(continued from Part 1)
The literature on shame all gets around sooner or later to one of its most characteristic and troublesome features, namely, that it often detaches from reality. Thus, some folks shrug off real disgrace while others needlessly beat up on themselves. Blissful drunks, for example, feel no pain and (for the time being) no shame. The same may be true of happy-go-lucky strippers, the literally impudent. On the other side, highly motivated but only moderately accomplished students who feel like failures when they do not become class valedictorian need a dose of reality therapy. Leaving aside their pretentiousness, they are in better shape than they think.
Some false shame stems from the sin of conceit–the overestimate of one’s abilities or worth. Conceit, like all sin, is not only wrong, but also foolish. One of the reasons (besides its detachment from reality and its alienating effect) that conceit is so foolish is that it sets us up for a fall. It sets us up for shame. The generative idea in conceit is that my life is and ought to be superior.
I ought never to forget a name or mispronounce a word in the company of the lexicographically elite. I ought never to act like a nincompoop, not even accidentally. Nincompoopery is for losers. So are moderate praise, limited recognition, humble relatives, and middle income. As for me and my house, we deserve to dwell at the peaks.
In narcissism, a psychiatric disorder that incorporates at least self-centeredness and that often includes some degree of conceit as well, shame precedes and follows grandiosity. The grandiose narcissist tells a lot of tall tales about himself, but they are desperate and improbable attempts to cover shame–a “badly made toupee,” as Nathanson remarks. Narcissism is full of twists away from reality. Donald Capps observes that when narcissists detect envy or one of the other deadly sins in themselves, they use the language of guilt (“I feel guilty when I want Fred to drive his new Beemer through the end of his garage”), but experience the emotion of shame. That is, they think they have let themselves down. As they see it, the primary casualty of their sin has been their own status and the self-esteem that belongs with it. The narcissistic sinner therefore feels not so much culpable as depleted.
But false or distorted shame may arise just as easily from sources outside the self. In his “Shame and Grace,” a sterling theological contribution to the field, Lewis Smedes remarks that a lot of unhealthy shame (“a false voice from our false self”) gets loaded onto us by secular culture and graceless religion and unaccepting parents. For example, some parents set a standard of acceptability that is unattainable not only because it is so high, but also because it is so cruelly inexplicit. Children simply cannot find out what it would take to please these vague and lofty parents. “Unaccepting parents,” says Smedes, “signal to us that we are somehow indefinitely horrid and that to be acceptable we need to be just the opposite of the unspecified dolts we are.”
What’s clear from all these examples is that we feel like oddities or failures only by reference to a standard of some kind. And here lies trouble, given that shame–inducing standards can be deceptive, silly, or cruel.
Thus, a mafia soldier disobeys a capo’s order, spares an innocent witness, and feels immediately chagrined. A guest on a daytime talk show spills the beans about all his affairs with lovers, and with some of the mothers of his lovers, but feels diminished by the more-rakish-than-thou exploits of another guest. A teenage girl is ashamed of being a virgin. A Christian student at a fashionable university is ashamed of the gospel. A Manhattan socialite spends thousands of dollars in renovation of her bathroom in order to build in a refrigerator above one end of her tub, reasoning that to step out of a bath and apply tepid cologne is “demeaning.”
Psychologically correct souls feel ashamed of feeling guilty. In a cartoon that Smedes cites, a psychiatrist remonstrates with a slow-learning patient: “You’ve been in analysis for six months and you still feel guilty? Shame on you!”
In “Remembering Denny,” Calvin Trillin tells of a Yale classmate from the 1950s who had it all. Denny Hansen was handsome, funny, and intelligent. He was a charismatic golden boy from California, who was also a record-breaking swimmer, a genial magnet for admirers, a Rhodes Scholar, and president of everything he joined. Indeed, all through school days, his friends kept making bets and jokes about the day when Denny Hansen would be elected President of the United States. But across the years after college, family members and friends gradually lost touch with Denny, in part because he did not answer their letters or return their calls. As they later discovered, Denny’s career trajectory had flattened out and he had not wanted to say so. After all, he had not become President, nor even Speaker of the House. He had never married. His career was a shameful failure: all he had done was to have authored several respected books and occupied a professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of International Relations. And he was homosexual in a time when people did not speak of such conditions openly. Having carried an intolerable burden of promise as far as he could, one day in his middle age the golden boy from California threw it off by poisoning himself with carbon monoxide.
A GOSPEL FOR THE SHAMED
Psalm 103 blesses the Lord for “all his benefits,” which include not only the forgiveness of sins, but also the lifting of shame. God is the one who heals our diseases, redeems our lives from the Pit, and crowns us with love and compassion. These themes–healing and lifting and crowning–echo through the psalms. God “heals the brokenhearted” (Ps. 147:3). God draws his people “out of the depths” from which they cry (Ps. 30), a metaphor not only for death, but also for depression, corruption, and the distress brought to us by gloating enemies. In his program of redemption, God calls people not only to repentance with the promise of forgiveness, but also to faith with the promise of resurrection. God attaches to the lowly and the unclean, raising them from their slime and crud. Where shame is concerned, God may be trusted to lift and to cleanse and to cloak us with love.
