(continued from Part 2)

CARING FOR THE SHAMED

So what is the shape of such care? How do we treat each other's shamed and vulnerable selves? Though we do not have space here properly to develop the topic of care for the shamed (and therefore recommend such books as those of Smedes and Albers), we nonetheless offer four observations.

1. Not all shame is bad. Under certain circumstances, shame accompanies guilt and is therefore a sign of health. A person who has lied or cheated or stolen has displeased God, defrauded his neighbor, and disgraced himself. Both guilt and shame are therefore excellent emotions for him to feel for a time, a double wakeup call. Ministry to those who are shamed by their guilt will, accordingly, include some frank acknowledgment of sin and a willingness to name and even to discuss the distress that attaches to it.

But such candor needs a secure context, and it needs a time limit. This is true not only for the shame that attaches to wrongdoing, but also for other kinds. Ministry to the shamed includes the provision of a safe space--relatively private, firmly supportive, warmly hospitable--in which candor and unmistakable love combine to encourage the disclosure of shame and, in good time, its dissipation. These safe confessionals are especially valuable because they are rare. What we find too often instead are merciless contexts, such as the cubicles of the King's School, or else judgmental ones, such as the ring of Pharisees around the woman taken in adultery in John 8, or else merely tolerant ones, such as the offices of those therapists who think of all guilt and shame as pathological.

As Haddon Robinson once remarked, truthful people are often too blunt, and gracious people often too soft. Safe places for the disclosure of shame need to be like Jesus, "full of grace and truth," and one of the most urgent challenges to the Christian church these days is to multiply these places.

2. The first gospel to the shamed is that we are mere creatures. Recognizing our limitedness, our one-of-manyness, our sheer finitude takes a big load off our minds. None of us has to do it all, be it all, or have it all, and thus none of us needs to feel ashamed of failures along these lines. "Human finitude," says Albers, "is a gift which frees us from the anxiety of having to be like God."

Thus, part of the care of the shamed will amount to reality therapy. Some false shame derives, after all, from misperceptions, or from unrealistic expectations, and these can sometimes be allayed. Significantly, Psalm 25, which opens with prayers not to be put to shame, then goes on with a sequence of impassioned pleas to God to "show me your ways." "Guide me in your truth." Teach me!

One right approach to false shame is didactic. As Smedes observes, a secular society tells us that if we aren't rich, famous, sexy, and cellulite-free, we're losers. Graceless churches bind disciples into lockstep patterns of expectation that shame people who have not spoken in tongues, or who have. Parents cinch up impossible burdens of expectation on children, virtually guaranteeing their unhappiness.

Here we need to rely on simple truths to bring us relief. For example, it is simply true that we do not need to be handsome or beautiful. Good looks are literally and reassuringly unnecessary, and it's a good thing, because most people don't have them. It's OK, and sometimes even amusing, to be a nerd in a gymful of jocks, or a jock in a classful of nerds. If someone uses you in a love relationship, it hurts a lot. But in some kind of straightforward way, the problem is that person's, not yours. Many physical disabilities can be accepted, in time, and the people who have them may end up leading stronger and more purposeful lives than those who do not. The same may hold for temperamentally extravagant persons (hotheads, for example) and persons with disordered sexual orientations, especially if the accepting community is full of both grace and truth.

3. Let us say frankly that some of our deficiencies, deformities, and absurdities are not easily fixed, even inside a community that is full of safe spaces. They may never get fixed during our lifetime. We therefore need the grace of one more truth--one that is sometimes underestimated or even scorned among the Christian culterati. The truth is that our actual deficiencies, deformities, and absurdities are really and wonderfully impermanent. This life is only the preface to our story, and our story is due to take quite a turn. Our shame has been buried with Christ, and one day we shall arise to a life in which, once more, every morning, God says, "Let there be light!" In depicting the great day of the Lord, Malachi says that "the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings," and we shall "go out leaping like calves from the stall" (Mal. 4:2).

Belief in the life to come is reality therapy. It gives us poise. It lets us breathe. It gives us freedom not to writhe and scramble. In one of the most graceful eloquences of his eloquent life, C. S. Lewis addresses the shamed with the passion of one who has absorbed all the jibes about pie in the sky and who nonetheless compassionately believes in the power of Jesus Christ's resurrection:

If you are a poor creature--poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels--saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion--nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends--do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom he blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrapheap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all--not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school. ("Mere Christianity")

4. The shamed need fellowship. Jesus was always ministering to "sinners"--that is, not just to the guilty, but to the publicly guilty, the scorned guilty, the deliciously and therefore gossiped-about guilty. Our natural reaction to the shamed is to shun them. After all, shame is catching. But Jesus' natural reaction to the shamed was to invite himself over to dinner with them. Thus Jesus dealt with Zaccheus simultaneously as a crook and a runt. Jesus' theory was that only the sick have need of a physician, and his practice was to make house calls.

