If you’re joining us for the first time, the title of the series is “How to Be a Sinner,” and we’re studying Peter Bouteneff’s book by the same title. If you’ve got a question or a comment about today’s lesson, you could write to me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and this is the sixth lesson in our series. If you missed it last week, we talked about self-esteem, self-denial, and self-love, some really confusing terminology particularly as Orthodox Christians. And we talked about the fact that we tend to err on one side or the other. Our popular culture gives us one message about self-love and about self-acceptance and about self-care, and sometimes Orthodox Christians unfortunately thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We talked about, okay, what is a biblical and patristic view of these different words.

So today we kind of find ourselves in a similar situation, where we need to rescue three more words from their negative connotations. This chapter is called “The Sweetness of Compunction.” I remember the first time I ever heard the word “compunction.” I had no idea what it meant. It sounded kind of interesting. It occurs in the services at various places, but I didn’t know if that was a positive thing or a negative thing; it was just a word that I didn’t really understand. So we need to rescue these words from their negative connotations, and the words properly understood. We’re going to look at three of them today; [they] lead to health, vitality, and, yes, even salvation in the full sense of that term. I want to look at these one by one.

I’m going to take the first two, guilt and shame, and consider them together, because guilt and shame are two words that we have to understand how they differ, how they’re the same, where they overlap. Again, these words are words that have a lot of connotation in our culture today. These words, Dr. Bouteneff starts by saying that these words describe states of being. Guilt is a term certainly that we’re familiar with—“That person was guilty”; “He wasn’t guilty”; “Is he guilty?” Is he not guilty?”—but it means culpability. A person who committed a crime is guilty of that crime and has to suffer the consequences. And this is true regardless of the circumstances or how I may feel about the crime. I either did it or I didn’t do it: it’s an objective fact.

I was thinking this morning. As I was preparing the lesson, I thought of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. Do you remember? He’s thrown into prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. He’s guilty, no question about it. It was an objective fact. We may argue with the fact that, first of all, the circumstances may have mitigated the behavior, because he was just trying to feed his family, but nonetheless he was guilty: he stole a loaf of bread. The penalty or the consequences seem rather harsh. Nineteen years for a loaf of bread? And we may say the same thing today in our criminal justice system. People commit various crimes, there may be mitigating circumstances, but the point of guilt is either you did it or you didn’t do it. Separate from the circumstances, separate from the penalty or the consequences, guilt implies culpability.

Shame, however, means dishonor or humiliation. A lot of discussion in our culture talking about shame. People can bring shame to themselves. They can bring shame to their family, even their entire nation, by behaving in a dishonorable way, but it’s more of an emotional thing that we feel, a kind of profound embarrassment over what’s transpired. Think of—I just thought of this on a national scale—think of Germany after they lost the First World War: as a country, they were utterly humiliated. The problem with shame, that if it doesn’t progress beyond that, left to itself, it can lead to self-hatred, self-loathing, and a lot of really unproductive behavior. You know, people that do shame research—and, yes, that is a thing—people like Brené Brown, say that generally shame leads to all kinds of negative psychological and social consequences. It explains a lot of abuse, a lot of criminal behavior. Just a cycle of shame where people are humiliated. They have self-hatred, self-loathing, so they act that out in ways that are negative toward other people.

But how are they related? I have to tell a story about something that happened prior to my conversion. I became a Christian when I was 18 years old. So it was a long series of circumstances that led up to that, but one of those circumstances was that, when I was in high school, I got involved in drug culture. My mother’s sitting here; this comes as no news to her. She had a front-row seat. [Laughter] I’m not sure she bought the ticket, but she had a front-row seat. And I remember, after my parents discovered drugs in my bedroom, the way I found out about that is my mom was in her bedroom—not to embarrass you, Mom, but—[she] was crying. And I was guilty. You know, I felt the guilt of that, because I knew it was wrong, I did it anyway, but I also felt enormous shame because of the repercussions that it had on my mom.

