The Ugliest Word
What is the ugliest word in the English language? My vote is for “guilt.” Even sin is fun for a season, but I haven’t found that to be true for guilt.
It would be so nice if there were a remedy for our sin AND our guilt.
Unremedied guilt can mess up our lives in so many ways. It provides a way for the world to still “be all about me” and my guilt. The weight of guilt narrows our world. Like a car that travels over and over again on a road that cannot sustain the weight, a rut is formed and once formed is almost self sustaining. It becomes the defining feature of that section of road. Forever after we give that rut “the attention it deserves.” We now refer to that section of road as “that place with the deep rut in it.”
Another way guilt messes with us is by way of the dread and anxiety of not knowing when retribution will come or in what form. We can even create self-fulfilling prophecies. We can engage in all sorts of magical thinking along the lines of what goes around comes around. Events that are not remotely related logically can be seen as “a direct result” of our action. Again, this narrows the event to be “all about me.”
Maybe the most damaging to relationships is our desire to put our guilt on someone else (but not the right Someone and in the wrong way.) We have a deeply wired desire to place our guilt on someone else. This wiring may be by design. It draws us to seek the One Who Takes Our Guilt. But we will take almost any other substitute, however inappropriate and ineffective. This other person is often our spouse, but can be almost anyone or anything. And since they can’t sufficiently take our guilt it does not satisfy our need completely and along the way adds to our guilt because now we have impugned an innocent.
How about the guilt that is real but not true, like the imagined guilt for not creating an outcome that matches up to our arbitrary expectation? But don’t underestimate false guilt. The weight can be just as harmful as real guilt. Some parts of our brain are just not designed to track down every lead and shred of evidence. Our limbic system, a high traffic area in our brain for emotional processing, says to our cortex, the part that reasons and makes judgments, “If you say so that’s good enough for me” and the limbic system carries out the exact same process it would if the guilt were real and certifiable. Like some evil, twisted placebo we respond to the false guilt as we would true guilt.
If only there were a remedy for our sin AND our guilt.
David Hamilton
Love the article, but aren’t our guilt and shame a result of our sin? It would be that when our sins are atoned for–then our guilt and shame are taken away also. There is just ONE remedy that is sufficient for all conditions of the heart, mind, and soul…
Gr8moments; I think we can have guilt even when we don’t sin. I have much guilt that I would say was not directed from my sin. Yes, I also have much guilt from my sins too. But I don’t think it is always because of our sin….same as shame.