Break Free from Guilt

Every Sunday morning of my childhood, I found myself kneeling in the wooden pews of our local Catholic church, surrounded by the familiar scent of incense and the soft murmur of prayers. My parents, devout Catholics, made sure we never missed Mass. Week after week, we would recite the Confiteor, a prayer of confession that included the words "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." As a child, I would dutifully beat my chest three times while speaking these words, just as everyone else did, but something about this ritual always troubled me. I intuitively felt it was ridiculous.

Imagine if, as a parent, you made your five-year-old child kneel before you each week, strike their chest, and declare their faults. We would recognize this as psychologically damaging, perhaps even abusive. Yet somehow, when wrapped in religious ceremony, people accepted this same ritual as spiritual necessity. We would never force our own children to perform such rituals of shame and self-blame. So why would God - who is supposedly the embodiment of perfect love and compassion - demand this of us?

The truth is, the divine force - whether we call it God, the One Life, Spirit, or the Absolute - never demanded such performances of guilt. These rituals of self-blame are human inventions, created by religious institutions.