Guilt has gotten a lot of bad press recently. We live in an age where guilt is practically always something bad, something to get past with the help of a shrink. Par­ticularly when discussing sex, peo­ple will declare that religion and morality do nothing more than make people feel guilty. Andrew Aaron, a sex and marriage therapist in New Bedford, Massachusetts seems to subscribe to this view:

“Through centuries,” he writes, “religious education has associated sex with what is wrong and sinful rather than what is sacred. Instead of an expression of the divine, sex is suspi­ciously regarded as weak­ness of the flesh. The result of this influence is that sexuality, a natural part of being human, is tainted with shame, guilt, and am­bivalence.”

Every instance of erotic satis­faction, sexual activity or or­gasm, however, cannot be auto­matically branded as sacred or as a divine manifestation. We all recog­nize how easily the unbridled pur­suit of sex­ual gratification can be­come an ex­ploitative, self-centered and de­meaning enterprise.  “Con­text” matters critically when it comes to getting sex right, and it is too easy in the sexually permis­sive envi­ronment of today's soci­ety to miss the core truth that the unique context for human sexual activity is a very specific one, namely, the beautiful setting of marriage, with its mutual com­mitment and openness to chil­dren. 

Father Thomas O'Don­nell, S.J. in his "Medicine and Chris­tian Morality" distills the matter to its essence in this way:

 "In the moral order, all de­liber­ately induced venereal pleasure is restricted to mar­riage and related in some way, either immediately or remotely, to a proper marital act." 

From this perspective, the real harms we bring upon our­selves and others when seeking to satisfy the sexual impulse outside of its specific context should, in fact, elicit feelings of guilt on our part.

To put it simply, there is such a thing as “good guilt,” which manifests our own inner awareness of how we have acted against what is good for us, and violated the objective moral or­der.

I recall a story of a woman who committed adultery, and over time she struggled with feelings of guilt. What she ended up doing, in this situation, was to ration­alize her guilt away with the help of her thera­pist. He managed to con­vince her that she was a "genius of friendship." The woman became "spiritually thin­ner" in her relation­ships with men, and ceased to grow humanly and per­sonally. Simply put, she entered into the worst possible state of spiritual affairs. 

The potential that she had for any deep relationships with mem­bers of the opposite sex was dashed by the way she resolved her guilt: men be­came objects for her crafty genius, and her relationships were reduced to power plays and manipu­lation. She gradually became an empty shell of a woman, with little left that was genuine inside of her. She had en­countered real guilt in her life, but had failed to engage it in a way that could lead to growth, con­version and fulfillment, and her therapist likewise failed her, because he was not sensi­tive to the value of true guilt and the deepest human needs reflected in that guilt — the need to forgive and to be forgiven.

A few years back, Naomi Wolf wrote about a friend of hers who was a "Cornell-educated, urban, Democ­ratic-voting 40-year-old cardi­ologist." This friend had once had an abortion, and afterwards she said something Wolf found very interest­ing: "You know how in the Greek myths when you kill a relative you are pursued by Furies? For months it was as if baby Furies were pursuing me."

No matter what our educa­tion or background, no matter what our level of sophistication may be, we have all received the gift of con­science, and the gift of “good guilt” that is ordered to helping us confront ourselves and turn away from wrong­doing. Pushing away our good guilt or hiding it under the rug only makes our situation worse. We are the only creatures in the animal kingdom ca­pable of illuminating our guilt, of asking why we feel guilty. 

Guilt is like a pain of the soul, and pain often indicates that some­thing is wrong and we should see a doctor. Our guilty feelings about wrongs or evils we have com­mitted should lead us to seek the Di­vine Physician, in the Sacrament of Rec­onciliation, where God's healing touch is personally experienced. For­giveness from God and neighbor leads us to healing and wholeness. In this sense, "good guilt" points to pos­sibilities of inner renewal and free­dom. By becoming attuned to our guilt, and addressing it honestly, we discover a real cause for hope.

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