More about Guilt

While gathering quotes for the daily e-mail I send to my workmates this one popped up:

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Mohandas Gandhi (source)

Whoa. So dead on it hurts. Too many professed Christians don't live up to the model, me included. And there is a reason for this -- it is much easier to govern ourselves by wondering "What would Jesus do?" rather than knowing what Jesus did.

The Bible is hard to read, in my opinion. Surely it is a translation issue or that it is nothing like contemporary prose. A much larger factor for many is that the content is uncomfortable because it points out our flaws -- well, maybe that should be "our humanity" rather than "our flaws" -- and this leads to guilt for not overcoming the condition.

Continuing in a pseudo-Socratic fashion ... So what's up with the guilt, then? Because Jesus was created human, too, he faced the same challenges, problems, and temptations that we do and more so (don't forget that field trip with Satan). Because He was able to remain in a state of perfect grace He became the standard, albeit so nearly impossible to match we tend to feel bad when we don't measure up.

This guilt may not be entirely appropriate. Maybe we should instead be regretful, something akin to guilt, as forsaking the gift given to us by His sacrifice creates the burden of loss. People tend to wallow in regret more so than they do guilt, too, which is part of a cycle of inviting the sin to stay in our lives.

This continuance of sin is, of course, the poor behavior recognized by the Mahatma and to have it attributed to Christians is itself regrettable. We Saints need to take a lesson from the great Indian legend and live according to our values because people judge us by our individual deeds then brand our community as a whole. The only way we can overcome this is to study the life of Jesus and apply the lessons to our own life. Then, perhaps, observations like Gandhi's will no longer cross the minds of our brothers and sisters.

(reposted from Musings in Search of a Muse 16 Oct 2005)