Is Shame Something to Resist—or to Reconsider? - Lecture 3

What is shame, and why does it shape us so deeply? Shame is a shared human experience, yet we struggle to describe it. In some cases, we sense that we should not feel ashamed, and yet we do. In other cases of moral wrongdoing, a lack of shame, or at least the ability to experience it, is often deemed problematic. To be shameless is viewed as a moral deficiency in such circumstances. 

Scripture only deepens the complexity. Across both the First and Second Testaments, the Bible seems to present the experience of shame as something integral to the human experience— and as something we should not resist.

In this Friday Night Lecture, Dr. S. J. Parrott will explore the dynamics of shame, what it contributes to our moral psychologies, and how Scripture can reorient our thinking about shame in order to consider how we find out who we are, and who gets a say in the process.

Friday Night Lectures feature three short and engaging talks woven together with live Q&A, brief intermissions, and time for conversation. Join us for a warm, welcoming atmosphere and meaningful reflection on compelling questions within the Christian tradition. 

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER

S. J. Parrott completed her DPhil in Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford after obtaining two master's degrees at Regent College in Vancouver. She specializes in topics of shame, ethics, human formation, rhetoric, prophetic and poetic literature, and more.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

As we begin our finale for tonight, I want to thank all thank all of you for being here with me. You could have done many things on your Friday nights, uh, and it's cold outside. So I'm grateful for you being here. I'm grateful for you being here talking about a difficult difficult subject matter. I just want to say again, shame is not easy to discuss as it brings up memories and experiences and difficult topics that, to be frank, we'd rather not talk about. So I'm very grateful that you're all here with me and engaging me, uh engaging with me in this topic and learning with me as we go along. My aim in this lecture is to draw together the previous two in a meaningful way that can help us all move forward from shame towards transformation. So it's a bit of a hybrid between looking some more at shame and transformation and in the context of scripture at this time, the Second Testament. And then also, again, just because this is a topic that affects all of us and some of us very deeply, I just I want to help us all quite lit quite practically move forward from it. So it's a bit of a mix between the two. I want us to move forward from shame towards transformation. What shame got to do with transformation? Here I am using the word with respect to our relationship with God in Christ. By transformation, I mean that the ability of God's perspective to affect and make demands of us need not refer singularly to shame. And in fact, I'd say this is not the ultimate aim of God's shaking of our self-conceptions. We already saw this last lecture, last lecture, where I suggested that if we avoid being, if we are to avoid being shameless, we need to contend with the perspectives of others, the upside of which is that we can also give practical weight to and acknowledge God's, who is our arbitrator and defender in the midst of our shame and who refocuses our attention on himself. Rather, the ability of the divine perspective to affect us is what leads to transformation, the usurping of our view of ourselves for his view of us that is accurate, positive, divinely inspired, one that does not reject our neediness, limitation, particularity, or our simpleness, even if it means working through these things, these difficult things, along the way in order to arrive at such a view. Such transformation, I will suggest, comes to its fullest expression by being in Christ. And I'll use most of my lecture time to discuss how we can move from shame towards transformation by coming in contact with God's perspective of this, of us, pardon me. And I'll follow that by kind of giving some practicalities to manage and mitigate shame. Because again, I take this quite seriously that this matters in our lives. So last lecture, I said that we are all prone to not see ourselves correctly at times. We may not see character flaws, sin, arrogance, or actions and behaviors that ought to be refined. We are also limited in our view of ourselves in another way. We feel as though we are worthless, sinful beyond redemption, stupid, ugly, untalented, boring, unable to move beyond a particular thing that happened in the past or move beyond a broken and sinful past in general. These examples are also ways in which we do not see ourselves correctly, because the nature of these examples is that we tend to view ourselves solely as these things to the exclusion of other parts of our identity complex we might want to include in our self-conception. We feel as though we are worthless and nothing of what is worthwhile about ourselves or our life is in view. There's no complexity, but there's singularity and limitation. Whether we have an over-inflated self-conception and are arrogant, an ignorant self-conception and are unaware of some aspect of ourselves, or an under-inflated self-conception and are dissatisfied with who we are, or any other configuration that you can think of, we are all limited in our view of ourselves. Add in the fact that others may not see ourselves correctly at times, and then we could find ourselves in quite a situation. This is messy. This is the messiness of being fallible, limited, finite humans in relationship with one another. And in the midst of this messiness, I want to suggest to you that God has provided us a way to navigate it, that we are not the final authority on the person we are because we have chosen to contend with the perspectives of others, means that we are importantly open to God's perspective of who we are. And as I've already said, according to the perspective of the of Scripture, it is God's perspective that is accurate and of the utmost value. God's perspective is what can help us navigate the continual influx of perspectives of others and our own. And that means that it is God's perspective that is the final authority on who we are, and his perspective is the way in which we can navigate the messy and beautiful business of being humans and