May you know God with you when you are experiencing feelings of guilt. May your sense of responsibility and accountability be coupled with the gift of discernment and truth. May the wisdom of God help you to distinguish between the places of authentic responsibility that bring you to growth and the places of toxic guilt that drain you of truth. May you claim all that is yours and let go of all that is not. May the God of wisdom aid you in knowing the difference and bless you with Serenity. --Maxine Shonk, OP
Tony 23.3.21
This little 'blessing' raises questions for me that I'd feel happier discussing here than on the forum. On the one hand we have to acknowledge our guilt and not deny it or dodge it or suppress it. And 'guilt' is a feeling of disharmony in us, not just an abstract mental knowledge of conduct outside the law. They say Catholicism is a culture of guilt, which I suppose could mean that we all experience 'feelings of guilt' (perhaps even more than others do), and we need to know how to handle them.
In this blessing we pray for help to distinguish authentic responsibility from toxic grief. It's often said that we have to let go of our guilt once it is acknowledged [confessed] and forgiven. This process is so problematic from every side that we have a whole sacramental system to 'enable' it, namely, confession of sins with declaration of forgiveness by an official speaking in the name of the community.
Being absolved in confession gives us permission to let go of the feelings of guilt. (Let's keep away from problems of the ritualising and trivialising that characterised the practice a few decades ago.)
Everything depends on admitting our wrong - the wrong-doing that makes us wrong. Is this the heart of the matter? Every day in ourselves we experience a flow of self-excusing, self-justifying. But we are shocked to see excuses and denial paraded on stage in the present crisis over sexual abuse in parliament house. Being 'authentic' is the issue for the members of parliament especially when they are on display. Being authentic deep within myself is the issue when I push aside or walk away from the feelings of guilt that are dammed up within my memory. The walls of that dam are built by common sense reinforced by faith that God/Nature does not want the death of the sinner but a metanoia that opens the inner self to healing via forgiveness.
The blessing ends with: "May you claim all that is yours and let go of all that is not." Guilt that is acknowledged/forgiven never just dissolves away entirely, but I can and should let it go for it is no longer totally mine since I have accepted the forgiveness. If I do not let it go I will drown in the toxic flood. If I do not claim the forgiveness as my own and take it within myself I will not heal.
Is it going too far to suggest that universal sinfulness [= original sin?] is the trial and error process of evolution? That this is the normal way for us to learn to be accountable, that we first do wrong, then recognise that wrong, then acknowledge and confess that wrong, then accept the forgiveness given precisely when it is not deserved or earned?
Sometimes we feel guilty just for being, or perhaps for being part of the human family. I'm always shocked to read of a 'Catholic guilt culture'. I know guilt is misused in the Church, and ritualised and trivialised, but the alternative is not a 'no-guilt culture'. It is truth through accountability.
Could we even speak of 'universal guilt' as we speak of 'universal angst' - or should that be 'existential angst'? Pretty much the same I think.
Debb 25.3.21
First I wanted to respond to Tony’s post about guilt, but I have lost it. Anyway, perhaps I can just say a bit about guilt. I often wake up with uncomfortable thoughts about the past, mostly that I have failed to make the most of the opportunities I have been given in life. Guilt about sins of omission I suppose you could say. I read Val’s blessing first thing and that encourages me to focus on the day ahead and the opportunities it might bring.
The most helpful remedy for that has been doing family history. I have done some detailed research about the different branches, one lot from Germany, another from England and another from Ireland. There are skeletons in each closet, but as I tell the story (making use of a lot of newspaper reports from Trove) I become more understanding, less black-and-white.
The English branch has several others who have written about the ancestors who came to Australia in the very early days, and the recurring word is “shame”. I realise I inherited a sense of shame that goes back five generations, to the murder of two aboriginal youths.
