Lent: Reflection on Shame, Guilt, and Sin

Seventeenth-century Puritan theologian Thomas Watson argued that repentance was a spiritual medicine made up of six special ingredients. "If any one is left out, it loses its virtue." 1) Sight of sin, 2) Sorrow for sin, 3) Confession of sin, 4) Shame for sin, 5) Hatred for sin, 6) Turning from sin.[1]

            My heart has committed sins that my hands haven't gotten around to yet.[2]

            Pascal said that if everyone knew the innermost thoughts of everyone else, there would not be five friends left on Earth. 

On the First Sunday of Lent, church, which usually helps you to feel good, to celebrate, and to sing, beckons you to penitential acts of honesty that reiterate that we are, despite our achievements and our intentions, sinful.  We are not, as we are, right.  Let us be honest: We sin. 

            Shame, guilt, and sin. 

            Charles Darwin did a study of emotion in human beings and animals.  The one emotion he did not find among animals was that of shame.  You see, shame reveals a conscience sensitive to moral issues.  Blushing reveals shame.

            Guilt is different.  We may have committed a specific act that we know to be wrong.  Sin is not good, but the fact that we experience guilt is a good thing.  It reveals that we have a sense of what is right.

            The themes of shame and guilt are ones that many in our culture would have the church forget. In fact, many in the psychological world would counsel the church to go another direction. For example, Sigmund Freud said shame was a mechanism that cripples and inhibits the growth of the person.  Fritz Pearles, the founder of the Gestalt Therapy movement, said, "Shame, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and fear restrict the individual's expression." 

            At the same time, other psychiatrists will tell you that the truth about us is hard to come by.  We lie, particularly about ourselves.  So do not expect too much raw honesty from us about our sin.  We defend ourselves quite well. In fact, psychologist Dr. Vaillant believes that we become more adept in utilizing our defense mechanisms as we grow older, as we gain education and experience.  There is a cost to a life spent polishing the mask we present to others.

            In other words, we want to cover up shame and guilt.  However, it will always be there.  The conscience will not let us forget. 

            I want to ask you a question. Do you ever feel trapped by this fast-paced, frenzied, and complex world in which we live to be someone you do not wish to be and live a life that you do not desire? The author of Three Simple Rules (p. 7-8), Rueben Job, thinks many of us do. Deep within us, he thinks, we suspect that the path on which we travel is not healthy or right. We know something is wrong. We want a way out.

            The Talmud has a beautiful comment: "A sense of shame is a lovely sign.  Whoever has a sense of shame will not sin so quickly; but whoever shows no sense of shame in their visage, their father surely never stood on Mount Sinai." 

            Yet, after one honestly faces shame and guilt, what are we to do? When will the daylight come? The Christian faith has an odd response. You can repent.  If we can be honest for ten minutes here on Sunday, maybe we can be honest for the forty days of Lent, maybe then for the rest of our lives.  Lord have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  Because God does have mercy, we can be honest.  We need not loudly assert our innocence, for after we hung him on a cross through our sin, no one here has clean hands.  We are not right.  We have not done right.

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[1] --The Doctrine of Repentance (1668), 18.

[2] --Michael Horton, president of Christians United for Reformation, National & International Religion Report 10 (29 April 1996), 8.