The good news was that that shame turned into something positive, because I resolved in that moment that that was the end of my experimentation with drugs, because if my sin, my guilt, and my shame could lead to that impact on my mother, someone whom I loved so dearly and who had given me so much—I was done. I was done. So shame doesn’t always have to have a negative connotation, doesn’t always have to lead to a negative result. So I think sometimes maybe in our culture this idea of shame may swing a little bit too far? And so we’re going to rescue it, I hope, in this lesson.

Let’s consider—and this is a section in the book—on doing versus being. So there’s our behavior, and there’s our character. There’s who we are, and there’s what we do. We’re not only human doings; we’re human beings, both/and make up who we are. Some people, including many psychologists, say that guilt is a feeling about what I have done, while shame is a feeling about something that I am. In other words, I did something bad versus I am bad. This is where we have to be very clear in our thinking. We have to make this important distinction. All that we’ve talked about in previous weeks, we’ve talked about holding to these twin truths, that on the one hand we are sinners—we sin, we fall short of the glory of God, we transgress his law, we’re culpable—but at the same time we’re made in the image of God—we’re inherently beautiful, we’re inherently reflections of the glory of God, and that’s not even lost in our sin. So we have to hold onto both of those things, and I think it really speaks to this issue of shame.

Guilt concerns, Dr. Bouteneff says, things you can control, change, or redirect. So stay with me here. You can therefore acknowledge it. When you transgress, when you commit a sin, when you fall short, you can acknowledge it, confess it, and take responsibility for it. Guilt is something you can control, change, or redirect. You may be able to make restitution or some kind of reparation. You can repent of it. You can reorient yourself so you don’t repeat that behavior again. And as a result, you can rid yourself of the deed so that these guilty feelings don’t need to haunt you.

Guilt is something that’s intended to be temporary. It’s something that should motivate us to further behavior. It’s like an early-warning sign. It’s like on the dashboard of my car, the oil light goes off, and that’s intended to prompt me to deal with the shortage of oil in my engine before it locks up and I come to a grinding halt. That’s the same way guilt is supposed to be. It’s a God-given gift, and to the extent that our conscience is functioning, we should feel that guilt and not try to eradicate that guilt. That’s also misplaced in our culture a lot of times, where people say, “Oh, you shouldn’t feel guilty about that. There is no guilt; there is no shame. Just forget about it. Whatever behavior you engage in is normative. It’s okay.” Unfortunately, we live in a society that is normalizing a lot of behavior that shouldn’t be normalized.

Shame, on the other hand, being about who you are, is outside your control. So, for example, you could be ashamed of your physical attributes. I’m too tall, I’m too short, I’m too heavy, I’m too thin. Some other physical imperfection: I have the wrong skin color, whatever it may be. Or it could be your social class: I was born poor, or I was born to a lower-income family. Or maybe I have shame about being born into a wealthy family. (I haven’t struggled with that particular one.) Or even your nationality: I’m German, and maybe I should feel some shame about what happened in World War II, or maybe I was born in Turkey and should have some shame about what happened to the Armenians in the genocide, or maybe we should all feel shame with what transpired with our Native American cultures here. But there’s little or nothing to be done about these, so feelings of shame are inappropriate and should be avoided. Again, this is from the book. The only way that shame can be useful: if it’s turned into guilt; in other words, into something that can be changed and dealt with and expunged.

So this distinction can be helpful, because if we just sit in our shame and have feelings of shame or self-hatred or self-loathing, there’s nowhere for that to really go. And to the extent that there’s nowhere for it to go, it’s not helpful. It just makes us feel bad. Dr. Bouteneff writes this; he says:

The way of distinguishing the two is helpful in that it encourages us to identify what we can act on and what we can’t.

So that’s a good thing, right?

There are certain things that we have in our existence that are part of the general broken, fallen world, and we don’t want to excuse that, but I don’t want to have personal culpability for it, and therefore to feel shame is often unproductive. It directs us away from downward spirals of shame and toward reparative actions to free us from the weight of guilt.

