Sermon “The Blessing of Regret”
Rev. Sarah Person
My first memory of guilt is from when I was six years old and in the second grade. When I was six, I was lucky to be a middle-class, smart kid in a safe, predictable household in a safe, predictable world. It is not the same for all of us, and wasn’t always the same for me afterwards. But, when I was six, I woke up one morning and absolutely did not want to go to school. I don’t remember why, I only remember I was not going to walk down the hill to that bus and spend the day in school. I told my parents I wasn’t feeling well. They called Dr. Follett. God help me. In those days, doctors made house calls and I waited in a panicked sweat for him to call on me and expose my lie to my parents.
When he finally showed up, I had given up all hope and waited for the inevitable – what the inevitable was I didn’t know but I knew it would be bad – and he examined me and went downstairs to talk to my parents. I heard the door close and my mother came into my room and told me I had probably picked up a bug and would benefit from a day at home. Huh?
Relief has never since felt as sweet, but after that first moment, I felt even guiltier that I had fooled Dr. Follett and lied to my parents. I never, ever confessed. I was never punished and never absolved. I never had a chance to make it right. And I never forgot.
Today at sundown begins the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I ask you to consider two big questions this morning: does Unitarian Universalism help us (a) figure out what to do with ourselves when we do wrong, and (b) understand the place of sin in the world? It could do better, a lot better. If you are a packrat and still have the May/June 1998 issue of World, check out the front cover. It shows a small UU church with a big sign in front that says, “We don’t do guilt.”
Be honest, how many of us have joined this denomination because Unitarian Universalists do not belabor guilt? (Probably about as many of us who struggle with this denomination because we do not belabor guilt.) In point of fact, we are spiritually descended from some wonderful heretics who rejected a God who judged for a God who was merciful; who rejected a religious community obsessed with separating the saved from the damned for a community that assured one another that God had the capacity to love and save every one of us. There might be some reconciliation necessary, it used to be stressed, but we all had the chance to be reconciled. Centuries later, we have a reputation for being a “feel-good” faith with an incapacity to respond to sin and even less capacity to respond to evil.
One of my colleagues, Philip Simmons, wrote: “… A feel-good approach to religion carries the risk of moral and spiritual complacency. In refusing to confront our own wrongdoing or in fixating on vast social problems and imagining ourselves as their solutions, we locate evil somewhere ‘out there,’ beyond the walls of our sanctuaries and our own flawed human hearts.”
There is some truth in all this. But, what should we do about it, if anything? We do not have a public or ritual cleansing of our consciences. That’s fine, you might say; Sundays could be pretty intense otherwise. But I wonder whether we are cheating ourselves of a chance for honesty, truth-telling and, most of all, healing. I also wonder whether we are cheating ourselves of the imperative to be better than we are and to do better things with what we have. When we do otherwise, we fail to examine: when we fall short of our own expectations, and when we set our expectations too low. Believe it or not, a healthy way of feeling and dealing with guilt can prod us to be something better and do more. So today, I am going to summon up the spirits of my Jewish mothers through the ages who wielded guilt like a guided missile. The rest of you can imagine your own matriarchs – mine are enough for me.
For starters, let’s reclaim the word sin from the fundamentalists of all persuasions: rather than a state of being wrong, think of it as a state of being human and constantly having to realign ones self to get closer to the holy. Sins are human. Thoughtlessness is human. I see my capacity for the seven deadly sins to be an indelible mark of my humanity. (They are Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust – in case you were wondering.) I am also totally aware of my desire to be closer to the holy – another mark of my humanity. Our capacity for sin and our desire to get closer to God are as much a part of being human as our brain and muscle and bones. I can be crabby and condescending and darned good at it, much as I might regret it later. We are always existing in both possibilities; the possibility of sin and the possibility of grace. Sometimes, perhaps more often than not, we need a voice – a Dutch Uncle – to point out in which moment we happen to be at any given time.
Why, why should we care? And Rev. Sarah, aren’t you getting a little too close to the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of divine retribution? No. No, the idea that we are born bad and that bad things only happen to bad people are ancient and horrific ideas that existed for only one reason: to explain why an all-powerful God would let bad things happen to people who didn’t seem to have done anything wrong – in other words, to the innocent. If we could explain that, then we could still trust in God after terrible things happened. That’s a sermon for another day. No, this is not about doctrine; this is about conscience and what it takes to live a better life. And, it’s about what ancient practices can teach us.
