This is the second of a four part series which looks at the foundations of Unitarian Universalism from a masters perspective. This is a series which hopes to get to the foundations without staying in the shallows of the principles and purposes. Last week we looked at sin as error, both on the personal level and the national level. We’ll be touching again on sin today. Each sermon in this series builds on the ones before it.

A few years ago the UU World ran a cover of a sign in front of one of our UU congregations which read: “We don’t do guilt!”

In my adolescence and young adulthood I would have resonated with that, coming as I did out of a more traditional religious tradition and in a period of soul searching on the doorsteps of a fundamentalist Christian church. Guilt was all they did. It was something I wanted nothing of, and the sentiment of “We don’t do guilt!” left me feeling smugly secure.

The sentiment on the sign was one of those things I heard as a youth and young adult in the Unitarian Universalist congregation that I eventually joined. There was the smug assurance, just as smug as the fundamentalists I had left, which felt morally superior to “those other” religious traditions that had guilt. We are above that. Being emotionally immature, and having recently come out of a hurtful religious experience, I completely resonated with the smugness.

But it has been in reflection years later that I wonder if the smugness was telling me something. The smugness itself tells me in part that Unitarian Universalists can be just as yucky as every other religion. We share much good with other religious traditions, and we share many of the same types of things that turn people off to religion. Why did I feel so superior to those who had no problem with guilt?

I ask this question, not to answer it, because I think I already have, but to pose a larger question: What’s so bad about guilt? The word itself conjures up all sorts of feelings from our unresolved pasts. And guilt itself feels bad. There seems to be nothing to recommend guilt as a religious value, or as a tool for our own development. Unitarian Universalists by and large don’t do guilt. I think it is to our detriment.

Our Unitarian founders put great emphasis on the development of character, a part of which was the moral conscience. How do we know what is right and what is wrong? More traditional forms of religion in the west rely on sacred writ to be a foundation upon which to judge our actions. In our cultural context that would mean the Bible made up of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. By 1835, the Transcendentalist movement within Unitarianism called into question the idea of revealed religion, or religious concepts as revealed in a holy book, and moved us toward a naturalistic theology. According to the Transcendentalists, we had the ability to distinguish good from bad through an innate moral sense. Religious value was not to be found in a book but within our very being. The development of character became paramount as it was seen as a development of the very God-nature with which we were created. Far from being fallen and utterly depraved, our Unitarian ancestors saw us as filled with worth and dignity.

So how does guilt fit into all of this? Have you ever done anything for which you felt guilty? What was it? Was there a reason you felt guilty? And now here’s the real question, did you do it again?

Probably not.

Guilt is a tool in the formation of character. Guilt as I see it is when we feel bad for something we have done, which we ought not to have done, or left undone something which we knew we needed to do. The key point here is that guilt is a product of action. It is a function of conscience. Our Unitarian ancestors put great faith in the idea of the moral conscience. Our conscience was seen as a living revelation. We didn’t need holy books because we had the innate ability to distinguish right from wrong.

That was the whole point of the Transcendentalist controversy; awakening the seeds of divinity within us by opening ourselves up to the revelation all around us and within us. Religion is in the living. It is how we live our lives that counts, not the beliefs we hold. And while it is well and good to have high ideals and lofty sentiments, we are human and we will fall short of the mark we’ve set. God knows I do. It’s really as simple as that. Guilt is what reminds us we’ve fallen short of the mark we’ve set.

So when I read on the cover of the World, “We don’t do guilt!” I felt sad. We’ve strayed so far from our roots. How do we know when we have transgressed our own standards? Self-righteousness is a seductive game, one that’s very easy to play. Self-righteousness is a sign that we aren’t listening to ourselves. Not really. Unpleasant as it is in the short term, guilt is a tool for our own self-transformation.

I think that the trouble comes when guilt is confused with shame. Shame is a whole thing altogether. And it is often confused with guilt.

It is natural to confuse the two, both feel awful, both are feelings that point to our inadequacies. But, the important difference is that guilt is based upon our actions, it is a function of our conscience to remind us of what we know to be right and wrong, while shame is put on us from outside (and often internalized) and is not about our actions but our being.

