When Brené Brown’s books and TEDx talks entered the mainstay more than a decade ago, I was, I admit, a skeptic. Brown’s popular teachings on vulnerability, shame, and courage felt too goopy to me, too wobbly to hang any of my experiences onto. Then, a few years back, I had a crushing experience of shame for something I had done that had hurt a friend and betrayed my values. The details aren’t necessary to share, and doing so might only create more hurt. The important thing is that the offense swallowed up my sense of self; it revealed that I was the type of person who would do such a bad thing.

In light of this, as it turned out, something goopy was in order.

Shame is having a moment, as Brown and many others have pointed out. The Internet is a place where group identity — among gamers, or activists, or Christians — is fortified by shaming others. We know who we are by deriding who we are not. We know our actions are good or bad not by what our conscience tells us — the traditional definition of guilt — but by what our online neighbors tell us. If our worst moments appear online, we may be able to apologize for them, but we can never delete them either, for the Internet never dies. There are few paths available for forgiveness and repair, and this leaves offenders in digital purgatory.

Beyond the social elements of modern shaming, many of us carry an acute inner sense of wrongness. Brown’s distinction is helpful: Guilt says, “I did something bad,” while shame says, “I am bad.” Shame has a way of collapsing actions into identity.

As a moral emotion, guilt is empowering. It can spur us to repair things with people we’ve hurt, and to repent, to go in a new direction. The prayer of confession in the Christian liturgy gives us words to name sins “in thought, word, and deed,” even the sin of good deeds left undone. Week after week we are invited to think back to the ways we’ve fallen short. There is never a week when we needn’t confess our shortcomings; and there are always things we can name, repent of, and be assured of forgiveness for in the new week ahead. In addition, a sense of our guiltiness and need of grace invites us to turn toward others, to respond in empathy to people we’ve hurt. The times in my life when I have felt guilty — or, in the language of my upbringing, “convicted by the Spirit” — I received it as an invitation. Now that I can see my sin, I can confess it, experience God’s mercy, and move forward feeling lighter and freer.

Shame felt nothing like this. Rather, it felt like I had cast myself out of the realm of belonging and love. While others could enter the gates of the garden of goodness, I was out, and I had no way to get back in. Like Taylor Swift, shame said, “I’m the problem, it’s me.” The monster on the hill could never hang out with the sexy babies.

Of course, in this wrestling with shame, which persisted for the good portion of a year, I knew the traditional Christian categories. I knew the right answers. The imaginary Reformed men who sometimes sit on my shoulders intoned, “Well, in fact, there is nothing good in you; you are a worm. Your shame is telling you the truth about who you are. Your only hope is to cast yourself upon the mercy of Jesus and believe in his total atonement on your behalf. In fact, your shame arises from pride, because pride prevents you from believing God’s mercy is sufficient.” I could (and do!) doctrinally assent to some of this, but as you might imagine, repeating this kind of answer in my head did nothing to relieve the shame. Instead, it added a perverse religious tinge to a miserable state, as if God received more glory from my self-abasement, as if misery was the point.

Curt Thompson is having none of this. Thompson is a psychiatrist and popular author who calls shame a tool that evil uses to undo God’s good purposes for us and for Creation. In his book The Soul of Shame, he calls it

the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity … Shame, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate, random, emotional event that came with us out of the primordial evolutionary soup. It is both a source and result of evil’s active assault on God’s creation, and a way for evil to try to hold out until the new heaven and earth appear at the consummation of history.

Shame tells us to hide from others, to keep others at bay for fear of what they’ll see if they get close. As such, shame steals our birthright, for we were made to connect with God, others, and even ourselves. We were made to rest in the embrace of the One who doesn’t just tolerate us but created us to dwell with him forever. Connection is our telos — the thing for which we are made, the destination we are headed toward.

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My shame was abated by something that doesn’t fit neatly into categories of Christian teaching. To this day, I’m still trying to make sense of it, although, even more, I am grateful for its unexpected grace and the healing it brought.

On a Friday morning two summers ago, amid this intense shame season, I woke up with the kind of inner turmoil that I had grown used to, with different parts of myself warring back and forth in my mind. One part chided the other part for the original offending act that had hurt my friend. How could you have done that? You are bad. You aren’t safe. You don’t belong here. And the other part of myself crouched in self-defense, trying to protect herself against these accusations. You’re being too harsh. You don’t understand me.

