Spiritual Survival Guide
4: Shame
block it out, tamp it all down. We may distract ourselves with busyness or numb ourselves with addictive substances. How many of us are locked up mainly because of how we’ve been cop- ing with our shame? Way too many of us are burdened by our toxic, chronic, secret shame. It’s miserable. It’s painful. And if you look, you can see it in the eyes of just about everyone in prison. Most of us have been bottling our shame up, stuffing it down inside. We continue to carry it around with us. Shame clings to those of us who tend to always compare ourselves to others (physically, socially, whatever) and who inevitably come up short. It hounds those of us who feel that we don’t deserve anything. And it haunts those of us who’ve done some truly awful things in our lives, and now feel marked for life by it. Shame grieves the heart of God, because none of this is what we’re meant for. All we’re really doing by attacking or hiding, of course, is managing our shame. We’re never truly dealing with it. Shame is elusive and tricky. It hides deep down inside. Shame has its own unique pathology. It’s deep- er and more global and more crippling than guilt. With guilt, generally, there’s a way to confess for what we’ve done—to repent, make amends, and try to repair the relationship. But with shame, there’s always the sense that if the other person knew who we really are (with all the mess deep inside us) they’d want out of the relationship altogether, because we’re not worthy of forgiveness or love. We’re stuck. Alone. Shame is deeper than guilt, and it’s more persistent than embarrassment. Embarrassment is uncomfortable, but it comes and goes. It’s episodic. We make mistakes. We all do painfully embarrassing things. The differ- ence is, we can usually laugh about embarrassing moments later. But we don’t laugh about truly shameful things, do we? Shameful pain lingers.
It not only lingers, it grows. It becomes a chronic condition for many of us. It’s like it seeps into our very way of being, percolating and staining everything about ourselves. It colors our every experience. It shapes our identity. It restricts our freedom. And it blocks us from God’s love.
Who Are We, Really?
Shame has a way of touching the very core of our identity. It makes us ask ourselves, Who am I, deep down? What does all this inner dirt, stain, behavior, or thought say about me? What kind of person does the things that I do? If we don’t get this part right, these nagging questions about who we really are, we’re going to keep getting shame wrong. Shame’s going to keep weigh- ing us down, and we’ll never live the new and joyful life that Jesus calls us to. There are two ways to get this question of identity really wrong, and one way to get it right. Here’s the first way we get identity wrong: Lots of us go wrong by making a fundamentally wrong equation. The author Lewis Smedes puts it this way: “I did, therefore I am; this is the fatal equation.” It’s saying that whatever stupid or awful thing I’ve done equals who I am. And we take that fatal, distorted, and overly simplistic equation and turn to Scripture, and guess what? There are plenty of biblical texts that seem to support it. In fact, Jesus’ own language, about us being known by our “fruits” (good trees don’t bear bad fruit; see Matthew 7:15-20), can just seem to pile on the shame. Whenever we start making this on-to-one correspondence between fruit and root, this fusion between whatever bad thing I do and who I am, it’s hard to avoid the defining power of all the bad fruit we’ve produced. It’s
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