Tag: Shame

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Learning to Listen to Anger

It has become apparent to me that I have a hard time welcoming the human experience of anger and figuring out what to do with it. That becomes quite a setup for struggle and heartache – especially during years like this past one! As I look around and observe other humans all around me, I realize that I am not the only one having a hard time here.

Never mind that God created the emotion of anger; never mind that his Son Jesus was truly human and experienced anger without sinning. Many of us Christians feel a major “should” that warns us against anger – and then we find ourselves stuck.

Far too often I have avoided feeling or expressing my anger. It turns out that it doesn’t just go away by itself. Anger is experienced interiorly as an urgent call to action; it wants to do things! If we ignore it, much like rushing water, it insists on finding a path. It leaks out on others through sarcastic or shaming comments. It swirls around in resentment, pulling us and those around us down into the muck of self-pity. Or it propels us up to a pedestal of self-righteousness and judgment, from which we eagerly label “those people” as inferior to ourselves and cast blame on them for our misery. It’s all their fault! If only, if only, if only…

Resentment is an especially common way of not listening to our anger. As a wise man I know likes to say, we cling to our resentments; we hug them close and snuggle up with them. That sounds strange yet so true. It is easy to stay in a place of resentment because it doesn’t take any courage. In my resentments, I can identify myself as a victim. “That guy” or “those people” have caused all my problems, and I am powerless to do anything about it. That feels a whole lot safer to me, because it also means I cannot be held responsible – which in turn means I am entitled. Commiserate and gossip about “those people”? Don’t mind if I do! Think of witty labels for those who are causing all my problems? Sure, that will be fun! Binging on comfort food or sugar? Yes, please! Avoiding important tasks that will actually make the world a better place? Hey, if you were suffering as much as I, you would understand!  You get the idea…

Many of us, especially if we have highly empathic hearts, may find that our anger turns inward and erodes us from the inside out. Enter anxiety, depression, or an assortment of bodily illnesses. We can’t bear the thought of showing our anger to others, so we allow it to consume us from the inside. For some reason we find it okay to pour contempt onto our own human dignity, telling ourselves we are being kind to others by holding it in. Only our anger leaks out anyway, and others don’t much care to be around us in those moments.

What can one do?? Clearly, just putting our anger in the driver seat is not recommended. Aggression and violence cause harm to self and others – whether the overt violence of interrupting, shouting, raging, or assaulting; or the more subtle forms of violence such as the silent treatment, sarcasm, gossip, or passive aggression. They all harm and rupture our relationships. They all result from not truly tending to our anger, not learning to listen to it.

Instead, we can see our anger as a God-given warning signal, an invitation to be curious and pay attention, a call to receive the care we need and to work for the justice and peace that Christ came to bring.

Our anger always has something to tell us – although if we listen deeply and empathically, the full message may surprise us. So often what we think is the problem is not really the problem. The thing we think we are so resentful about is actually just the tip of the iceberg – to borrow an image from Mark & Debbie Laaser. If I am really telling the truth to myself, the thing I feel angry about right now – as frustrating as it may be – is actually so painful because I am feeling the same way I felt way back when – and that causes a strong reaction within me. The anger reaction is a call to action warning me of danger – that if I don’t do something, I will feel just as terrified, just as sad, or just as alone and abandoned as I did back then. Instead of “should-ing” away my anger (which never works), I can invite Jesus to join me in listening to it and revealing to me where I most need his love and truth.

In some cases, listening to my anger makes me aware that I am guarding deep and scary places of my heart – reservoirs of unshed tears and grief, tremors of fear or terror, or perhaps even stronger and older anger over harm experienced that was far worse than the injustice presently bothering me. If I allow Jesus to take me into (and back from) those places, my anger becomes the fuel on a journey of retrieving all these broken fragments and becoming a whole person capable of both mercy and justice in the present moment. I begin to know who I truly am and what I deeply desire, and I can be strong in the face of present evils, without needing to “power up” in aggression against others, nor to shrink and hide my true self or let others trample upon me.

Sometimes our anger needs to be expressed. It can be interesting to notice our anger and ask it what it wants to do. Curious asking is quite different from acting out – and if we are in a posture of curiosity and kindness, there is no real risk. Does our anger want to scream? Does it want to smash or break something? Does it want to throw things? Kick or hit or pound? Isn’t it interesting how many different nuances our anger can have? Often noticing what our anger wants to do helps us also to get down to its original root and receive the care that we have needed for a long time.

