Yesterday I awoke in the middle of the night from a dream filled with terrible guilt over some vague-ish transgression I’d committed in France. I reminded myself I’ve never been to France, and went back to sleep.

I realized there was some metaphysical profundity in that dream, though, and later – when I was up and about – pondered the dream some more.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy has a lot to say about dreams. “Mortal existence is a dream…” she writes, and “Whatever indicates the fall of man or the opposite of God or God’s absence, is the Adam-dream, which is neither Mind nor man, for it is not begotten of the Father.”

The belief that we’re born in guilt, living in guilt, that our moments and hours and days – even our dreams – should be filled with guilt, is a boatload of balderdash, a heap of rubbish, a 20 foot-long baloney sandwich. It is, I believe, the cause of a lot of grief and wasted time for humanity.

I really like what Edward A. Kimball has to say about self-condemnation in his book, Lectures and Articles on Christian Science. He writes, “It won’t do you a particle of good to enter upon a career of self-condemnation. Remorse never got anybody into heaven. A sense of regret and all that sort of thing is not the process. The process is reform; it is change; it is correction…”

And the late great Ethel Waters said, “I am somebody cause God don’t make no junk.” We are all, I believe, the sons and daughters of Love – worthy of everything good and joyful the universe has to offer. Love don’t make no guilt-ridden junk.

(Ahem. The following needs to be read in a revival meeting kind of voice to get the full effect): Rise up, my brothers and sisters! Wake up and rise, I say! For you are free-born and worthy and guilt-free! Allelujah and amen and pass the joy.

snowgeese in flight (photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)