This is important and helpful. But he goes on to say:

There is something about this distinction, thought, that rings false. People not only feel shame for who they are and for things they cannot control, but sometimes they can also be ashamed for things they have done. For example (he gives this example), if I cheated on my spouse, I feel not only guilty but likely ashamed of myself.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, provided it doesn’t stop there. So shame—and this is where I want to rescue the term from our modern culture—and I think actually… How many of you have read Brené Brown? She’s a shame researcher at the University of Houston and has written some amazing books that I love. If you read her closely, I don’t think she’s saying that all shame is bad, but shame as popularly defined and as popularly defined is bad. But shame could be both appropriate and healthy. For example—actually, I’m going to quote from the book again.

Imagine someone who wantonly lies, steals, bullies people, or sleeps around. People will justly ask such a person, “Have you no shame?” And some people apparently don’t have any shame. It’s just a fundamental lack of conscience.

But I think—correct me if I’m wrong; feel free to disagree with this—that’s the exception, not the rule. I think the way that most people deal with shame is maybe they have too sensitive a conscience, or they take on more than they need to. But in the face of some kinds of bad behavior, we should be ashamed of ourselves, because, again, it’s an early-warning indicator that something needs to change.

The Philokalia speaks of our “shameful misdeeds.” So it’s right there in the language of the Fathers. The implication is that we should always feel shame for such wrongs and that not feeling shame is seen as a problem. Some of those situations, I mean, if we’re not feeling shame, that may be an indication that the light is burnt out on the dashboard, that our conscience needs to be awakened. As we grow in holiness, as we grow in grace, as we move toward Christ, our sensitivity should be that. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you’re reading the Fathers, you’re thinking, “Oh no.” You’re reading the story of this most-holy person, and yet they feel enormous guilt, enormous shame. They feel contrite about their sin. And I think what is changing is their perception. It’s not that they’re sinning more; it’s their perception of their sin is going deeper: they’re more aware of how they fall short. But again, shame is like an early-warning system that alerts us to the fact that something is amiss and needs to be addressed.

Okay, so that’s like being versus doing, so we can consider these two terms of guilt and shame. So there’s value in the distinction between guilt being something we’ve done and shame being attached to something we are, but it probably doesn’t go far enough, and there’s value in seeing both of those as useful.

Then he says let’s consider individual versus social. So we could make another distinction: guilt is an individual reaction, like: I transgressed a law, or I feel bad about what I did. Shame is a social reaction: I’m embarrassed before others, or before God, for what I did or for who I am. Guilt comes when you know you’ve done something wrong. You should feel shame when others know it.

When I became the CEO of Thomas Nelson, my predecessor, Sam Moore, said to me; he said, “Every decision you make, you need to think about: What’s this going to look like if it’s printed the next morning on the front page of The Wall Street Journal? Would you be ashamed, if you made this decision?” That’s a helpful thing. I don’t want to experience shame; I don’t want to make a decision… But before that comes the transgression that would lead to the shame.

But, Dr. Bouteneff says, there’s a flaw here, too. Why? Because nothing is ever totally an individual act. This is profound. I mean, in the case with my mom. My use of drugs didn’t just affect me: it affected her, it affected my family, it affected the cosmos in ways that I can’t fully understand, because we’re all connected. Think of it this way: even if no one ever finds out, you commit a sin in the privacy of your own home—nobody ever finds out—God knows, right? There’s always an audience. Furthermore, as we saw in a previous lesson, the whole universe is affected by our sin. Do you remember when Fr. Seraphim was here and did our pre-Lenten retreat? How many of you were here? Fr. Seraphim from Scotland? He talked about the fact that every time we sin it’s like putting a little drop of poison into the sea of humanity. Maybe imperceptible, but there’s a little impact from that that ripples out; it creates ripples. Everything is spiritually connected. Listen to this:

The Prophet Hosea, in Hosea 4:2-3—by the way, he’s the first of the 12 minor prophets; he’s preaching to the northern kingdoms who were apostate, and listen to what he says—he says by swearing and lying, killing and stealing and committing adultery, they break all restraint with bloodshed upon bloodshed. I mean, this was a culture that was just rife with all kinds of sin. Listen to what he says: Therefore the land will mourn, and everyone who dwells there will waste away, with the beast of the field and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea will be taken away. It’s like there’s this cosmic impact to their sin. There’s this ripple effect, like throwing a rock in a pond: it ripples out. It affects even the land, and it affects even the animals.

