Existential Guilt

In my senior year of college, I did a paper on existential psychology.  I encountered the concept of "existential guilt."  At this point I was very familiar with Southern Baptist guilt.  I felt guilty about masturbating,  committing adultery in my heart,  and voting for Jimmy Carter for president.  I didn't really need to learn about another kind of guilt, but not only did I find out about it, but realized I had it in spades.   Existential guilt is feeling angst about not taking advantage of all the possibilities in one's life.  My first thought went to the girl who'd kissed me at our high school graduation and said she hoped to see me later in the evening, and then she ended up at the party I'd been invited to, but missed.  Up to that point I thought God had simply intervened to protect me from myself.  Of course, now I'm pretty sure if I'd gotten laid that night, I might not have ended up married at twenty.  But that wasn't the biggest source of my existential guilt.

I was about to graduate from college with a bachelor's in religion, because at nine, during an emotionally charged revival meeting, I felt the "call" to become a preacher.  I lived the next ten years of my life preparing for that calling, which included the instructions of my father to not marry a girl who didn't want to be a preacher's wife.  Since all the girls I dated in high school were Methodists, I waited until I met a good Baptist girl who told me she'd dreamed that she was supposed to marry a preacher.  That led to another reason for existential guilt, but I won't get into that.

The main source of my guilt is that I discovered that I'd spent the last ten years preparing for an occupation I never really wanted to do, and didn't realize it until I heard the words come out of my lips in the form of a confession during a group counseling exercise for one of my psych classes.  It's now been thirty years and I've worked in group homes, juvenile detention facilities, and other social programs.  I've preached part-time.  For the last ten years I've preached at a Presbyterian church, but I don't think I'm really Presbyterian.  More and more the atheists sound the most reasonable to me, but I can't quite go that far yet.

Now that I look back at all the possibilities of the past I have angst over missing, I must admit that the only one that gives me pause is failing to get laid on graduation night.