We can also allow our anger to express itself, giving it healthy outlets, allowing it to pass out of our bodies so that we can be released of it. If we think creatively, there are all kinds of ways for our anger to do what it wants to do while honoring human dignity. As long as we are not harming others or self or damaging personal property, pretty much anything goes.

This is all so counter-intuitive for those of us who have been conditioned to view our anger as “bad.” Far from causing harm, when we take ownership of our anger, allow ourselves to feel it and acknowledge it, and listen empathically to it, we actually gain the freedom to be released from its grip. Our anger does not actually want to be in the driver’s seat – it is crying out for attention and help. When it actually gets heard and taken seriously, it will gladly step out aside and allow the Wisdom of God to take over.

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Shame and The Day of Judgment

During this month of November, the Church’s liturgy (together with nature all around us) invites our hearts to consider the realities of death and judgment – events we prefer not to ponder, especially in our culture of comfort and hedonistic escapes.

The monks of the Middle Ages left us with a haunting, yet stunningly beautiful hymn entitled the Dies Irae, which proclaims that the Day of Judgment is at hand, and urges us to cast our hopes of salvation on Jesus Christ, as he resurrects us and tells the true story of our lives.

In elegant Latin verse, the hymn summarizes that great and dreadful Day: the world as we know it will be dissolved into ashes, the trumpet will sound, and all the dead will be raised from their tombs. Death itself and all of nature will stand agape as the Just One assembles us all before his throne. The written book will be brought forth, in which all is contained, and the stories of that book will be told publicly for all to hear. Whatever has remained hidden will be proclaimed openly. My true story and yours will be told in all fullness

At first blush, the thought of my full story being told for all to hear, full and unabridged, is utterly terrifying. When I tell my story to others, I get to pick and choose what they hear, to keep certain things in and leave other things out, to shade things my way. Not so on the Day of Judgment. My truth is my truth.

But I am learning that, rather than being a day of deep shame, the Day of Judgment (if I desire it) will actually be a day on which I am definitively healed from my shame. The very shame that fills me with dread at the thought of being seen and known is the very shame that needs to be brought to the light of day, indeed, to the light of The Day so often promised in Scripture. Until I am fully seen and fully known, I cannot truly be myself.

Is the Day of Judgment not a Day whose coming we pray for daily? Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come!” Many Christians often pray, “Come, Lord Jesus!” – in words that echo the last words of the Bible: marana tha (“Our Lord, come!”). If he does not come with the fullness of his truth and love, we will never become our truest and deepest selves. We will remain less than fully human.

Shame is a heavy burden, and one with which I am quite familiar. I have spent most of my life finding ways to hide my true self from others. As an infant, as a child, as an adolescent, and beyond, I learned to hide what I was really feeling (shame, sadness, loneliness, or anger). I even pretended for many years like I didn’t have those feelings at all! I learned to be “independent” and self-reliant, pretending like I didn’t need anything from others. Needing others felt shameful. Reaching out for kindness and support felt uncertain and unsafe. And all the while a deep and painful loneliness grew – undetected for many years because it was the ocean in which I was swimming for so long.

In my hiding, I developed a vast array of subtle (or not-so-subtle) defenses that proved highly effective in keeping other people from having access to my truest, deepest self. What a bind that creates! My inner self continues (as God made me) to desire deeply to be seen and known and understood and accepted for who I really am – yet the moment good people actually draw near, I still tend to react in ways that keep them at a distance. I put on one kind of mask or the other, so they can’t see the real me.

Then, of course, there are my many sins – all the ways, over the years, in which I have stumbled in my ungodly self-reliance and self-protection; the harm I have caused to others and to self; the rupture to relationships. There are my darkest or most twisted fantasies – the “if only…” thoughts or urges that I like to pretend are not really there. How could I possibly look forward to those being proclaimed publicly on the Day of Judgment?

The Dies Irae provides the answer to all this anguish after it asks similar questions. What am I to do, poor wretch that I am, in the face of so great a Judge, before whom even the just cannot be secure? Is there anyone who can plead for me on that Day?