In this sense, from a biblical perspective and from a patristic perspective, there’s no such thing as a victimless crime. No such thing as a victimless crime. Even in the case of pornography, somebody thinks, “Well, what I do on my own is nobody else’s business.” But there’s always a victim. The women that are involved, the men who abuse them: victims. So as a result, I may feel guilt or even shame even if I haven’t gone public or confessed it to anyone, and that’s a good thing. You all look very somber. This doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It has to start there, perhaps, but guilt and shame are a mixed bag. While we can distinguish between the two, they are often a distinction without a difference. They show up together like twin orcs. You know what I’m talking about, from Lord of the Rings? [Laughter] The real bad guys, you know, in Lord of the Rings. Goblins. But they show up sometimes like that. But they’re actually signs of a healthy, functioning conscience.

So when you feel guilt, when you feel shame, don’t immediately go: “Oh, that’s a bad thing!” And this is sometimes what the culture tells us to do: we need to go get therapy about those. And certainly if they persist and they become static and they don’t go somewhere, yeah, maybe we need to talk to a therapist, or certainly need to talk to our father confessor, but they’re a good thing. If we feel that guilt, thank God that we have that early-warning sign, that prick of our conscience.

St. Paul talks about—I think it’s in 1 Timothy where he talks about these two guys, Hymenaeus and Alexander, who made a shipwreck of their faith because their conscience had become seared. They’d become sort of impervious to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and not seeing what their sin was causing. So these are signs that can lead us to seek forgiveness, to surrender to God, and to change. They only—and this is what I want you to get—they only become unhealthy when we leave them unresolved, so it’s a good thing. If I feel guilt, if I feel shame, if I’m embarrassed, if I’m humiliated—good. Now what can I do with it?

It’s a God-given gift. In fact, if you think about it, have you ever known anyone who had nerve damage where they couldn’t feel pain? We hear about these people, we read about these people, and they had to be very careful, because they can hurt themselves, sometimes desperately, but because they don’t feel pain, they don’t know it. Our conscience functions in much the same way. Guilt and shame function in much the same way. We know we’ve transgressed the line. We know we need to repent.

Okay, let’s talk about another word; let’s talk about compunction. Dr. Bouteneff says in the book that the degree to which we experience holiness, wherever we find it, will likely be the degree to which we experience compunction. In other words, in the presence of holiness—in the church, in a service, around a holy person—sometimes we just feel our own inadequacy; we’re aware of the gap. What is compunction? Compunction is about regret or remorse. This is not necessarily remorse for a particular deed but for our brokenness. Again, I’m quoting from the book: “Contrition is the natural reaction to the gulf between what we are in our disordered lives and what we are in God’s eyes. Ideally, our experience of that gulf will produce a positive, life-giving compunction.”

Again, compunction needs to be seen as a positive thing that leads us to greater life. This is why we see the saints asking God to give them remorse. Again, sometimes we think in our culture we don’t want to think negative. This is a negative thing; we want to put this out of mind. Think happy thoughts; think positive thoughts. The power of positive thinking and so forth. But remorse is seen as the doorway to coming to terms with our sin and the potential to progress in holiness, like the first step, and as Orthodox Christians we cannot lose this concept.

The Canon of St. Andrew we pray in the church in the first week of Great Lent. If you’ve been to that service—I know that most of you have, but probably not all of you have—those services on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the first week of Great Lent are incredibly sobering. They’re very full of compunction, full of remorse, full of confession. We say, “Lord, have mercy,” a gazillion times. Here’s one prayer from that canon:

Take from me the heavy yoke of sin, and in your compassion grant me tears of compunction.

We literally pray for compunction. Here’s another from the Canon of Repentance:

Give me understanding, O Lord, that I may weep bitterly over my deeds.

Tears are a good thing. Weeping bitterly over our sin, taking it seriously is the first step toward healing.

