Spiritual Survival Guide
4: Shame
I must’ve figured (sometimes consciously, mostly not) something like: The only thing I can do at this stage is to just work doubly hard at being good, and work doubly hard to be different from, better than, my family. In other words, overachieve my way into worthiness, into acceptance. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be, and expected to be, a “good kid”—an honest kid, a nice kid. I wanted people’s approval and admiration. But at the same time, deep inside I felt like a terrible phony, pretending to be good when I was just fak- ing it. And I hated that about myself. Hated it. It’s horrible to live with the thought that, deep down, you’re a fake. I lived that way for nearly forty years. And then everything changed. For the past twenty years, my own personal reservoir of shame has been gradually draining away and giving way to joy. At the end of the day, I can only tell you what it’s been like for me, my own path to God’s joy. But maybe there’s something in my story that’ll resonate with yours. For me, the path from shame to joy has been marked by four experiences and four key Bible passages. The first is an ongoing experience of God coming at me with grace and loving me and accepting me from the outside in. For years, I kept reading the gospel of Jesus Christ and repeating it to others. I’d tell people, “It’s so obvious: God is crazy about you, don’t you understand?” As often as not, people would shrug, like they were afraid to be- lieve it. “Yeah, okay. I guess so.”
truth about themselves. I found myself getting drawn back to St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul says “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5, emphasis added). Not dribs and drabs. Poured. Drenched and overflowing. I talked about God’s love so many times to others that I finally started listening to it for myself. That means . . . God is crazy about me. Just because. “Just because” meant that I didn’t need to hide from God or impress him. His grace and acceptance just kept coming, just kept coming, just kept coming. Regardless. Relentless. God’s “just because love” just plain wore down my shame. That’s what grace does. Shame lost its grip on me because the shameful voice in my head got drowned out by the voice of God’s grace saying, I know who you are and what you’ve done. But hear this: I love you more than you can ever know. I love you more than you can ever know. And that love just piled up and piled up. Love just got poured in and poured in and poured in. And, over time, I found myself start- ing to love myself, “just because.” For me, at least, God’s intervening love was the only power strong and persistent enough to break down my unhealthy shame, my secret self-disgust, and my drivenness to prove or earn my way to acceptance. That made all the difference, but it was still only the first step. There were still obstacles to my joy. And that meant I had to learn the art of accepting myself.
“No, I’m telling you. God loves you like crazy.”
I never realized that shame was blocking them from hearing the
I couldn’t seem to shake a sort of lingering resentment against
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