Yes. The King of Majesty will plead for me. He freely and gratuitously saves those who desire salvation. He longs to save me.

The hymn proceeds to tell the ultimate story, the definitive story – the story of Jesus, who though divine, freely and willingly emptied himself, became one of us, and saved us in his Passion and Resurrection. When my story is perfectly united to his story, every moment of my life has new meaning. All my masks can be removed and laid to rest, my true self can be seen, and all can hear my full story – a story redeemed and transformed by Jesus. When my story is told, all can hear how Jesus was there at every moment – especially the moments of greatest heartache, heartbreak, and shame, moments in which I was betrayed, moments in which I betrayed others. All the while he was attuning to my heart, and gazing upon me with love and kindness as a beloved child of his Father. He was suffering with me and for me, weeping with me, breathing life into me, and rejoicing with me.

When we talk about dying with Christ and rising with Christ, it is so much more than a cliché! We prefer to compartmentalize, and lock away certain parts of our story. But that means leaving them unredeemed, and it means not being a whole person in Christ. Only when we allow him, the Alpha and the Omega, the true author of all human history, to take authority over all these shards and fragments, can we find ultimate resolution to the discord in our story. That means going down with him into the dark places and allowing him to shine forth with his love and truth. We all have memories in which (if we are honest) we do not truly believe that God is good. Jesus surprises us with the new life of his resurrection, and opens us to be loved even in those memories in which we feel unlovable. We don’t have to hide.

The Dies Irae has many dark notes in it, and is a beautiful hymn. It ends with stunning trust and hope in the one who loves us and so empowers us to be just and holy. Perhaps the book that will be opened on the Day of Judgment will be more like a book of music. Each of our songs will be sung. No doubt, there will be many discordant measures, bearing witness to our darkest days. But if I give Jesus permission to tell my story, it will be a song that gives great glory to God. And all those assembled will only be able to sing a resounding “AMEN!” in response – for he is Truth itself.

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P.S. – This piece by the CBC explores the vast musical influence of the Dies Irae over the centuries.

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Dispelling the Shadows of Shame

I have come to realize that shame is the devil’s tactic of choice in his efforts to ruin our human existence. Certainly he entices and allures, divides and distracts. Occasionally he openly attacks, but he would much rather not. In those moments we might call upon the name of the Lord and be saved. If there’s anything the devil can’t stand, it’s being defeated yet again.

Rather than an open fight, the devil much prefers to lurk in the shadows and undermine us without our even noticing. As Kevin Spacey famously said in The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

The devil subtly shames us with his lies, keeping us from becoming fully ourselves. If we don’t unmask him and expose him, if we don’t even notice that he’s there, he can deceive us with ease, convincing us that we are unlovable, that we must avoid being vulnerable, and that we must hide ourselves from others and even from God.

Curt Thompson wrote a marvelous book on the subject entitled The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. He offers the image of a “shame attendant” who follows each of us around, pretending to be a loyal servant, eagerly whispering his counsel in our ear. I think immediately of Grima Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings, who kept sapping and undermining the strength of King Theoden with his whispered distortions and lies.

Shame is all about distorting our true story. We humans are storytellers by our very nature. Even though we only know some of the facts in any given situation, we generally cannot resist filling in the gaps with assumptions about the parts of the story that we do not know. This is how rumors get started. This is why twenty different witnesses can give twenty different accounts of the same event. This is why one momentary interaction in daily life can sometimes feel like just a normal human interaction and other times can send us on a downward spiral for hours or even days.

An acquaintance walks past without stopping to talk. A co-worker asks for a status report on our project that we are behind on. A parish member asks us how our struggling child is doing in school. A friend posts social media photos of amazing family activities. A spouse offers a suggestion for how to do something differently. Any one of these innocuous experiences can cause a sudden shift. We might immediately feel the urge to withdraw or isolate or procrastinate; we might lash out at the person; we might find ourselves replaying conversations over and over in our mind, trying to find just the right response.