Compunction, though, wrongly understood, Dr. Bouteneff says, can be detrimental. For example, we’re not talking about clinical depression, and there are people that seem to be unable to move past their sin. St. Paul himself recognizes that there is a difference between—I’m going to call it therapeutic shame, that leads to a positive outcome, and neurotic shame that keeps us stuck in a negative state. Let me just read from 2 Corinthians 7:10. He says, “For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation.” So there’s a kind of sorrow, a kind of compunction, there’s a kind of remorse that has a positive outcome, that it leads to our salvation. He goes on to say—let me repeat that:

For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted (or not to be dismissed), but the sorrow of the world produces death.

It doesn’t have any place to go. There’s a kind of ungodly sorrow that has no place to go. It’s just wallowing in sin for wallowing in sin’s sake.

True compunction, healthy regret and remorse, is useful if it leads us to repentance and change. Here’s the thing we’ve got to get: The Church is not just trying to make us feel bad. There’s no redeeming value in just feeling bad, if that’s where it stops. It’s intended to lead us to repentance. Compunction grounds us in reality, and here’s why. If our stance before ourselves, others, and God doesn’t take into account our mistakes and our failures and our misdirected priorities, we’re not living in reality, we’re in denial, we’re living a fantasy. This is why I think that—I hope we’d all admit—when we watch the world of politics—and we’re ramping up to the next election, which I just dread—but it feels unreal because nobody’s willing to admit any mistakes. There’s no compunction in that world. No one seems to admit that they were wrong or they said hurtful things or they’ve done hurtful actions. The most they may say is—here’s how it usually goes: “Maybe I made a mistake, but we all make mistakes.” That’s not what compunction looks like. It’s not really owning it, and because of that it feels inauthentic.

Part of what is often referred to in the Fathers and here in this book, “The Sweetness of Compunction,” stems from owning up to actual reality. As Christians, more than anybody else, we have to be those who come to terms with reality, to acknowledge the world for what it is: beautiful, shot through with the glory of God, but fallen and broken. Shortcomings, failure, and brokenness are inevitable in the living of this life. And denial and justification leads to lies that are always harmful to us. So to try to deny that in ourselves, to not own up to it, creates a sort of false self that’s not helpful. Acknowledgment and confession lead to authenticity. I want to be authentically who I am, and part of that identity is that I’m a sinner. Part of it is I’m made in the image of God; we talked about that over the last several weeks.

St. John the Dwarf—actually, I love that name—St. John the Dwarf, a fourth-century Egyptian ascetic, says that self-accusation is the easy burden, and self-justification is the heavy one. Let me say it again: Self-accusation is the easy burden, and self-justification is the heavy one. Notice how much time we and people in our society spend justifying themselves: enormous amount of energy. I’ve been married for 41 years. I’m a slow learner, but gradually I’m learning that it’s easier to agree with my wife when she confronts me with my sin than to try to justify myself. It takes an enormous amount of energy for me to justify myself: “Well, I was angry for a reason, don’t you understand?” Much easier for me to say, “You know, you’re right. I was out of line.” That doesn’t take that much energy. Self-accusation, me accusing myself, is the easy yoke. Self-justification is hard. It takes a lot of energy, and it doesn’t always lead to a good—never leads to a good outcome. Isn’t it just easier to admit that we were wrong and ask forgiveness?

Again, to read from the book:

People versed in psychology will know well the perils of covering up our compunction of sadness. Especially following tragedy, trauma, abuse, a loved one’s death, we are apt to supplant our regret and sadness with other things such as forced joy, anger, hatred, anxiety, and/or depression. The therapy for deep-set and unexpressed sadness will often include prolonged tears, the welling-up of what had perhaps been long submerged, often unspeakably painful, the sweet reality that will, God willing, result in healing and wholeness.

It concerns me when people have had a tragic thing happen to them, and there are no tears. They’re unwilling to embrace it. And I think that’s part of us taking our sin seriously and the brokenness of the world seriously, is that we have to embrace that. We have to cry; tears are good. In other words, compunction rightly understood and fully embraced can lead us to wholeness. It’s what we all want. That’s essentially the meaning of salvation, is that we be fully restored, eventually fully restored, spirit, soul, and body.

