"Guilt-free Living”
by Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
October 7, 2007

            In a Doonesbury cartoon I saw many years ago, Gary Trudeau depicts Scottie, chaplain of the Little Church of Walden, talking with two prospective church members, a man and a woman.

            “So what would you like to know about Little Church of Walden, folks?” Scottie asks. “Don't hold back - I know how difficult it can be to choose a church,"

            “Well, what's your basic approach here, Reverend? Is it traditional gospel?” the man asks.

            "In a way,” Scottie says. “I like to describe it as 12-step Christianity ... Basically, I believe that we're all recovering sinners. My ministry is about overcoming denial, it's about recommitment, about redemption. It's all in the brochure there.”

            “Wait a minute,” the woman says. “Sinners? Redemption? Doesn't all that imply ... guilt?”

            “Well, yes, I do rely on the occasional disincentive to keep the flock from going astray,” Scottie. “Guilt's part of that!"

            “I dunno,” the man says. “There's so much negativity in the world as it is."

            “That's right,” the woman says. “We're looking for a church that's supportive, a place where we can feel good about ourselves. I'm not sure the guilt thing works for us."

            “On the other hand,” the man says, “you DO offer racquetball."

            The woman says, “So did the Unitarians, honey. Let's shop around some more.”

            I think that couple might feel at home here at Saltwater Church, even though we don’t have racquetball. As minister of this church, I don’t talk very often about guilt. I’ve even thought of putting an ad in the local paper: “Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church, 95-percent guilt free.”

            There are a few reasons I don’t talk about guilt very much.

            Historically, Unitarian Universalism has been a religious tradition that has tended to emphasize human capability rather than human frailty, our possibility for growth rather than our potential for pitfalls. “We believe in the growing nobility of man,” William Channing Gannett wrote optimistically, though sexist-ly, in 1887.

            There is also the fact that so many of you have come from religious traditions in which you had so much guilt shoved down your throats at an early age, that you’ve already had enough guilt for a lifetime.

            It has also been said that the purpose of a church is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but even when it comes to things like encouraging you to be generous with this religious community with your time, treasure and talent, or to work to make this world more loving and just, I’ve never thought guilt was a very good motivator.

            In fact, more often than not, as minister of this church, instead of trying to make all of you feel more guilty about things, I’ve tried to help you feel less guilty. You see, one of the things that I’ve noticed about many of you in this congregation is this: Many of you have expectations and standards for ourselves that are… How can I say this nicely? Many of you have expectations and standards for yourselves that are totally and completely nuts! You expect yourselves to be supermen and superwoman capable of extraordinary feats on a regular basis, and you if you fail to live up to these superhuman expectations, you feel guilty. Even when something is truly and completely out of your control, as any outside observer would certainly tell you, you find a way to blame yourself for it.

            I think I may understand this. Most of us, I think, would rather feel guilty than helpless. If the reason for misfortune is our own failing rather than the sometimes random nature of life, then misfortune can be controlled, at least in the future, and if guilt is the price to be paid for the illusion of complete control over our lives, many of us are willing to pay this price.

            A story told by the rabbi Lawrence Kushner illustrates this well. .

“Some years ago,” Kushner says, “I was called on to officiate at two funerals of elderly women in my congregation during the same week in January. I set out to visit both families one afternoon to offer my condolences. At the first home, the eldest son of the deceased woman said to me, ‘I feel it’s my fault that Momma died. I should have insisted on her going to Florida, get her out of this miserable cold weather where you can’t even walk outside. If I had done that, she would still be alive today.’ I tried to console him, [Kushner says] and then made my way to the second family’s home, where the eldest son said to me, ‘I feel it’s my fault that Mother died. If only I hadn’t insisted on her going to Florida. That long plane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was too much for her.’”

More often than not, as minister of this church, I have tried to encourage all of us to have more realistic expectations of ourselves, of our degree of control, and when we do act less than perfectly, to be more compassionate and accepting regarding our own imperfections as well as those of others.

In general, I think many of us live too much inappropriate guilt, which robs of our ability to live our lives as well as we might otherwise. This is why I like so much those lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves…”

On the other hand, even if we were to rid our selves of any guilty feelings we have about things we probably shouldn’t feel guilty about, even if we were to rid ourselves of any guilty feelings that result from the totally unrealistic expectations many of have about ourselves, of ourselves, most of us would very likely still feel guilty about something or other every once in a while.

            Why?

