Pack Up Your Sorrows

Richard Farina wrote a superb song, which would serve marvelously as a hymn regarding asking God to help you forgive yourself. Here it is:

No use crying, talking to a stranger,
Naming the sorrows you've seen.
Too many sad times, too many bad times,
And nobody knows what you mean.

Ah, but if somehow you could pack up your sorrows,
And give them all to me,
You would lose them, I know how to use them,
Give them all to me.

No use rambling, walking in the shadows,
Trailing a wandering star.
No one beside you, no one to hide you,
Nobody knows where you are.

No use gambling, running in the darkness,
Looking for a spirit that's free.
Too many wrong times, too many long times,
Nobody knows what you see.

No use roaming, lying by the roadside,
Seeking a satisfied mind.
Too many highways, too many byways,
And nobody's walking behind.

Part of one’s sorrows over which we might grieve are feelings of guilt and remorse for slights, missteps, insults, broken promises, and hurts inflicted on others. They drag down the spirit in the same way that Jacob Marley’s chains drag him down, as he wanders through the afterlife. Why do they not disappear? Why can we heal the pain from losing a loved one, and not heal the guilt over not giving more love to that person when they were alive? Guilts are like a cancer which steal energy and nourishment from our spirit.

Some events which produce guilt may not be identifiable as such when they first occur. A simple case is when you forget to get a printer cartridge for your printer, you get home when all the stores close, and discover that your daughter needed to print a 10 page report to be handed in the next day. OK, so you write a note to your daughter’s teacher, go to the store when it opens, print the report, and hand carry it to the school. Problem solved, but a residue of guilt remains, that you could have been so thoughtless, especially if the forgetting was linked to staying overlong at the club after a round of golf.

Some causes for guilt evolve in such a dramatic way, they become the subject of great literature, such as the guilt of Rodion Raskolnikov, the central character of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov murders an unsavory pawnbroker for money, and has fabulous excuses for committing the crime, such as imagining all the good he can do with the money he unlawfully acquires. But, as the story evolves, Raskolnikov becomes more and more weighed down by the guilt of the murder. The great irony of the crime is that it was done to relieve what, in retrospect, seems like a trivial matter: the debt he owed to his landlady.

Guilt was such an overwhelming emotion that it drove Raskolnikov to murder. Guilt, and other toxic emotions such as hate and resentment, when mixed with a mind out of balance can lead to the kind of vicious multiple murders over which we grieve today. Guilt, the burden of a sense of sin, ranges from being an uncomfortable companion on sleepless nights, to being the match which lights the fuse to far more serious problems.

So now we come back to the song. It offers to someone like Scrooge, for example, the opportunity be relieved of years of regret, remorse, and isolation. But who is willing to accept such a burden? It seems magical. It sounds like something Mephistopheles might offer, as he draws off a miasma of guilt from your ear, packs it into a ball, like a snowball, and waves his talon-fingered hand over it, and it has disappeared. No mortal can take on such a burden.

            

But God can. The Lord has an infinite capacity to forgive and place you in the state of his Grace. We know he can absorb suffering in the extreme, and be renewed in life, in the divine which is our fate, if we pack up our troubles and give them all to him. If you find yourself being unable to look people in the eye, or you are reluctant to help with simple things, for fear of making a mistake, perhaps you are due for the blessing of being kind to yourself and accepting the help of Jesus, who can carry your troubles, for he knows what you see.

Amen.

-- Bruce Marold