This is why, from an Orthodox perspective, when we look at repentance, when we look at compunction, and it’s expressed in the penitential season of Great Lent, we often see this as bright sadness. How many of you have heard Lent referred to [as] that: “bright sadness”? Why could it be bright sadness? The Friday before Meatfare Sunday, we sing, “Let us begin the Fast with joy.” Now, on the surface we’re about to enter into a very serious time, right? A very serious time of fasting, of compunction, of praying these prayers of repentance, confession—but “let us begin the Fast with joy.” Why in the world would we say this? Here’s why: because we know this journey is going to end well. We may have to go through some dark periods to get there, but the journey’s going to end well. Yes, we’re going to confront our sin in all its ugliness, but we’re not going to stay there; we’re going to journey on to the cross, where Christ deals with our sin once and for all, and then raises us with him to new life. That, my friends, is the Gospel.

This is why one of my favorite services in the Church is the Sunday of Forgiveness. How many of you have been to the Sunday of Forgiveness, on Sunday evening for vespers, when we go around and ask forgiveness of every single person present? First time I went to that, I thought this must be the most awkward service I’ve ever attended. [Laughter] I’m going to have to ask forgiveness of every single person here? And I’ve been asked before as a deacon, and I’ve thought it myself: “But I haven’t sinned against everybody, so isn’t this a little bit disingenuous?” Not if you take sin seriously. We do nothing on its own. Everything has that ripple effect.

But I want you to think back to that service for a minute, because while we’re asking for forgiveness, going around… And it’s a very moving service; I’ve cried many tears at that service. You get into it feeling like, enh, this is kind of superficial, it’s contrived, what could it mean, and as you get into it, you enter into it, your soul kind of follows your body, and as you act out this repentance, you begin to feel this deep repentance and this deep sense of compunction. But what is being chanted in the background as we’re doing this? Does anybody remember? The Canon of Pascha, which we will hear dozens of dozens of time as we move into this season of Pascha, as we get to the Resurrection, but here, faintly, quietly, as a foreshadowing of what is to come. This repentance, this forgiveness that we’re all engaged with, this mutual reconciliation so that we can enter the feast clean… By the way, that precedes Clean Monday, because we’re starting the Fast having been forgiven, having offered forgiveness, and now we’re starting with Clean Monday, but it’s going somewhere. It’s going to end in the Resurrection, where not only is Christ resurrected but [we], being in him, are resurrected with him. So I love that service.

Guilt. Shame. Compunction. Let me summarize, and then I want to get into a little bit of application. First of all, guilt and shame are two topics that we need to rescue from our culture. We don’t need to dismiss those terms or think those are the relics of an antiquated Christianity or religion. No, they’re very relevant. They’re our experience. We need to embrace them, but we need to see them holistically and see that they can go somewhere. They could be an early warning sign that something needs [to be] rectified. And, when that something is rectified, they fulfill their purpose. We don’t need to feel the guilt; we don’t need to feel the shame. We can do away with them: we dealt with them in a healthy way. That’s what it means to have and to exercise a Christian conscience.

But compunction, that feeling of remorse, that feeling of regret, that’s also good—if it leads somewhere. So we can embrace that compunction; we can embrace tears. We ought to as we become more sensitive to sin and the implications of our sin, not only towards God, but towards one another. We can repent, but it’s got to go somewhere.

So how can we apply this to our life? Fortunately in this chapter Dr. Bouteneff gives us three points, and I’m just going to give those to you and comment on them. First of all, identify what you’re actually feeling. I think one of the marks of maturity is self-awareness, to not let these things just sort of be turmoil in our soul and not be aware of them, but to recognize them and to say, “Oh, I’m feeling guilt. I wonder why. Where’s that coming from?” Or: “I’m feeling shame.” Or: “I suddenly feel compunction.” Identify what you’re actually feeling. It’s helpful to give it a name. Then to acknowledge it to yourself and to someone else, and particularly in the Church we have a mechanism for resolving all this. First of all, yes, confess it to the priest.

