Another excerpt from Hearty Masculinity: Of Body and Spirit:
I’ve
found that shame hangs heavy on many men. They’ve elevated one moment of
failure or one bad habit or one broken relationship, and transformed it into
something more than it is. This is the Grand Torino problem. In that
movie the Clint Eastwood character elevated a sin he once committed, kissing
someone who was not his wife at a Christmas party, into a base element of who
he is and allows it to warp every other relationship he has. So too, many men
have confused guilt for shame, have moved from “I have sinned” to “I am an
unredeemable sinner.”
There
are several things wrong with this way of thinking. Firstly, it condemns you to
despair. Secondly, it conjures up an awful excuse that keeps you from the hard
work of forgiveness. Thirdly, it is just categorically incorrect.
Shame is about a person’s being, not
their doing. Shame takes a discrete act and plunges it into your heart. When
you sweep a guilt into your very self, identify so strongly with a wrong you
have done, or even that has been done to you, you claim that you are
irredeemable. Shame takes an instance of little lowercase plural sins,
and puffs them up into what’s off about the whole world, the singular uppercase
reality of Sin. Who would not crumble in the face of such an evil force,
who would not feel defeated if they believed they were facing Sin in their very
being and all alone? But, dear friend, Christ Jesus has already faced that
curse and left it on the cross.
Shame wants to stay with you, stick
to you like cat hair to Chapstick. It knows that if you confront it for what it
really is, guilt, it can be excised. The Tutus’ fourfold path of forgiveness,
and other practices like it, can crack it open, and cure what ails your
conscience. On some level, seeing your guilt as your shame, can become an
excuse for inaction, it can be easier to say, “I’m fundamentally broken,” than
to look the past square in the eye, and begin to take steps to move beyond it.
Finally,
there is this confusion of categories. Shame is a chapter 1 problem—My why is
that I kissed someone who was not my wife; who am I? An adulterer. Guilt is a
chapter 3 problem—I need to repair my relationship with my wife. Sin is about a
breaking of a relationship, not the breaking of a rule.
Sin is not a discrete action that God
disapproves of, it is the breaking of relationships—with God, neighbor, and
self. Start with that, and there are ways to make things right. That’s why sin
is always a question of guilt, not shame. It’s harder, being forgiven by
God—lightened and enlighted by the Spirit—and then called to a life of ongoing
repentance and reconciliation, mending what is broken. But it is truer to the
human condition than a lightened heart and no follow up or acknowledgement of
what has been broken and who has been wrong, harder, but it is the way of the
cross.
Paul writes in Romans 8:38-39 that
nothing in all of the universe can separate us from God’s love found in Jesus
Christ. Shame does not trust that to be true, it elevates something else as
able to overcome God’s love. It gives a piece of creation power that it doesn’t
rightly have. It creates an idol out of a sin or assumption, it creates a
barrier that isn’t naturally there within us. But, thanks be to God, the Cross
smashes every idol, God tears down every wall, builds bridges, and elongates
tables, so that there might be plenteous forgiveness and grace.
Let us pray: God, deepest mercy
and sweetest grace, replace all thoughts and feelings of shame, with the
identity that claimed us at the font. Give us courage to face our failures and
fears, even old terrors and those things that Sin uses to overwhelm us. Guide
us on the path of reconciliation, a lifetime of turning again and again to you
in whom we may always trust, confident in the love we find in Jesus Christ.
Amen.
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