"He was despised and rejected
by men...Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we estimeemed him not."
(Isaiah 53:3)700 BC
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He was despised and rejected of men. Isaiah
Long before modern psychologists came along to discover it,
ancient philosophers were curious about the shadow of shame
that darkened the lives of so many people.What most interested them was the shame we felt when we were disgraced in the eyes of our own people.Take Aristotle,for instance;twenty-two centuries before the birth of Freud he observed that shame is what we feel when "we ....are disgraceful...to those who care for us."
To be disgraceful to people who care for us means that our own
people have no grace in their hearts for us.To be disgraceful is to be weighed and found unacceptable to those whom we need most to accept us. It is, in short, to be despised and rejected by our own Is not this the shame we all fear most? Is it not the primal shame that we dread more than death itself?The label I am giving it here is social Shame. There are three basic ways we can experience it.
1-We experience shame if another person despises us as if we were nothing but objects to use instead of persons to love.
2- We feel shame if we are despised and rejected by our own group.
3- We feel shame when our group is despised and rejected by another group.
Let us explore each of these experiences.
as If We Were Things and Not Persons
When another person looks us up and down the way a shopper
inspects a chest of drawers,and then scorns us,he shames us because he makes us feel like nonpersons.It was this experience
that so fascinated the existentialist philosopher Jean P.Satre who
said that being looked on as an object is the essence of being shamed, the seed of dehumanizing of humanity,and a feeling that triggers"an immediate shudder which runs from head to toe".
I knew a pretty good scholar once who was tormented every
moment of his life by a "Cyrano complex." He knew in the depths of his heart that anyone who looked at him saw,not a person,but a huge,ugly nose.When I was a skinny boy sixteen years old and six
feet three inches tall, I knew for sure that when anyone looked at me all she saw was a sharp pair of hip bones that stuck out of my sides like drawn swords.It may be that nobody has captured this feeling as Dostoyevski did when one of his characters, Dmitri
Karamazov, was on trial for his life.He was sitting in the dock, legs crossed,looking down at his dangling left foot as it wagged back and forth at the end of a ridiculously scrawny leg.His toe, grotesque knob that it was,a flat gnarled, crooked,filthy object,poked its head out of a hole in his shoe!He knew for sure that everyone in the courtroom was staring at his toe, that they considered him to be
worth no more than the worth of that obcene growth,and he loathed himself.
It can happen to anybody when someone else stares at her with
contempt.A child feels it when his mother stares at him;her mouth
says nothing,but her lips are taut with patience too much tested,and
her eyes say,"I've had it with you,you miserable child."A man feels
it when he goes to collect his first unemployment check and a
person behind the desk glowers at him for one tenth of second,looks at him with enough indifference to tell him he is nobody,and then ,eyes back at her papers, points her pencil at another line,and mutters,"Stand over there."A person who seldom eats at restaurants takes a table and feels disdain in the look of a man with a menu in his hand and knows for sure that he is no more than a clod in the eyes of his waiter.
Shame has no intelligence;it does not reason with us. It is a feeling. However, whenever we feel shame, it sets us at a cross-road. We have a choice: do we rush to get relief,or do we first ask what causes the pain?
To ask why we are feeling the sting of shame is a step into self understanding .When we probe our shame, we may discover a great deal about ourselves that is worth knowing.What we find out
about ourselves may disappoint us deeply.It may also make us feel grateful for the good qualities we had not dared give ourselves credit for before.But whatever there is for us to discover inside ourselves,shame may be the push we need to make us look and see.
As we bore through the crust of feelings we do not understand
we may also discover deep pools of shame that somebody caused us before we knew what was happening. We may feel for the first
time the full sting of a shame that we do not deserve, a shame someone injected into us by treating as if we were a shameful child.
Waves of sadness may pour out into our conciousness,our heart may be breaking,and only when we see where our shame came from will we know why it feels so heavy and why we do noot deserve to feel it at all.
The Beginning Of Our Healing
The Healing of our shame begins best, I am convinced, with a spiritual experience--to be more specific, a spiritual experience of Grace...
Grace is an unconventional alternative to three coventional
remedies for our feelings of unworthiness and unaccepta-
bleness.
Conventional responses may vary some in detail,but they never steer far from these:
1-Lowering our ideals to the level of our abilities to meet them.
2-Making ourselves acceptable enough to satisfy the ideals
we already have.
3-Persuading ourselves that we are just fine the way we are.
I do not believe that we can heal our shame by these methods.I do not think they go deep enough.I do not think
we can make them work...
"The surest cure for the feeling of being an unacceptable person is the discovery that we are accepted by the grace of
One whose acceptance of us matters most."
To experience grace is to recover our lost inner child. The
heart of our inner child is trust.We lose our childhood when we feel that the persons we trusted to accept us do not accept us or that they may reject us if we do things that displease them. Shame cheats us of childhood.Grace give it
back to us.
The trusting child does not have a worry in the world about whether he is smart enough, or handsome enough, whether he has accomplished enough with his life, or been good enough to be acceptable to his parent.He trusts that the someone who holds him, warms him,feeds him,cradles him,and loves him will accept him again and always.Trust is the inner child we rediscover in an experience of grace.
Grace overcomes shame, not by uncovering an overlooked cache of excellence in ourselves but simply by accepting us, the whole of us,with no regard to our beauty or our ugliness,our virtue or vices.We are accepted with no possibility of being rejected. accepted once and accepted forever.accepted at the ultimate depth of our being.We are given what we have longed for in every nook and nuance of every relationship.
We are ready for grace when we are bone tired of our struggle to be worthy and acceptable. After we have tried too long to earn the approval of everyone iimportant to us,
we are ready for grace.When we are tired of trying to be the person somebody sometime covinced us we had to be,we are ready for grace.When we have given up all hope of ever being an acceptable humain being,we may hear in our hearts the ultimate reassurance: we are accepted,accepted by grace.
Listen to God's word.
"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus,
and shalt believe in thine heart that god hath raised him from the dead,thou shalt be saved.Romans 10:9.Amazing Grace.-
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