            We are human beings. We are not intrinsically bad, but we are imperfect, and we sometimes make mistakes, and guilt is our natural response when we have done something that we really shouldn’t have done or when we haven’t done something that we really should have done. Sometimes we feel guilty about how we have acted regarding our own life, because we have failed to do with our own lives all that we know we can do. More often, I think, we feel guilty because our actions or inactions have hurt others.

            Of course, there are some people who suggest that we human beings really don’t feel guilty when we do bad things. We just feel bad when we get caught doing bad things.        Sometimes I know this is true. I know when my wife catches me sneaking into the refrigerator late at night and eating the last piece of cheesecake, even though I had a big piece after dinner with extra raspberry sauce, I don’t feel bad at all about eating the cheesecake. I feel bad about getting caught.

            But sometimes this isn’t true.

            In literature, there are many stories about people who have gotten away with something and have been haunted by their own guilt. For example, Fydor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment and Edgar Allen Poe’s short-story The Tell-Tale Heart both deal with men who have gotten away with murder, but then are haunted by their conscience by what they have done, and as our video clip showed this morning, even America’s favorite bad boy Bart Simpson sometimes feels guilty for what he has done.

            In real life, there is the story of Kathleen Power. Power was a student at Brandeis University in the late 1960s and became increasingly radicalized about the Vietnam War. She saw the war as a great evil and wanted to express her moral outrage, especially after President Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia.

            During her senior year, Power dropped out a college and joined a group of other  young people. This group planned to rob the State Street Bank and Trust Company of Boston “to liberate funds from a collaborationist establishment.” Power’s job was to drive the getaway car. During the robbery, while Power waited in the getaway car, a Boston policeman was shot and killed by one of the other group members, leaving behind a wife and nine children. While Power didn’t shoot the man herself, according to the law, she was also guilty of his killing.

            However, Power got away, and for 23 years she lived as a fugitive, despite being on the FBIs most wanted list for many of those years. She cut off all contact with her family, changed her name, and moved many times. She eventually married, settled in Oregon, and raised a son. She became co-owner of a restaurant in Eugene.

            To the minds of many people, she had gotten away with murder. However, she too was haunted by her conscience. She felt very badly about the death of the policeman and felt guilty about her part in the crime. She gave a great deal of her income away to charity, but even this did not assuage her guilty conscience. Finally, in September 1993, she turned herself in, waived her right to a trial, pled guilty to manslaughter, was sentenced to 8-12 years in prison, and served six years of that sentence.

            After reading about her story, I’ve wondered to myself, what would I have done in her situation? Would I have been able to live with the guilt? Would I have turned myself in?

            What are we as Unitarian Universalists supposed to do when we really do something wrong and feel guilty about it?

            I have sometimes struggled to know what to do about my own guilty feelings about things I have and have not done in this life. I have also wondered what to say when one of you has come to me about something you have done that you felt terribly guilty about.

            There was an article recently in the Seattle Times about the popularity of online confessionals. On IveScrewedUp.com, you can type in a description of your sins, along with your age and hometown. The Universal Life Church has an “Absolution of Sins Application Form.” Roman Catholics can go to absolution-online.com. At this website, you can fill your shopping cart with your choices of sins, and the site then calculates an appropriate penance, for example 117 Hail Marys and 73 Our Fathers. This website, by the way, is not endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church.

            However, I don’t think online confessionals are the answer.

            And unlike Jews, we Unitarian Universalists don’t observe Yom Kippur. Unlike Roman Catholics, we don’t have a sacrament of reconciliation, as it’s called today, and as your minister, I don’t believe I have the ability to absolve your past or future sins (though the finance committee has more than once recommended that we might reinstitute the practice of selling indulgences.) Unlike many Protestant Christians, most of us don’t believe that all we need to do is confess our sins to Jesus and we will be mysteriously forgiven, although such a belief is very emotionally appealing, I admit.

            I have spent time studying these traditions, though,  especially about what each says about guilt and atonement, and I believe we can learn from them. I’ve also spent some time studying 12-step traditions such as Alchoholics Anonymous because, these too deal a lot with wrongdoing and redemption. I’ve also reflected a lot on my own experience. So this morning, I want to suggest some steps that we might take if there is something in our lives that we have done, feel guilty about, and want to be free of this guilt.

What are these steps?

