Tag: Shame

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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.