Behind those reactions are the whispers of our shame attendant: There you go again; you always fail at those things… You’ll never be as successful as him… You’ll never be beautiful like her… Of course she would walk away from you; why would you let someone get close to you like that?… He wouldn’t understand – no one will ever really understand you… If you make mistakes like that, no one will want to be around you anymore… You’re stuck; nothing will ever change… People will always let you down; they’ll leave you once they really get to know you…

The devil is the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning. He sees God’s glory in us and cannot stand it. Often very early in life, he begins his carefully planned attack. He sneaks in when we are the most powerless and vulnerable, and whispers lies and half-truths into our ears. He uses a few facts to begin distorting our story. This constant whisper becomes so much a part of our life that we cease noticing it. We learn to hide and isolate, for fear of feeling vulnerable.

The hiding and isolating can come in many forms: avoidance and withdrawal, shifting the blame to others, putting on a fake persona, overachieving, or addictive behaviors. Every addiction is fueled by shame. Whereas intimate relationships run the risk of abandonment or rejection, the soothing of an addiction (sugar, alcohol, shopping, pornography, binge watching) will always be there for us, won’t make any immediate demands, and will numb the shame if only for a brief time.

Perfectionism is also fueled by shame, and often goes hand in hand with addictive behaviors. Behind every perfectionist is a shame attendant whispering why failure is not an option: I am only lovable if I am accomplished and successful; I am not lovable when I make mistakes or fail; I have to…or else… When the pressures of perfectionism become crushing and unbearable, the escape of an addiction can feel irresistible.

Shame doesn’t just infect our minds in the form of negative self-talk or accusations; it also affects our emotions and even our bodies. We are a unity of body, mind, and spirit. So we typically feel shame and even carry it in our bodies. That is why our shame reactions can be so strong and so lasting in certain day-to-day human interactions. Many of us have shame-laden memories, unresolved moments in our story that we keep hidden away – moments in which we felt totally worthless or unlovable, threatened or powerless, rejected or alone or abandoned. In those memories, our body felt certain sensations. If we ever feel those again, our brain immediately sets off its “smoke alarm” (the amygdala) and warns us that we are in grave danger – even when we are not. We react. We hide. We isolate.

The solution is so counter-intuitive. We need to be seen and known, to come to the light, to be loved and to belong. It only works if I surrender and allow all of myself to be seen and accepted and loved (including the “bad” parts I would rather lock away).  If I pull back and only project an avatar of myself, a “safe” and edited version to share with others, I will never truly be known and loved – and shame can stay in the driver’s seat, ever reminding me that there are other weaker parts of me that must be kept hidden at all costs.

To be human is to be vulnerable, whether we like it or not. The whispers of shame convince us that we must not allow ourselves to feel vulnerable. So long as we are beholden to those whispers, we are unable to be healed and integrated as a whole person. We continue to experience what Mother Teresa described as the greatest form poverty – to feel alone and unloved.

And you – what are the parts of yourself that you hide from others or from God? Are you willing to be known and seen and heard by at least a few trustworthy people, and by God? He does not pull back; he loves us for who we are and he has always loved us. He has loved us “even when…” If we ask, he will also help us find others who can play that role of loving us for who we are. Those people are there to be found – we are just afraid!

Stepping out into the experience of vulnerability can be terrifying at times (believe me, I know!). But the shadows of shame take flight the more that we allow it to happen.

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Vulnerable AND Safe

For many of us, vulnerability is one of the hardest human experiences to manage. It can be terrifying and overwhelming. It can cause us to feel exposed, naked, unprotected, or unsafe – and we can find fifty ways to run or to hide.

Fleeing from vulnerability is a story as old as the human race itself. Following the fall, the whispers of shame urged Adam and Eve to run and hide themselves, and to try to cover their nakedness.

Unfortunately, I cannot be in an intimate relationship with God if I am hiding and protecting myself from Him. I cannot experience close connection with other human beings if I am hiding and protecting myself from them. You are perhaps familiar with the famous quote from C.S. Lewis:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

In the Incarnation, Jesus chose to be vulnerable. The eternal Son of God who was immortal willingly took on our human flesh. One motive was to be able to offer himself on the Cross, to pay the price of our redemption. As God, he could not die. As man, he could. But becoming flesh was not simply about paying a ransom on the Cross. The deeper motive was to love us, to show us how to love, and to make us all capable of loving in that way. From start to finish, vulnerable love was the motive of Jesus becoming flesh and of everything he said and did in the flesh.

