized as useless--a point to Dr. Dyer on that one.
But beyond self-fulfillment and the affirmation of our individual selves is our participation in the larger life of this larger human family of which we're each and all a part. And the standards we set for ourselves--realistic and necessary standards--should be ones that assure that our contributions to this larger community of human beings are positive and life enhancing ones. These are the kind of standards to which we should indeed hold ourselves accountable; and be aware of when we fall short of them. Recall Gaylin once more: "Feeling guilty informs us of when we have failed in our own ideals."
To conclude: 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 burdened by un-needed guilt. And 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, in some measure, for the well-being of others. Keeping all that in balance is not always easy, but it is one of the essential tasks of being human. I feel that finding that balance between self-fulfillment and a wider sense of responsibility beyond the nurture of one's ego, is one of the things it means to "come down where one ought to be."
Stephen Edington
March 13, 2011