From Genesis 3 through the rest of Scripture, the shamed want to hide and the godly go to find them. The shamed want to crawl away and die. The godly eat with them, help sustain them, go to be with them. The shamed have been mortified, perhaps by their own hand. The godly try to become agents of the resurrection that is the specialty of Christ. A key ministry to the shamed is therefore hospitality--that much-misunderstood and underestimated New Testament expression of love--in which we make not friends, but strangers, feel at home with us and thus more at home within their own skin.

In general, human beings thrive on love and wither in its absence. Consider, for now, just two features of love, and think of them as ministries to the shamed. First, to love another human being, says Dietrich von Hildebrand, is to give her a certain credit, a certain benefit of the doubt, so that you see her good qualities as a natural expression of her true self, and her faults and diminishments as really uncharacteristic. Love chooses to focus on the good qualities and to make much of them. It chooses not to focus on her faults and certainly not to dwell on them. The result is that the loved one finds her own attention drawn to what you find so remarkable in her and starts to rejoice with those who rejoice in her. If she has in her something that fills you with enthusiasm, perhaps she deserves a second look, even if she is doing the looking.

Second, if we doubt that "mere love" can help a person who is truly suffering from shame, we should turn our minds to the scene of a death and think of what love means to the bereaved. To lose a loved one is to lose someone irreplaceable. What can others do? They cannot bring back the one we have lost. They cannot take away the hurt. They cannot fix things. But they can love us. And when they do, when friends and family members come to us, when they hug and weep and say simple things and send a card or a plant--when they do these things, something in us lifts and straightens. The reason is that love is vitalizing. Love brings life back into us. Love does not raise the dead, but it raises us so that we can deal with death better.

All these themes and directions for ministry come together, as so much of the New Testament does, in the three parables of Luke 15, and especially in the last. What we often overlook is the preface to these parables, namely, that some Pharisees have been grumbling about Jesus' choice of company. He eats with the shamed, and these Pharisees--good men in the worst sense of the word--find the sight distasteful.

So Jesus tells of a certain father and of his prodigal son. The son who wastes his father's money on bibulous meals and foreign whores is guilty all right; no question there. But he is also a shamed son. He is a failure. His declaration of independence and his search for his own essential self have landed him in the gutter. There, homeless, derelict, and defiled, he thinks back to the family home, pictures the servants, and sees to what appalling depths he has sunk. His practiced confession therefore includes a lowliness clause: "I am not worthy to be called your son. Let me be as one of your hired servants."

What is remarkable, of course, and what all the generations of Bible readers have noticed with a chill down the spine, is that at the homecoming, the father does not wait to hear his son's confession. He wasn't waiting for that, first of all. Guilt does not interest him. No, he wants his boy. Hence, all the running and embracing and rejoicing. Hence, all the new clothing to help cover this youngster's shame. The idea is to get a son dressed up for dinner. The idea is to put him back where he belongs, among safe people who love and accept him. The climax of this parable, a climax of Christian worship, and for that matter a climax of human history, is God's table fellowship with the shamed. These are people worth feeding. We are not talking here about a proper little Sunday night gathering over ham sandwiches and coffee. No, as Robert Farrar Capon writes, this is "a neighborhood blowout," full of music and dancing and refillings of the punchbowl.

What's the point? The point is that the shamed one had not only been lost. He had been mortified. And the dancing and the eating and drinking and embracing that go on into the night-all these are ways to raise the dead.

A QUARTER CENTURY OF SIGNIFICANT SHAME

Robert H. Albers, "Shame: A Faith Perspective" (Haworth, 1995).

John Bradshaw, "Healing the Shame That Binds You" (Health, 1988).

Donald Capps, "The Depleted Self: Sin in a Narcissistic Age" (Fortress, 1993).

Merle A. Fossum and Marilyn J. Mason, "Shame: Families in Recovery" (Norton, 1986).

Tom Goodhue, "Shame," "Quarterly Review 4" (1984), pp. 57-65.

Robert Karen, "Shame," "The Atlantic Monthly," February 1992,

pp. 40-70.

Gershen Kaufman, "Shame: The Power of Caring" (Schenkman, 1980).

Gershen Kaufman, "The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes" (Springer, 1989).

Christopher Lasch, "Shame," in "A Companion to American Thought," edited by Richard Wrightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Blackwell, 1995).

Helen Block Lewis, "Shame and Guilt in Neurosis" (International Universities, 1971).

Michael Lewis, "Shame: The Exposed Self" (Free Press, 1992).

Susan Miller, "The Shame Experience" (Analytic, 1985).

Andrew P. Morrison, "Shame: The Underside of Narcissism" (Analytic, 1989).

Donald L. Nathanson, "Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self" (Norton, 1992).

Donald L. Nathanson, ed., "The Many Faces of Shame" (Guilford, 1987).

Carl D. Schneider, "Shame, Exposure, and Privacy" (Beacon, 1977).

Lewis B. Smedes, "Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don't Deserve" (HarperSanFrancisco/Zondervan, 1993).

Leon Wurmser, "The Mask of Shame" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 3

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