Those of us descended from wandering tribes had a different take on things than townies. Wandering nomads depend on maintaining a good relationship with God in everything they do in order to get where they’re going, and to be large enough and strong enough to hang onto that place once they get there. The ancient Hebrews figured out that, while they were wandering in the desert or in exile, they tended to behave. Once they settled in towns and cities, with their own temples, and with neighbors (the bad influence), they lapsed into a cycle of behaving, misbehaving, behaving and misbehaving until things got so bad they were yanked into exile again. The Dutch Uncles of the Hebrews were their ill-tempered and irritating prophets.
Through it all, the Hebrews believed that, no matter how far they strayed from God and from each other, they could return to their better selves, in harmony with each other and with God. They did this publicly, with ritual sacrifices and reaching out to one another. And they did this privately, in communion with God. They did so because, even when everything was going right, their history told them, and their prophets scolded, that the survival of their race depended upon a constant effort to make things right with God.
God loves a repentant sinner.
My colleague, Rabbi Neal Lovinger, refers to the period of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a period of fearless moral inventory. Elizabeth Lerner, another UU minister with Jewish antecedents says: “There is the Jewish New Year phone call tradition. At Rosh Hashanah, Jews look back on the year and atone for their wrong-doing. And so every fall, right around the Jewish New Year—and the start of the UU “church year”—I call up or visit the people closest to me and apologize for anything I’ve done in the past year that wronged them. I ask for their forgiveness and if I can do anything to make it up to them. Sometimes these calls are a joy; sometimes they’re tough—especially the ones I go into blithely, thinking all is well, only to find out all’s not well at all.
Judaism treats atonement as a High Holy Day obligation, not just as an important, healthy practice; atonement is a sacred act that regards relationships as essential to the balance of the world and to our capacity to be moral, loving, creative beings. Nothing matters more. And so those phone calls are holy acts.” And we can’t skip our obligations, whether we recognize them as holy acts.
Unitarian Universalists do “do guilt,” but not, I think, in a way that hits home, not in a way that helps us get over ourselves, and not in a way that pulls us together as a community. We have a Universalist principle about the inherent worth and dignity of every being, and another principle about our interdependence with one another and the world. We set ourselves the task of living by these principles, but we don’t compel ourselves to the hard work of a fearless moral inventory. We have shed the assumption of guilt for the assumption of innocence and part of me thinks we have lost something for it.
We have lost a way to hold ourselves spiritually accountable. We don’t want to feel unworthy – kind of like not going to a therapist because we might get blamed for everything wrong in our lives. We want religion to lift us up and not cast us down. In so doing, however, we lose the opportunity to be healed. We have lost a way to say to ourselves and one another: I will not continue with my life as usual until I have wrenched myself back into right relationship with those that should matter to me. I will not continue with my relationship with all I consider holy until I have made amends. Yom Kippur is an explicit accounting of the worth and dignity of every being, and our interdependence on that fact.
We do not, in community, formally seek repentance and reconciliation with each other and with God. We do not, in community, strive to move forward toward being a blessing on this earth by living as though every single thing we do matters – even in our private moments alone. Our older traditions, with wonder, depth and commitment, ask us to believe that something we do in our innermost thoughts, in our intimate relationships in our efforts to build beloved community, can strengthen that beloved community. Our traditions tell us that a strong beloved community can heal the world. So let us regret, repent, not to be saved, but to heal ourselves and be a blessing upon the world.
I was only six when I first felt paralyzed by guilt. I spent a long time regretting my lie and keeping my silence. It was years before I realized that the good doctor probably knew I was faking and also knew I just needed to stay home. Years after that, I realized that my parents probably knew as well. They let me learn my lesson. Through all the years, and all my transgressions, I’ve learned I’m human. I’m not always the best I should be, but I can try and sometimes I will do the wrong thing for the right reasons and the right thing for the wrong reasons, and most times I can forgive myself. Above all, I try to figure out why I wanted to do the wrong thing and what the consequences meant, and whether I could make it right. I grew up and promised my children that they could have one mental health day off of school each semester. Sometimes they took me up on the offer.
Embracing our guilt, our regret, leaves us open to the possibility of grace. The world is filled with sacredness and sacred possibilities. Like Dr. Follett.
The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
September 27, 2009