Guilt and Forgiveness

A couple days ago, I brought up the rhetorical questions Christians routinely ask when they try to imagine what life would be like without faith in God.

The reaction is similar to the one people often had in response to the phrase defund the police when it recently gained notoriety. The idea then was that scaling back or abolishing police forces across the country would allow criminals* to run rampant. Many people believe that the mere presence of police and the threat of being punished by the combined work of law enforcement and the legal system prevents a lot of crime from ever happening**.

A world without God strikes many people as the same kind of criminal hellscape. Without the threat of being punished by God, what stops any of us from doing things supposedly forbidden by God? How can there be law an order without the almighty father of law and order***?

That is truly a worthy discussion to have, but it’s not what I want to think about right now. What I want to focus on is the other side of the Divine Police State people are so afraid to live without, the part people assume won’t exist for the lawless heathens who feel free to pursue the darkest impulses of their lustful hearts:

Forgiveness.

People often make the assumption**** that people who don’t fear God are incapable of restraining themselves, which tells you a lot about what evangelicalism teaches people to believe about themselves. This coincides with an assumption that the absence of a divine authority would erase the concept of guilt from existence. (Conversely, they may argue that the mere presence of guilt is evidence of a divine moral law imprinted within every soul.)

But when you think of beings in this world in terms of relationships, the concepts of guilt and forgiveness take on a different nature.

Consider the question, Are we cool? raised after a misunderstanding, conflict, or any sort of unpleasant occurrence between two parties. Are we cool? If the answer is No, that’s guilt. If the answer is Yeah, we’re cool, that’s forgiveness.

Morality as we often understand it—as some eternal standard of right and wrong, against which a mere blot of substandard behavior renders us forever depraved and damned—need not enter the fray here. There also doesn’t necessarily need to be a second party, either. The Are we cool? question can be directed inward . . . and it can be really difficult to answer in the affirmative.

Have you ever yelled at your dog after he ate one of your AirPods? And not just one of them, the right one? The side that actually works most of the time? (This is purely hypothetical, of course.) The dog didn’t do anything morally wrong, he just did something I didn’t like*****. Then I proceeded to do something he didn’t like. So what are we left with?

I certainly felt guilt for yelling at the dog. I have no idea what the dog felt, but it looked like guilt. Ten minutes later, it sure seemed like the answer to Are we cool? was a furry, wet mess. At least between us. That sure felt like forgiveness.

The dog does not remember that AirPod. His capacity for self-forgiveness seems pretty healthy. Obviously I do remember it, along with the yelling (which the dog remembers too) and the guilt. I don’t know that I’ve quite forgiven myself or that I’m totally cool with the person who did the yelling or the person they’ve become.

And that’s the part about walking away from the faith I don’t think people understand. I’m happy to be done with the idea of wrath wrought out on every infraction, but the availability of divine forgiveness was pretty nice to have around.

I wish I could say I have the secret formula for making guilt go away and finding forgiveness falling from the sky in abundance. I don’t. But I do believe it’s important to put the work into your relationships to repair the harm we often do to each other and to ourselves. It’s important to learn and grow in our ability and commitment to care for each other and ourselves.

And even though it feels nice to believe God will just heal our hearts and bring us together, that lazy little belief is a really good way to make sure true healing never happens.

We are responsible for ourselves. We are responsible for each other. We are responsible for our relationships. When we resort to “trusting God to do it,” the message we’re really sending to the people in our lives and to ourselves is that we just don’t care enough to make it better.

Footnotes

*Petty criminals, that is, not the ones in charge of everything

**How we go about knowing this fascinates me greatly, but I’m not going down that trail right now.

***No, not Sam Wolf

****And it’s a thoughtless one

*****Although it did give me insight into just how much earwax seeps into an AirPod, and it is not an insignificant amount, I assure you.