Head buried in his hands. Sitting alone on a bench. Paper lunch bag holding an uneaten peanut butter sandwich. School filled with children. Charlie Brown without his dog or a friend. I don’t know the narrative behind the scene. Did Lucy and her friends just call him, “Blockhead,” or did he fail to impress the Little Red-Haired Girl? While I’m inclined to believe the latter, the result is another moment when Charlie Brown was shamed.
So much of Schulz emerged from Charlie Brown; did you notice they had the same first name? Schulz may well have been the greatest cartoonist to pen a daily strip. He certainly inspired a generation of cartoonists to take up the cause. He also had his own set of insecurity demons, and when reading about his personal story, you find him living between guilt and shame. Not without some irony, the same traits could be found in a boy named Charlie Brown.
But Schulz and Charlie Brown aren’t far from the only ones who struggle with those demons. From the earliest recorded memories of mankind, guilt and shame have tag-teamed humanity. When Adam and Eve realized they were naked in the garden, and more importantly, before God, they made makeshift clothing out of fig leaves and hid themselves (Gen. 3:7). The text doesn’t say why they chose to make the clothes and go into hiding, but filling in the blanks is easy: they sinned against God and felt bad about the sin they committed.
Guilt and shame. The two are easily linked. Together they serve a purpose. They cause great spiritual and emotional discomfort in order to draw us back to God. So when we’ve committed sin and feel the guilt and shame, its purpose is to drive us to repentance, refusing to commit that sin again, and to draw us closer to God. Unfortunately, like the fallen world we live in, it doesn’t always work out that way.
Guilt can have three components to it, and certainly what follows is an over simplification of guilt. First, we experience Real Guilt when we commit a sin or cross a boundary and the sting is felt. You’ve done wrong and you know you’ve done wrong. You lost your temper and unloaded your anger on your child. When the dust settles, you recognize the damage on your child and ask forgiveness from him/her. Secondly, we experience Repressed Guilt when we commit a sin or cross a boundary but instead of feeling the sting of wrong, we’ve compartmentalize our life in such a way as to avoid dealing with the guilt. Unfortunately (or fortunately), eventually what is repressed makes its way to the surface of our lives. What is hidden or buried, like rubber tires in a landfill, cannot stay hidden and buried forever. Once the repressed guilt surfaces, the damage can be felt. Finally, we experienced False Guilt when we do not commit a sin or cross a boundary but feel the sting of wrong as if we did. Usually, False Guilt has an outside element to it by other people’s own insecurities and character flaws projected ourselves. As a minister, I’ve discovered numerous times when people refuse to deal with their own sin, but they’ll project their problems onto the leadership. Sadly, they’ll blame me or someone else for their own guilt.
Guilt and shame have their place in the redemptive story, but can be abused. Using guilt and shame as a form of motivation may have a desirable short-term result, but its long-term impact is negative. Not only does guilt and shame create an environment of fear, it never moves you out of fear. It burdens you. It weighs you down. (see Em Griffith, The Mind Changers). Guilt and shame, as motivators, trap the victim in a perpetual cycle of fear, making one believe he/she is never “good enough” for God’s grace, or that God’s grace is always out of reach.
God does not want us to live our lives encumbered by guilt and shame. He wants to relieve the burden (Jn. 3:16-17). He wants to lead his people beyond guilt and shame where hope, love, mercy, and grace are found (Rom. 8:1). God’s desire is for his transforming power to change our lives so that guilt and shame no longer act as the decisive and/or defining factor in our lives. If he can remove the guilt and shame from the worst of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15), what can he do for you? Or, case of Adam and Eve, we find grace as he made garments out of skin to replace their leaves (Gen. 3:21)?
Charlie Brown, sitting alone on the bench with his head in his hands, has an emotive look to it. Not because it’s a two dimensional cartoon character, but because we’ve all been there. Hope does not arrive because of a boy named Charlie Brown, but because of a Savior named Jesus Christ.
bonum dolar!
(i.e., Good Grief!)