“And the Word became vulnerable and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). That would be another way of putting it. To be human is to be vulnerable. This is the profound insight of Curt Thompson in The Soul of Shame: “So much of what we do in life is designed, among other things, to protect us from the fact that we are vulnerable at all times. To be human is to be vulnerable.”

At all times we humans are vulnerable – able to be wounded, abandoned, rejected, excluded, betrayed, injured, or killed. Sometimes we barely notice our vulnerability, and other times we feel it intensely. But it’s always there.

Jesus shows us how our human condition of vulnerability need not be an experience of shame and isolation, but can be transformed into an experience of healing and salvation. When we listen to the Gospels closely, we hear one story after another of Jesus modeling vulnerability for us. His heart remains wide open in love, even when others are misunderstanding, accusing, rejecting, or abandoning him. He does not break off to hide himself. Yes, he spends forty days in the desert, but that was actually an even deeper experience of vulnerability, enduring temptation as well as allowing himself to be comforted by the angels God sends.

Many of us resist and avoid vulnerability because we tend to associate being vulnerable with feeling shame – and shame is perhaps the most painful human emotion. When we feel shame as Adam and Eve felt it, we feel unlovable and devoid of dignity. We do not want to be seen or known. So we hide and isolate. Shame thrives in isolation. What begins as one traumatic experience – genuinely painful – becomes a perpetual cycle that we do not know how to break. Jesus, the New Adam, breaks our cycle of shame and opens for us a vulnerable path to salvation.

This path includes connecting with God and others. Again, Jesus is our model of what it means to be truly human. He does not go it alone. He consistently reaches out to his Father and to his friends – even when they choose to abandon him. He establishes the Church as a community of believers, calling each by name, but always into a community of faith. When we hear the story of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles it is a story of community and communion, not of isolation. Salvation happens in Christian community.

The name Jesus means “Savior,” and salvation means becoming safe by becoming whole and holy. It is safety that we are seeking when we hide from our vulnerability. But we will not find wholeness or holiness in our hiding. We may need it for a time, especially when our survival truly depends on it. But our places of hiding, our panic rooms, will indeed become tombs and places of death if we refuse to let ourselves be seen and known.

The invitation to salvation is an invitation to become vulnerable AND safe. We may understand this at intellectual level, but it is important to experience it as well. That means finding a safe community in which we can truly be seen and known, heard and understood, cherished and appreciated and encouraged.

There are many in twelve step programs who have claimed that they find an experience of Jesus much more easily in the church basement (in their group meetings) than in the church itself, where they find plenty of people putting on masks, bustling about, rigidly following rules, judging and gossiping, or following familiar routines – but precious few people opening up humbly in vulnerable human connection. That is quite an indictment! Is that true of me or of my parish community?

To put it differently – when broken people walk through our doors, feeling their shame deeply, what will they encounter here? Will they find a friendly face who shows them that it is safe to be vulnerable here? Or will they find fifty new ways of hiding from their vulnerability?

Those are questions that we can all take to prayer this Lent!

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The Stories We Tell

We humans are storytellers by our very nature. Our brains are tirelessly at work (even while we sleep!), putting the pieces of our life into a story that will help us make sense out of it. Storytelling is so much a part of being human that most of us don’t even notice when we are doing it. We easily jump to a conclusion from one or two bits of information: a colleague yawning during our presentation, a friend not returning a text message, a request from our boss for an urgent meeting, or a member of the opposite sex greeting us with a smile. Our mind begins spinning stories, true or not. It takes a disciplined detective to remain open to the evidence and not get misled by the red herrings. Indeed, one of the hardest human things to do is to abide in that in-between place in which we do not yet know the whole story, and be content to watch and wait.

Perhaps that is why I was so aggravated by the ending of the hit TV show Lost – do you remember it? For so many of us, it captivated our hearts, only to leave us unsatisfied, irritated, or downright frustrated.

While I was in Rome working on my doctorate, a group of us watched a couple of episodes each week. We laughed; we shed tears; we waited with bated breath for the next week’s episodes. When the finale came out, I prepared a steak dinner on the roof of our residence and we had a lovely evening – lovely, that is, until we watched the final episode. One of my friends was actually cursing and swearing as he hurled his ottoman across the room – mostly for dramatic effect. But his theatrics told the story of what our hearts were feeling at the time. We were deeply dissatisfied with the lack of resolution. We felt used, manipulated, and cast aside. How could someone spin a story, leave so many enticing hints and fragments, and then leave so many parts unresolved?