This is crucial. It is the difference which I touched upon last week and intend to go into deeper this week between sin and original sin. Sin, which Paul describes as that which I should have done but left undone, and that which I have done which I should not have done, is completely different from original sin which makes the claim that we are born mired in sin and cannot do good on our own. Sin is about actions, original sin is about being, just as guilt is about actions and shame is about being.

The idea of original sin is a shaming concept. There is a reason that our spiritual ancestors wholeheartedly rejected original sin, and yet, retained the idea of sin. For us to be responsible for our actions, we need to understand the difference between right and wrong.

Now when I say this, I’m not talking about moral absolutes, but rather situational ethics. We each in our creedless faith choose what is right and what is wrong in our contexts as individuals and in our contexts as a larger faith community. By our own standards we choose our rights and our wrongs in one context and adopt the rights and wrongs of the larger human community in another context. In both cases, it is a choice we make as free moral agents.

To know the difference between right and wrong within ourselves demands the concept of sin, whether we choose to call it that or not. I choose to call it that precisely because it is such a jarring word for us that it encourages deeper reflection. And sin means guilt. How have our feelings of guilt helped us to become better people?

Where as shame, which is a moral judgment from without on the very nature of our being, denies our ability to choose. It denies free will. So from this, I believe that we ought not to make claims that “We don’t do guilt!” We don’t do shame. We see each and every individual as having an inborn worth. It is part of who we are and cannot be taken away from us. We don’t do shame. But if we are to be fully human we need to do guilt.

Not doing guilt is the flipside of the same coin of doing shame. Both deny our full humanity as free moral agents. Both really deny our ability to choose. Both are fundamentalist in their absolute stance on human nature. To not do guilt is to deny us a tool to choose between right and wrong. And we do guilt anyway; it is not something that can be shut off just because a religion says so. So not doing guilt also demands a shallow religious world view because it denies a part of what makes us human. This is a danger in Unitarian Universalism, and it doesn’t have to be that way. This is just the same as doing shame. Doing shame denies the inborn worth of every person, it states our choices won’t matter anyway, because it denies the ability to choose correctly in the first place. In rejecting original sin, we have rejected shame. It is a rejection that needed to happen.

Of course, just because we reject it doesn’t mean people won’t feel it, which is why the good news of Unitarian Universalism must be shared widely. Sharing our message is a saving act to a world that is hurting. If we take this morning’s reading seriously, shame, real deep-seated shame, is one of the reasons we live in a violent culture. We wage war against the poor, which we often call the “War on Crime” or the “War on Drugs”; even the terminologies, use the word “war” to describe our feelings about crime and drugs, and far more our collective feelings about the poor. And the poor in our culture are made to feel shame about their condition and of who they are as people. What would happen if shame were lifted from being poor? What would happen if the few tools that are left to help the poor weren’t tinged with large doses of shame?

Our prisons, which hold a larger percentage of our population than any other industrialized country except South Africa, are institutions of shame. They are also being turned into a form of legalized slavery on our own shores. Prisoners are expected to pay for the cost of their trial, and for their room and board, by working for U.S. corporations in our prison system. Call it by whatever you wish but I call it a form of slavery. Our prison system is being privatized because it is profitable. Let me put it as clearly as possible: putting people behind bars is profitable. Do you honestly expect our prison system to be fair where there is profit to be had? In our country, which puts “In God We Trust” on our coins, and worships the coin as if it were God, do we honestly expect injustice to end where there is a profit to be had? As Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and money [Mammon].” [Matt 6:24] It is clear what we have been worshipping as a nation for many years now.

So, let’s give up shame, but keep guilt. In the Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell shares this story. Let us close with this story:

“One day, two policemen were driving up the Pali road when they saw, just beyond the railing that keeps the cars from rolling over, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man but caught him just as he jumped, and he was himself being pulled over when the second officer arrived just in time to pull the two of them back.

Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life had dropped off ¾ his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life ¾ all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die.

Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, “Why didn’t you let go? You would have been killed.” And his reported answer was, “I couldn’t let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.” Amen.

Delivered to the:
South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Freeport, NY
September 22, 2002