A Good Dose of Guilt

My cousin and I had just spent most of the day in the company of her grandchildren.  After they’d gone home, we sat over a cuppa, reflecting on this experience.  We compared the behaviour of these two youngsters to what our rose-tinted memories recalled of our own upbringing in the ’fifties, and one of us said casually, “There’s nothing like a good dose of guilt!”  Sadly, although born into, and brought up in, a loving Christian home, this pair had been uncivilised and undisciplined brats.  They climbed, they spilled, they broke; no respect was accorded the fact that they were in someone else’s house, and neither was any tolerance shown for one another.  They had no awareness of any kind of guilt.

As my mind digested this experience, and our subsequent thoughts, the idea of guilt prompted fond thoughts of a friend of long ago.  Daphne was one of twelve daughters, all named after flowers, who were born towards the end of the nineteenth century.  She had spent some years as a novice in a nunnery, before her life changed direction in wartime and she saw service in the WRNS.  The faith and discipline of those earlier days never left her, however, and in her old age she was a spiritual light to all who knew her.  Daphne just loved the dignified phrases of the Book of Common Prayer, and one of her favourites came from the service of Holy Communion.  Once, when sharing with me her sorrow that the service had been revised, she told me, “I did so love to be reminded that the burden of my sins is intolerable.”  In the years since her passing, I think I have come to understand why.

 
It is one thing to recognise certain things that we do as being ‘sinful’; perhaps such actions and attitudes earn a tick on a mental list of ‘Things to Avoid’ learned at church, in Sunday school, or from our parents.  It is quite another to have some appreciation of just how abhorrent such behaviour is in the sight of God.  Just as my cousin and I had found the children’s antics intolerable, we need to be reminded from time to time that our sin is intolerable to God.  This recognition is important at three levels.  Firstly, if we don’t see the sins, we cannot confess them; secondly, if we don’t confess our sins we cannot be forgiven for them; and thirdly, a sense of our sinfulness (over and above the sins themselves) acts as a kind of lens to show us more clearly than ever just how much we constantly need God’s forgiveness.  By refraction, as it were, we then get an idea of the extent to which, God’s natural disgust for our sin is overcome through His love and goodness, and the redemption won for us by Jesus on the Cross!