It was the best of TV shows; it was the worst of TV shows. It was so amazing because it was storytelling within storytelling. I believe it was the flashbacks that made the show especially great. Each character had a deeply believable, profoundly complex, and totally human story. Little by little, fragments of their life emerged. It was easy to empathize with them, to feel their heartache and heartbreak, to cheer them on in their courageous moments of growth, or to cringe with disappointment when they took steps into the shadows. As the episodes progressed, the pieces of the past of each character, the sum total of the things done to them and the things they freely did, all served as warp and weft, forming the fabric of one gripping life story. It was beautiful.

I suppose that Lost suffered the fate of so many American TV shows – the curse of popularity. So long as a TV show can somehow be profitable, new episodes will continue to be generated, regardless of the quality. Lost found some new life by introducing new characters and by going even more in depth in the stories of some of the old standbys. But the plot twists of the show itself, while thrilling and enticing, eventually became its demise. In its final seasons, Lost left cliffhanger after cliffhanger – and just kept moving on to the next cliffhanger, without ever circling back for resolution. In the end, we felt like the woman who keeps going back to her abusive lover. Surely this time it will be different! In the end, like an abusive lover, the show did not deliver on its empty promises. And still, we loved it.

I’ve done some fascinating reading lately: Dare to Lead by Brené Brown, The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall, and The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson. While I don’t endorse 100% of what they say, all three books inspired much meditation and reflection. All three describe this deeply human quality of storytelling. We are storytellers by our very nature. Without stories, we cannot make sense out of life.

But there is a shadowy side to our storytelling. Not all of our stories are true stories. In our unwillingness to watch and wait in hope, we can begin telling lies about ourselves, about others, and about God.

I know for myself that I have often fluctuated back and forth between one of two extremes: self-exaltation and self-shaming.  In my moments of self-exaltation, I deny or minimize my unseemly behaviors or my personal problems. Puffed up with pride, I begin relying on myself and growing in a false confidence. In those moments, I easily excuse behaviors in myself that I totally dislike in others. I put on a mask and project a version of myself that I would like others to accept. I suspect I am not alone in these tendencies.

In the present age of social media, there is an ever greater temptation to tell a well-crafted and glamorous story about ourselves – whether or not it is true – and to compare our story to the story of others. All of these self-exalting stories are cardboard cutouts, like the filming stage of an old a spaghetti western. Then come those moments in which the truth knocks over our façade, and we are terrified of being discovered for the fraud that we (think we) are.

The other side I often experience is telling a story of self-shaming. Then my survival instincts kick in: fight or flight or freeze. At my worst, I begin blaming others or become demanding or demeaning. More commonly, I withdraw into isolation and coping, or I avoid anything that feels challenging, for fear of failure. I know I am not the only one who does these things.

The problem with both versions of storytelling (self-exaltation and self-shaming) is that they are highly selective. We are taking only parts of our story, and distorting the whole. Our lives our complex. Like the characters on Lost, we make many mistakes AND we make heroic choices amidst difficult circumstances. Evil things are done to us AND we freely choose to cooperate in evil.  We are victims of tragedy AND we are given opportunities for freedom and redemption. We behave in ugly or hurtful ways AND we show great sensitivity and compassion.

The bigger story for each of us is the story of a redeemed sinner who is in the process of being sanctified by Jesus. Every part of our story matters. Every part needs to be touched by his healing grace. When our entire story, in every detail, gets united with the saving story of Jesus, we begin to discover who we really are – and it is far more beautiful and more worth living than any pretend story we’ve ever told about ourselves. We can be known and loved in our story. Then, on the Day of Judgment, when our merciful Savior opens the Book of Life and proclaims our entire story for all to hear, all will praise God for the amazing story Jesus has told in and through us.

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A Most Memorable Homily

**DISCLAIMER – If you do not enjoy a little earthy humor, then this post may not be for you**

Pope Gregory the Great was a legendary preacher. But he gave at least one crappy homily. That is to say, he gave a homily in which dung was a featured metaphor.

