Guilt-Free New Year

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

Another new year – where did the last one go? Another fresh start, another picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and trying again. Perhaps, like me, the regrets of last year are still clinging to you. Perhaps you too are finding it hard to shake the memory of things “ill done and done to others’ harm” (T. S. Eliot). Maybe you and I are suffering from an old-fashioned case of Catholic guilt.

Artists, authors and filmmakers love the idea of Catholic guilt. Have you noticed? If a character is Catholic, she might not ever go to mass, she might not say the rosary, but you better believe she feels guilty. Guilt, as far as the storytellers are concerned, is the defining Catholic characteristic.

The Irony of Catholic Guilt

This is something I find pretty ironic, because I can’t think of a less Catholic tendency than guilt. Oh yes, culturally the habit is there, and I’m certainly not above wallowing in it myself occasionally (or let’s be honest, frequently).

But whoever heard of a saint exhorting people to feel guilty? Can you imagine St John Paul the Great saying, “You should spend large amounts of time feeling bad about yourself”? Or how about St Teresa of Calcutta suggesting that the most productive way to spend your time in prayer is to keep going over and over the things you’ve done wrong?

The idea is laughable, if not outright offensive.

The Saints' Emphasis on Repentance and Conversion

What the saints do emphasise, and they are very much taking their cues from Our Lord Himself here, is the need for repentance and conversion – literally, turning back to God. And what turning back to God entails is acknowledging that we need Him, that we can’t do anything without Him.

The Unpleasant Act of Identifying Failures

That in turn means realising that there are a lot of things that we are making a pretty poor job of by ourselves. This act of identifying our failures is pretty unpleasant. No one enjoys it very much and most people avoid it insofar as they can, myself included.

But, when you grow up with a religion that’s calling on you to be perfect, as we Catholics do, a religion that insists you must attempt things beyond what you, as a wounded human being, can achieve, it’s hard not to have the odd moment where you see that, “Hang on, I’m falling short of something here.”

For people who grow up with some contact with the church, even in the most perfunctory way, it’s almost impossible to avoid being aware of a standard that you don’t measure up to.

However, the key thing about conversion is that this uncomfortable lightbulb moment is merely the first step, the first 90 degrees in that 180-degree swivel towards God.

The second phase is paradoxically harder and more wonderful: it’s accepting that God loves you totally and wants to make up for your shortcomings. That cloud that's still hanging over you and me from last year? He could wipe it away in a heartbeat if only we’d let him.

“I have drowned your sins in the depths of the sea,” (Mic 7:19).

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow” (Is 1:18).

Trusting in God's Love and Promises

Why is this beautiful process of entering into and basking in God’s love so hard for us? Why do so many of us never progress past that first awful look at our inadequacies and end up bogged down in that paralysing waste of time, the famous Catholic guilt?

Speaking from my own experience, it’s because I just love to look at myself: even though what I see may be unattractive on many levels, it is my self and it obsesses me. I can’t envision it as different, I can’t bear the thought of it being changed by some outside force, even if it’s for the better.

My heart rebels against the idea – it feels like a loss of freedom, even though intellectually, I know that on there’s a greater freedom on the other side of that pinch: the release from compulsive, suffocating self-interest. The crux of the issue is, I do not trust God’s lovely promises, preferring my familiar misery to the cold-water shock of a leap of faith.

Overcoming Pride and Perfectionism

Catholic guilt – better to call it, “Catholic perfectionism” or “Catholic high-achiever syndrome”. Or better yet, let’s call it something more accurate and far less specific to one religion: pride. Not in the modern sense, which seems to have confused the concept with self-esteem, but in the more precise terms of moral theology, where pride is simply viewed as humanity’s efforts to exist apart from God.

The Paradox of Perfection and Trust

So often, our pride drives us to ask of ourselves something that God, our loving and patient Father, would never ask from us: perfecting ourselves by our own efforts. Yes, Scripture does say, “You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect”, but the perfection that is expected of us is loving abandonment.

The perfection of the saint is the completeness of their trust in God and their reliance on Him – and perhaps you and I might now be thinking, “Lord, I can’t even manage that! There are so many parts of my life that I don’t want to hand over to You, that I am afraid to part with!” Here, we encounter another paradox: we must trust that He will also make our trust perfect.

A New Year, A New Approach

So, here I am trying again this year, as I do every year. But this time, my trying has, I hope, a different flavour. I am trying to ask for help more, from God and the people around me, to surrender (if nothing else) my inability to surrender to Him completely. At the very least, I hope I’ll finish 2024 with a little more of the gift of laughing at myself and not taking my failings quite so seriously.