            A first step is to clearly acknowledge the wrong to ourselves. Too often, I suspect we’re wishy washy regarding this, or at least I know I am. When I’ve done something wrong, I’ll say to myself, “I feel really bad about this” or “I wish this would have happened differently,” or even “Mistakes were made.” I’ll often rationalize what I’ve done, saying I was tired, or stressed, or didn’t have enough time, but at least for myself, I know that when dealing with my own guilt, it’s important for me to say to myself, “I did this, and this was wrong.”

            Some people say it’s also necessary to make a confession to somebody else. For example, in the Roman Catholic tradition, one must confess to a priest. In the 12-step traditions, the fifth step is “to admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

            Why would it be necessary to make a confession to somebody else? Some people say that until you’ve admitted a wrong doing to another person, you really haven’t admitted it to yourself. It’s also helpful, I think, because so often our own self-judgment is usually so much harsher than the judgment of others, and when we confess our mistakes to somebody else, and that person doesn’t reject us as unworthy of being loved, it can be healing. Confession, it seems, is good for the soul.

            (And by the way, while I don’t believe I have the ability to absolve sins, as minister of this church, I am available to listen to them f you ever think this would be helpful to you.)

            A second step is to allow ourselves to feel regret, for at least a while. If we’ve truly done something bad, we probably should expect to feel badly for awhile. In the Roman Catholic tradition, one must feel truly sorry before one can be forgiven. On the other hand, it’s probably not a good idea to overdo this. In the Jewish tradition, there is the concept of turning, As the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom explains, “If one sins and then turns away from sin, toward the world and toward fulfillment of some God-given task, one is considered uniquely enlightened, standing above even the most pious holy man. If, on the other hand - - one continues to be absorbed with guilt and repentance, then one is considered to be mired in selfishness and baseness.” In other words, if we wallow in our guilt, this not only robs of our ability to enjoy our own lives, it also takes up time and energy that we might otherwise use in making the world a better place.

            A third step is to commit ourselves to not doing again what we did wrong. For this to happen, we have to truly understand what led us to do something wrong in the first place. This doesn’t mean making excuses for ourselves, but it means really trying to figure out what happened so it doesn’t happen again.

            Another part of this step is also making specific changes in our own lives so whatever happened will be less likely to happen again. Amanda Radak, who is our board president this year, sometimes has a quotation on the bottom of her e-mail that says something like, “Foolishness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” (I think she attaches this to all of her e-mails and not just her ones to me, but one of you will have to let me know.)  What this means to me, is that we’re being foolish with ourselves if we ever think that just feeling bad about something is even enough.

            This is why I think some people may wallow in their guilt. Wallowing is easy. Change is hard. Hard, but necessary. One part of Jewish tradition teaches that you really haven’t repented from a sin until you have twice refused the temptation to commit it again when given the opportunity.

            A fourth step is, if possible, to right the wrong that we’ve done. This may mean apologizing to another person. This might also mean making some kind of restitution in money or service.

            A fifth step is to affirm our own worth and potential. It is to affirm that though we are imperfect, as each of us is, we still are worthy of love. It is to affirm that even though we have done something we feel badly about, that this does not necessarily define who we are and this does not negate the possibility that we indeed have the ability to do good things in the future.

            But what if we do all of these five things, and we still feel guilty?

            The sixth step I am going to suggest may surprise you, because the sixth step I am suggesting is to pray, to pray that we may experience forgiveness for ourselves within our own hearts.

            I know that as religious liberals, we have various understandings of God and prayer and are, in fact, skeptical of many other people’s beliefs about God and prayer.

            The comic Emo Phillips tells the store of being a child and praying to God to give him a bicycle. When this didn’t work, he decided to steal a bicycle and pray to be forgiven. This isn’t what I’m suggesting.

            When I suggest to pray, you don’t have to believe in God as a big sugar daddy in the sky to do so. When I say to pray that we may experience for forgiveness, I mean simply to open one’s heart up to the universal human experience of grace.  

            Listen, for a moment, to what the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich wrote about grace: “Grace,” he wrote, “strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when year, after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsion reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness…if that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed.”

            Just as I have learned that I don’t think we can will ourselves to forgive another person but only open our hearts to the possibility, I don’t think we can will ourselves to forgive ourselves, but we can open our hearts to the possibility.

            Our lives, my friends, move ever forward, so if there are things that we have done in our past that are weighing us down, may we each learn to do whatever we must do put these burdens down, so that we may travel along life’s road more lightly.

            So may it be.

            Amen.