This is the primitive gospel, and it appears as soon as there is sin. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve try to hide their disgrace. As Vernard Eller once wrote, they make a clumsy attempt to patch up, hitch up, and cover up before God and before their own prying and sorry eyes. “They sewed fig leaves together and made loin cloths for themselves” (3:7). But these garments are the product of unskilled labor and cannot last. So God, in an inspired act of mercy, tailors for them “garments of skins” (3:21). Human beings generate shame; God covers it with a durable product that requires the shedding of blood. Human beings suffer a metaphysical chill; God warms them with garments they should never have needed.
So it goes across Scripture, and notably at its center in the life of Christ. Older dogmatics properly speak of the “states of Christ,” a parabola-shaped pattern of pre-existence, humiliation, and exaltation, drawn especially from the kenosis or “emptying” hymn of Philippians 2. The Lord empties himself of divine prerogatives in order to share our lot. The humiliation of Jesus Christ includes not only the indignity of trying to stuff his divine life into the cramped precincts of a human one (to get the idea, says C. S. Lewis, imagine how you’d like to become a slug), but also all the indignities and miseries of his passion.
Two miseries in particular, mockery and crucifixion, tell us that shame is on heaven’s agenda for incarnation and for redemption. In Matthew 27, Jesus is subjected to military mockery, one of the oldest, fiercest, and most effective forms of humiliation. We like to think of the suffering Lord as a tragic figure, sorrow and love flowing mingled down his brow. Matthew shows us the Lord treated as a fool. Here he is, ringed by jeering soldiers, draped with somebody’s motheaten bathrobe, adorned with a sick joke of a crown, hair matted with other men’s spit. Here, as Douglas Nelson remarks, is the King of Heaven with a military boot in his back, lurching around a drill ground while soldiers kneel and giggle. Here at the depths of the passion according to Saint Matthew is God made to look absurd.
“The deformity of Christ forms you,” said Augustine. “If he had not been willing to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form you had lost.” Jesus Christ bore the griefs and carried the sorrows of all the Philip Careys of the world. He suffered not only for human sin, but also from it-from one of the vilest forms of it. For mockery shames to the quick. Mockery mortifies a person. And, indeed, Matthew makes the inevitable link between mockery and death: “After they had mocked him, they . . . put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him” (27:31). Where mockery is concerned, crucifixion is just a way of finishing it off.
Indeed, the Romans reserved crucifixion for persons they wanted both to humiliate and to kill. Crucifixion exposed a person–first by stripping, then by publicly assaulting his flesh and tendon and bone, and then by presenting the person, now trapped and maimed, as a spectacle. The crucified one knew that he was naked, and if he did not, the catcalls of local wags and jokers would remind him. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ, that howling wilderness event, stripped our Lord not only of his clothing, but also of his friends and disciples, who largely left him. Finally, he lost even the comfort of God. “My God, why have you abandoned me?” is a cry from the depths that contains a hint of accusation as well as of desolation and lament. Jesus, the friend of sinners, got crucified between his kind of people in the sort of godforsaken place where you would expect to find them. When darkness moved in from noon till three, it was as if the good earth itself had become ashamed of him.
Hebrews tells us that, in an act of enormous courage and defiance, Jesus “endured the cross, despising the shame” (12:3) and then adds, significantly, that he is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and ascension–the going down and coming up of the Son of God–open the way not only for the forgiveness of our sins, but also for the lifting of our shame. For these are ingredients in the accepting grace of God and in the invitation to union with God’s Son.
If the Christian gospel springs from the states and events of Christ, and if it addresses our shame as well as our guilt, then we ought to minister the gospel accordingly. As Tom Goodhue remarks, well-meaning exoneration (“But it’s not your fault”) often misses the point. The same is true of a call to confession of sin and a plea for pardon. In fact, remarkably enough, confession of sin may be too simple. Many a problem drinker would much rather say “I drank too much last night and got way out of line; Please forgive me” than “My name is Sam, and I’m an alcoholic.” For this last declaration goes to who he is and not simply to what he has done; it goes to his shame, and not just to his guilt. Many an addict has confessed his sin again and again, as if guilt were his main problem, but he’s still an addict afterward, and the fumes of his shame keep reigniting his addiction. The truth is that he needs not just the God who forgives, but also the God who heals; not just the good Pardoner, but also the Great Physician. He needs care and support that have been shaped to fit what actually ails him.
(continued in Part 3)
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 3
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