Are We Too Obsessed With Guilt?
But what does ‘penitential’
mean? Is it a time to punish ourselves
for our sins, trying to appease God by going without chocolate, or going vegan,
or even intermittently going without food at all?
Well, there can
be good reasons for eating less, but self-punishment isn’t one of them. After all, the point of Christianity, and
particularly of Easter, is that we are reconciled to God because Jesus has already
atoned for us. We don’t need to make
ourselves suffer in this life in order to deter God from making us suffer more.
Alternatively,
is this a time to be aware of our sins, repent of them and ask God for
forgiveness? Maybe this is part of what
Lent is for. But is devoting seven weeks
of each year to feeling guilty what God wants?
My religious
upbringing wasn’t the sort that threatened children with damnation every time
we did anything remotely naughty. The
message was more that, because Jesus had been tortured to death instead of us,
and because we believed in him and accepted him as our saviour, we weren’t
going to get the punishment we deserved.
But our teachers did urge us to strike up conversations with random
strangers to tell them about Jesus so that they wouldn’t go to hell. So the underlying message remained: all of us
are so wicked in God’s eyes that we deserve to be tortured forever, and the
main reason to be a Christian is to avoid punishment.
For much of my
life, I have associated religion with a non-specific sense of guilt: not guilt
over anything in particular that I had done, but just for existing. As a child, the verses in Proverbs about
corporal punishment convinced me that God wanted my parents to beat me, not as
punishment for bad behaviour, but simply for being a child. Since my parents didn’t agree with this, I
took to beating myself.
Yet I also
believed that Jesus loved children more than he loved anyone else – had he not
said that the kingdom of heaven belonged to such as us? So I dreaded adolescence – I didn’t recall the
Bible saying anything about Jesus loving teenagers!
By the time I
actually was a teenager, I realised that God wasn’t a god of self-righteous
religious goody-goodies. Rather, Jesus
came to save delinquents and outcasts.
So I worried that, because my life didn’t involve gang warfare, heroin
addiction and sado-masochistic sex, I was too boring and bourgeois for Jesus to
care about saving me, which meant that I was going to hell.
As an adult, I
could always find something to feel guilty about. When I was unemployed and didn’t have any
money to give to charity, I worried that I was damned for not helping the
poor. When I got a job, I worried that I
was damned for not being poor enough.
Working in a care home for dementia patients, I felt guilty about
keeping patients there who didn’t want to be there. When I got sacked, I felt guilty because I
was no longer giving food and drink to those who were hungry and thirsty.
Once we get into
the habit of picturing God primarily as a stern judge who will punish us unless
we have a get-out-of-jail-free card, it can become hard to imagine having
anything to say to him other than, ‘I’m sorry,’ and, ‘Please forgive me,’ or
possibly, ‘I’m sorry I sought to evade your justice – please don’t forgive me.’
As Marcus Borg –
not a theologian I always agree with, but he makes some good points – says in The Heart of Christianity, we pray things like, ‘Our hearts have been closed to you, Lord; forgive us
our closed hearts,’ and don’t think to say, ‘open our closed hearts.’ We forget that if God loves us, he might want
to do more for us than simply forgiving us, such as freeing slaves, or healing
the sick. We forget that our problems
don’t always take the form of bad things that we have done.
Nick Fawcett’s
hymn ‘Lord, We Know That We Have Failed You’ begins by apologising for the
times when we have ignored God’s will, and the times when we have failed to
care for others. In Verse 3, he takes a
rather different tack:
Lord, we know that we have failed you,
Full of doubt when life’s been hard;
Suffering has sapped our vision,
Sorrow left our spirits scarred.
It is as though
Fawcett, having set out to write a hymn of penitence, wants to make everything
come under this heading. Since it doesn’t
make sense to apologise for bad things having happened to us, instead he apologises
for our having been damaged by the bad things that have happened to us, which
isn’t much better.
The psalmists
prayed to God in all sorts of circumstances, including repenting of sin (most
famously Psalm 51). To them, apologising for wrongdoing
was something they needed to do when they were conscious of having done something
seriously wrong. It wasn’t something
that defined their whole relationship with God.
Yes, saying, ‘forgive
us our sins,’ is in the Lord’s Prayer,
as is saying, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’ Perhaps Jesus is not saying, ‘You must repeat
these same phrases every time,’ but, ‘pray simply, according to the needs you
have, and trust that God hears you.’
So, if we have a
particular need – for example, if we are unemployed and can’t make a living –
we might pray, ‘God, please help me find a job.’ But that doesn’t mean that when we have
enough to live on, we pray every day, ‘God, please help me make more money.’ Instead, we thank God that we have food to
eat, and ask him to help us to use our money well, in shopping ethically and in
giving to charity. In the same way,
perhaps instead of trying to think of sins to ask forgiveness for, we need to
thank God that he has already forgiven us, and ask him to show us what we could
do better.
So in the same
way, I want to treat this Lent not as a time for looking for things to feel
guilty about, but of learning to live as part of God’s family. As the Anglican liturgy says,
Through fasting, prayer and acts of service
you bring us back to your generous heart.
So fasting,
prayer and acts of service all have a role to play, and I need to think about
what that role is. If I have any ideas,
I’ll post again.
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