I have just finished a book (not for publication just for rellies) about my Irish great grandmother and her daughters.. My father always told me he could remember nothing at all about his mother, even though he was a teenager when she died. I was angry with him for his refusal to tell us anything. Now I look further into the whole story I realise what a tough road my great grandmotherand her daughters travelled. My grandmother died of “exhaustion due to melancholia" at the age of 59. As I analyse what sent her spiralling down and imagine how her it must have affected my father, I realise he would now be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress. Makes me more compassionate towards him, and, by extension, towards myself. So, I am discovering one answer to shame and guilt is to put myself in the broader context of people, times and cirumstances.
Cathy 3.4.21
Sorry it's taken me so long to reply to your reflection on guilt, Tony, but that is a topic I find very problematic and I'm glad of an opportunity to talk about it. So thank you Tony for starting the discussion, and thank you Janet for your comments.
I think I've suffered from my share (or more) of "Catholic guilt" throughout my life, starting from when I was about nine or ten and I became very scrupulous, imagining that just about anything could be a mortal sin! I grew out of this when I left home as a young adult, but it left its mark on the rest of my life. For a long time I was one of those people that you mention, Tony, who feel guilty just for existing! It's really only over the last decade or so that I feel I'm healing from that. I'm sure it also contributed to the depression that's dogged me for most of my life.
You're no doubt right, Tony, that Confession (or the Sacrament of Reconciliation) became distorted back in our childhoods, and perhaps long before then. I've never agreed with people who say that you can just ask God for forgiveness, and you don't need the priest. As you point out, Tony, the priest is really representing the Christian community, which reflects that fact that, in a sense, sin and wrongdoing are not just private matters but hurt the community in some way. But the way it was practised when we were children, it did indeed trivialise the whole thing, and make it all rather pointless. I'm sure it's true that many children just made up "sins" so that they would have something to say!
These days I wonder if Confession is appropriate and meaningful only if you have done something seriously wrong, or if you want to make a major lifestyle change, that is, you're undergoing a genuine experience of metanoia. For most of us, most of the time, I think we grow spiritually and generally become better people by building on our strengths, and on what we like about ourselves, rather than focusing on weaknesses and faults and by reminding ourselves all the time what terrible "sinners" we are. As that famous Native American story puts it, we have two wolves within us (a good one and a bad one) and whichever one we choose to feed and nurture will be the one that flourishes, while the one we ignore will starve and fade away. I think I've remembered that correctly! In any case, i think this approach will be far better for our mental health!
I must admit that I'm also bothered by the way that these days, we so often hear that people should "take responsibility" for their actions. On the face of it, that may seem like a good thing. But if you've done something really wrong, or even if it's not so terrible in the scheme of things but which has hurt or let down someone you love, then it can be almost unbearably painful to "take responsibility" for it, which seems to imply that you did it on purpose. Or maybe it's something more subtle than that: you may not have intended the harm you did, but it's as though you're acknowledging that hurting people you care about is somehow part of the person you are. It's hard to explain, but I think it can be especially painful for those of us who suffered a lot of guilt as a child without really understanding it. But i think there's an even more important principle here. In recent years we've come to understand the human brain more and more, and we're realising just how complex it is, and how it can dramatically affect one's behaviour. One modern insight into the brain that has particularly impressed me is the understanding that the brain is in a very incomplete form when a baby is born. When the baby has positive interaction with the adults around him or her, that's what makes the neural pathways in the brain physically connect. Babies who are neglected or abused are going to go through life at a severe disadvantage compared to those who have parents (and other adults) who not only care for them physically but talk to them, sing to them, play games with them, etc. Then of course people can be born with a chemical imbalance in the brain, or with the brain not "wired" quite right. In the past, I think we've assumed that reality is a given, and our brains just record this objective reality exactly as it is. But our brains are always interpreting the information that's coming in from outside; we can all interpret reality in different ways, and our perceptions don't necessarily coincide with objective reality (if there is such a thing!!). So we're all dependent on our brains, and it doesn't seem fair to condemn someone for making a wrong choice when their brain was giving them distorted messages.