I think I mentioned this last week, but I got asked a question. Somebody was saying: You know, I don’t understand. If I confess my sins here, am I still going to have to give an account at the Last Judgment? It seems like there’s all these verses in the Scripture about the Last Judgment and us giving an account. But on the other hand, we have all these verses about God forgives us; he even forgets our sin. So how do we reconcile these two things? I said to her—and I talked with Fr. Philip about this afterwards, and he said, “Yeah, that was exactly the right answer,” to which I was like, “Phew, good” [Laughter]—but I said, “You know, you either confess it in this life or you account for it in the next, but you don’t do both.” You think about the prayer of absolution that the priest says after you leave confession. It’s basically: these are wiped out; these sins are gone. For us to continue to feel guilt—listen to me—continue to feel guilt or shame about that which has been confessed is false guilt and false shame. There’s no reason for it; it’s been objectively done away with.

But this confession, this acknowledging it to ourselves and to someone else isn’t just the priest, but we also have to go to those whom we’ve offended. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount; he says, “If you’re making your offering there at the altar”—the Eucharist: think of it that way—“and there remember that your brother (or sister) has something against you”—what does he say?—“leave your gift at the altar, go make reconciliation to your brother, and then come back and offer your gift.” Here’s the bottom line on that: Reconciliation takes priority over worship. That’s how important it is. Now, as Orthodox Christians, would you say we put a high priority on worship? Duh. Absolutely. As I’ve often said, “If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the liturgy.” [Laughter] We have all kinds of ways to worship, lots of opportunities to worship. It’s because it’s a huge priority for us. That’s one of the things I loved when I became Orthodox. I said, “This is a Church that takes worship seriously,” and I love the beauty of worship. But even more important, according to Jesus, is reconciliation with our brothers and sisters.

We have a remnant of that left in the kiss of peace. The kiss of peace takes place at the front end of what’s called the anaphora, as we move into the eucharist proper, where we exchange the gift of peace. Basically, the idea there is if you can’t greet your brothers and sisters in peace, there’s a problem; something needs to be dealt with. I’m not saying that you should leave the eucharist at that point and deal with it, although maybe you could argue that from Jesus’ words, but you definitely need to purpose that that’s going to get reconciled.

Now, not everything can be reconciled; I get that. That’s why St. Paul says, “Insofar as it depends upon you, be at peace with all men.” There may be people that refuse to be reconciled, but we just can’t read their minds and assume that’s the case if we haven’t made the effort to reach out to them and try to reconcile. The first move is always ours. If there’s somebody that has something against you, and you remember that in the midst of the liturgy, you owe it to yourself and to God and to that other person to purpose that you’re going to be reconciled; you’re going to make every attempt to reconcile yourself with them. You can’t just create a dialogue in your head and say, “Well, but they won’t accept my forgiveness,” or “They’re unreasonable.” No. You have a responsibility to reach out, to try to be reconciled. Unfortunately, these are often people in our family, and so we have a duty to do that in our family.

So, again, identify what you’re actually feeling, acknowledge it to yourself and to someone else, and then third, if it can be acted on, do so. In other words, if there’s something that needs to be done, a repentance that needs to be made, do so.

I just wondered, as I was thinking about this, what would happen if we, those of us listening to this, if we were able to reframe guilt, shame, and compunction as something to be embraced and something positive, not something that’s a remnant of an antiquated religion, something that’s to be avoided at all costs, but something to say, “No, that serves its purpose. I’m not going to be too quick to dismiss these things. These serve a purpose, and it’s a good purpose”? What difference would it make to our spiritual growth if we used these as tools to make us more authentic? What would happen in our families or even at work if we allowed these to transform us into someone better? If when we felt guilt, if when we felt shame, we acted on it and we did something about it?

Okay, next week, Chapter 7: “Mercy, Forgiveness, and Divine Judgment.” I can’t wait to get to that chapter; that’s the last chapter in the book. There are several appendices, but we’re not going to do those. You can read those on your own if you want, but Chapter 7 for next week.