After what seemed like a long time of inner warring, out of the blue an image came to mind — of these two parts embracing one another. Each could stay. Both belonged. Both had an important role to play. Both could learn to trust one another. Both had a seat at the table. And something about this image — of the two warring parts of myself embracing and reconciling to one another — allowed me to have compassion on the person who had hurt her friend; to consider more of the surrounding details that precipitated the offense; to see the offending action with mercy; and to not collapse the action into identity.

The idea of “forgiving yourself” doesn’t find much purchase in Christian teaching. Of course, we can’t make things right within ourselves. That’s the point; God in Christ came to Earth to do what humans couldn’t do for themselves, to wipe clean the moral slate, restoring us to right relationship with God and others. In addition, the aforementioned Reformers would say that “self-forgiveness” isn’t biblical, but rather a therapeutic category of pop psychology. If you believe that God forgives you completely, you don’t need to forgive yourself.

Then again, pop psychology has some helpful insights into how and why shame persists even when someone has the right theological response to it. According to Thompson, shame isn’t intellectual but physiological, something we feel in our bodies. Many of us experience shame even before we can speak in our relationship with our caregivers, shame that signals to our nervous systems that our actions will lead to our abandonment. “The sensation and emotional tone of shame is like none other,” he writes. “Few emotional states can match it for how unbearably painful it can be.”

In contemporary conversations about deconstruction and deconversion, many people say they were taught Christianity in ways that reinforced their essential badness, their “wormness,” in ways that prevented them from believing that God doesn’t just love them but also likes them. Purity culture taught that bodies and their desires are bad and dirty, leading to unshakable sexual shame even within the context of marriage. In essence, shame was used to keep people in line. These deconstruction stories remind us that if God’s love is taught in harsh, nitpicky, and shame-filled ways, God’s love is going to sound like “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

Whether or not “forgiving yourself ” is a helpful way of overcoming shame, God sees our past selves with the eyes of mercy, and in light of this, our own eyesight can readjust. We can look back at mistakes, missteps, and even grievous sins, grapple with the harm they caused, and also see that we were operating with limited knowledge, spiritual malformation from our family or church, or good intentions gone awry. On the cross, Jesus prays for the Father to forgive his tormentors, “for they know not what they do.” As the liturgy underscores, our sin is about commission, but it is also about omission — and often, we don’t even know what we don’t know. God extends mercy for the things we don’t even know to confess.

Cultivating a more merciful view of our past selves could help address the elements of our Christian upbringing — the focus of so much deconstruction critique — that were “totes cringe.” I think of the time I tried to evangelize a college boyfriend that landed with a thud (he had grown up Catholic!), and effectively ended our dating relationship. Remembering what I said and how I said it, I do cringe. I could scoff at my younger self and the faith community that had taught her that it was imperative to share the Good News as bluntly as possible. And I could remember that I was trying to do the best I could within the framework I had been given. To be sure, acknowledging our prior blind spots doesn’t let us off the hook for harm done; nor does it cancel out the need to confess to God and to try to make things right with others. There’s an impulse in deconstruction narratives to apply to people and experiences the rigid binary previously taught, only in the opposite direction. Neither, in my view, leads to health.

For several days after the image of the two warring parts of myself finally embracing came to mind, I felt like a veil had been lifted, that everyone I encountered or saw on the street was a self-evidently eternal creature, a person uniquely loved and known by God, knitted within the human family and made for connection and belonging and joy. This spiritually heightened view lasted for approximately one week, and then the veil came down. But the crushing weight of shame hasn’t returned. And in its absence, and in light of the Ultimate Mercy who holds all of us — our past, present, and future selves — I can more clearly see others with the eyes of mercy, too. As goopy as it might be, we can’t show mercy to others unless we know mercy for ourselves. Shamed people shame people, but mercy-filled people are merciful to people. And just as shames isolates and thrives in secret, so mercy brings our worst offenses into the light and meets them with compassion. Mercy begets mercy. It might even be the thing that heals us all from our societal spiral of shame.

COMMENTS

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One response to “Mercy Begets Mercy”

1. Isaac Kimball says:

   09/23/2023 at 5:10 pm

   I found this a helpful discussion on the relationship between shame and Protestant theological categories.
   So many people are emotionally burdened with shame, and they believe it is only right, or even that it is God’s will that they feel this way.

   Reply