Tony 5.4.21
I hope we have all been enriched and encouraged through the celebrations of our passover with the Christ. Thank you, Janet and Cathy for your contributions to this discussion of guilt and forgiveness. When Paul says "He carried our sins", it means he felt our guilt and shame, and not just in the shameful treatment of these last days but right through his life, as we all do. There has been so much to read this past week or two, wonderful contributions - but I can't always remember which is which and which one had this or that idea. Janet, I'm very very grateful for the powerful things you write and references you give us. Great work. Before this email I was writing a scathing reposte to Bruce's latest but I blinked and it was gone forever, so I'll have to re-do it, a little more courteously perhaps.
In the article you referred us to today Peter Day writes of a paradigm shift from guilt/forgiveness to shame/exclusion. (He mentions 'honour' too which makes me wonder about the cultures in which honour was/is paramount.) This is one of those coincidences that makes me think of a common or universal awareness ('subconscious'). I suppose lots of people are shocked at the vindictive attitudes on display everywhere, and apparently with approval from most commentators.
For myself, I liked what you wrote about family history and the importance of broadening our perspective. Even to the extent of seeing that to fail, to fall below our own standards is virtually a universal experience. I woke up one morning with thoughts of earliest childhood, so clear that they seemed to be memories. It was about the experience of being corrected, of stern or angry words, resulting in feelings of guilt. This had nothing to do with 'Catholic' or 'religion'; it's about early childhood training when the good and loving is the normal atmosphere, so that any reprimand stands out sharply. We would readily say those are the formative moments when the child is not only guided towards the good/safe, away from the bad/dangerous, but is also made aware of themselves, their ability to choose, to make decisions, to take on risk, and to share, to give - in a word to love. My point is that the catalyst of this earliest formation of the self is correction/shame/guilt - all negative factors. As we move towards maturity that negativity has to be turned into positivity. (Janet, if this theorising is way off you only have to say it.)
Cathy, you mention becoming scrupulous. I don't suppose this is a 'catholic' thing, except that anyone who went to confession more often or more intensely could feed the disorder better. Others might just grow out of it naturally. Do you think it came to us along with the Puritanism that had infected Ireland and the clergy who came out here? It was called Jansenism, of course, but meant the same thing: only the pure, the perfect, the sinless are worthy of communion with God. Pius X blew that out of the water with his decree on frequent communion, but then they brought in confession for children as young as six or seven and that only made things worse. Jansenism still ran the show. All the work we do to grow up in our attitudes to guilt and shame the further humankind progresses on this long and winding road.
You write: "For most of us, most of the time, I think we grow spiritually and generally become better people by building on our strengths, and on what we like about ourselves, rather than focusing on weaknesses and faults and by reminding ourselves all the time what terrible 'sinners' we are." I think we have to always see this in the context of a whole life. The focus changes as we go along. You don't expect a one-year-old to be self correcting, conscientious, even careful. Nor should you expect someone in their 20s to focus not on their faults and weaknesses but just on being their best selves: they will surely over-reach themselves and end up crashing. I suspect that most people experience some degree of 'maturity' as the children leave home and they unavoidably find themselves assessing the sort of job they've done of preparing other persons for life. In general the total lack of awareness of different phases of growth in the 'education' we received seems to be a most damning feature of it.
About 'taking responsibility', I thought the comment to Peter Day's article which said 'shame is public while guilt is private' was important here. To take responsibility is about that truthful inventory of the 12 Step program, and no, it's not easy. But it does have to be complete, i.e., looking at each aspect within the whole context (Janet's widening of our perspective.) I was finding it very hard to see any forgiveness for myself because the context of my life in the monastery seemed 'perfect'; then one day Ian came over here and, talking about the abuse that had occurred, he made the point that all clerics were abused by the system. Enda currently is suggesting the vows of teenagers could not have been valid. They would not stand up in a court of law. Without going into a discussion of these elements, the comments have widened my perspective, and now I can take responsibility for each of the things my conscience accuses me of - and there are sooo many!!! Then you start to see what forgiveness is about, and for me 'hope' is becoming a real issue. What if the Cancel Culture is right and our hope in the Christ is empty and void. To be cancelled; to die without hope OR to be secure in the hope that the Christ rising is the first of many...