How, you might ask, did I stumble upon this homily? Mainly because of my stepdad’s propensity for poop jokes. They weren’t necessarily his favorite form of humor, but they were a solid number two. He certainly struggled with his woundedness, but no one ever denied his sense of humor. Like many dads, he was an old pro at the “pull my finger” bit. But he also had more elaborate jokes. If we had friends over, when they asked to use our bathroom, he would normally encourage them to write their weight on the wall. When they looked at him in confusion and bewilderment, he would explain, “That way if you fall in, we know how much to scoop out.” My sisters didn’t exactly appreciate him saying that to their boyfriends, but I think all of us far preferred his lighthearted and mischievous moods to his angry ones.

When you do doctoral research in theology, you never know what you might find. There I was back in 2010, sifting through various texts of the early Church Fathers, when I noticed Gregory repeatedly using the Latin word stercus (“dung”). Given my crappy upbringing, I definitely did a double take. I couldn’t resist reading the entire homily. It ended up being one of the most remarkable bits of writing that I’ve ever read, beginning with the earthiness of manure and culminating with an intense heavenly yearning (both in Gregory’s preaching and in my own heart).

The homily ponders two images from Luke 13:6-17: the parable of the fruitless fig tree and the healing of the stooped woman. For three years the fig tree has born no fruit, and the master is ready to remove it. The steward begs the master for one more chance. He will dig around the tree. He will take a bucket of dung and fertilize the tree at its roots. Then, if it still bears no fruit, the master can cut it down.

Gregory compares the fruitless fig tree to our fallen human nature. The works of the flesh leave us fruitless. We are in need of conversion and repentance. We need to become detached and free from our sins – not merely in the moment of acting out, but going down to the roots of our pride.

How does the dung come in? As Gregory explains, “What is the bucket of dung but the mindfulness of our sins?” Remembering the stench of our sins while simultaneously stretching out in works of charity, we grow and bear fruit.

Gregory describes this mindfulness of our sins as “compunction” – a virtue rarely talked about in these decades of promoting positive self-esteem. While I fully acknowledge the damage done by low self-esteem, self-loathing, or shame, I am also convinced of the wisdom of Gregory on this point. Compunction is a humble awareness of our sinfulness and our total dependence on God.  We will never bear fruit without Him.

There is definitely a difference between compunction and shame.

Compunction involves true humility, leading us to rise above our sins and failures and reach out to heavenly truth. Shame, by contrast, is a sort of upside-down version of pride. We prefer denial or minimizing because, deep down, we know that some of our behaviors really stink. We are afraid that other people, if allowed too close to the stench, will stop loving us.

Compunction leads us to have deep compassion towards others, overcoming any anger or judgment we initially feel towards them. If we ourselves stand in so much need of mercy, how can we be hard on others? Shame, meanwhile, can lead to a festering fear, anger, and self-protection. In my stepfather’s case, I am convinced that much of his anger was the only way he knew to protect himself from the painful shame that he felt. He was terrified that none of us would love him if we knew the real him. So when he felt his shame most deeply, he raged the most violently. There are others who see their anger and rage as unacceptable emotions. So they turn instead to self-righteousness, judgment, or passive aggression. Both kinds of anger (active and passive) can cover over our fear and shame, rather than facing them truthfully. Both can become toxic and destructive in their own way.

Compunction is truth-telling about ourselves, whereas shame is laden with lies. Compunction refuses to deny or rationalize or minimize the ugliness of our sins. We have sinned; we have harmed relationships with God and others and self; and we “take full responsibility” – not by saying those words as a cliché but by actually confessing our sins, asking for help from God and others, and sincerely surrendering ourselves to radical change.

Literally, “compunction” denotes poking with a stick. In this case, a stinky stick. Any time we find ourselves puffing up with a false inflation of our ego, we have the memory of our sins to burst our bubble and keep us grounded in true humility. But this only works if it goes hand-in-hand with an unshakable confidence in God’s Fatherhood. We can we become “firmly rooted in love” (Ephesians 3:17), fertilized and nourished by an authentic compunction and humility. It is then that the real growth in Christ begins.

How on earth does this relate to the story of the stooped woman? I’ll finish that thought next time.

NOTE: This remarkable homily of Gregory the Great was given on June 10, 591. If you are a Patristic nerd, you can find the original Latin text in SC 522: 252-266 or PL 76, 1227-1232. If you don’t read Latin, there is an English translation in this book.

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