relation. And I began arguing this already last lecture when I turned to Psalm 71. And I want to continue this argument now by suggesting that God's perspective is one that transforms who we are and therefore how we see and understand ourselves. And that's all going to become crucial in our moving forward from shame. So, how does God see us? Well, the answer to that question is going to be unique to each of us as we are all unique individuals, but the tendencies of God's perspective are made known to us in the person of Christ. And thus I'd like to turn to two well-known stories in the Gospels to begin our conversation about the transformative perspective of God. They're probably not going to be the stories you're thinking of, but they're the stories that I believe highlight, hopefully highlight. You'll be, you'll tell me if they do or not, highlight what I'm talking about. And the story of Zacchaeus, one of my favorite stories. And time limits my ability to engage in these stories deeply, but I believe it's worth doing anyway. And this is like the heart of my work. I'm I'm a biblical scholar. I love working with the text themselves, so this is the stuff that really gets me excited here. Again, tiny, so tiny. I'm so sorry. And no circles this time to help you either, but I did put it in bold, which makes it harder to read, right? So you go pull it up on your phone if you want, but you probably all know the story anyways. Okay. John 4 narrates a story well known to most of us. Jesus' interaction with a Samaritan woman. Jesus is at a well, and he asks a Samaritan woman who is also there for a drink. Her response to Jesus' request in verse 9 is my first point of focus. She is confused or uncertain how a Jewish man, Jesus, could ask a Samaritan woman, herself, for water. John helps us out with a parenthetical note that states that Jewish people did not use anything in common with Samaritans. Sharing a well and a bucket of water is a no-no. What is central to the woman's understanding of herself in that moment is that she is a Samaritan, something which looms large in her perception due to the presence of Jesus, who is Jewish. Her Samaritaness is perceived as a barrier in this encounter. She cannot give him water because of this contingent and unchangeable aspect of her identity. And that's quite physical. I mean this quite physically. They physically cannot touch the same things. But Christ does not make her Samaritaness central as she does. Rather, he reorients the conversation around who he is. He suggests that if she knew who he was, her focus would not be on the fact that he that she is a Samaritan, but she would be asking him to give her that which will transform her, living waters that quench thirst forever. She then asks for this some verses later, and then Christ brings into focus some part of her past and present actions and behaviors, her many husbands, not for the purpose of defining her by it, not for the purpose of shaming her, but to reorient the conversation once again around who he is, not what she has done. What he has to offer her isn't contingent upon what she has done and isn't prohibited because she is a Samaritan. Everything he talks about and offers has to do with who he is, even as he interacts with the woman and in all of the particularities of her life. That is, it isn't that the particularities of the woman disappear, they're talked about and openly, her Samaritaness and her many husbands. It's that they are reoriented around the person of Christ, and he offers her he offers her himself as the means to transform her. Now we already get a hint at this in the narrative, for at the end of the story the woman goes to the people of the town and says, Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Christ's perspective has already affected her view of herself. Her public declaration that there is a man who knows everything she ever did is a very vulnerable declaration, is it not? I sure wouldn't share that, for fear that somebody will go talk to that person and ask everything I ever did. Yet she openly states that he knows, and her openness seems to suggest Christ's view of her has been adopted by her. That is, everything she has ever done is not central to her, it doesn't define her, nor does it limit her, because Christ was reorienting her understanding of herself around who he is, and thus follows the statement after her disclosure of a man who knows her totally. Could he be the Messiah? Everything for this Samaritan woman is being reoriented around this Jewish man. Luke 19 begins with Christ on the move and his destination is Jericho. We are then introduced to Zacchaeus, who's already there, and we are told he is a chief tax collector, he's rich, and he's short. These three points do not serve Zacchaeus well. As a tax collector, he was despised as a traitor by working for the Roman Empire, not for his Jewish community. His richness speaks of his corruptness, something he himself confirms later in the narrative. And his shortness limits his ability to see, including Christ amidst the crowds. So he runs ahead and climbs a tree, that's why the story's famous, in order to see Christ who would pass by. In a manner similar to the Samaritan woman, Christ sees Zacchaeus and asks something of him. Christ declares, I'm staying at your house tonight, Zacchaeus. There is the same uncertainty about this interaction between Christ and Zacchaeus as there is in the interaction with the Samaritan woman. Christ and these people ought not to be interacting as they are. Unlike the Samaritan woman, Zacchaeus himself does not espouse this uncertainty, but the people watching do. Verse 7 states, and when the people saw it that Jesus had gone into his house and and dined with him, they all complained, He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner, and not only a sinner, we might add, but a traitor of his Jewish community and a corrupt one at that. And while the crowd's comment is against Jesus, it reveals also much about their perspective of Zacchaeus, excuse me. Whether Zacchaeus is affected by their perspective on any given day, we do not know. But I think it's safe to say that this would not be news to him. The narrative continues, however, and something about Zacchaeus' interaction with Christ in his home leads him to respond to the crowd's perspective of him that day by saying, not to them, but to Christ, I'm going to make right, I'm going to pay it back. Pay back those who I cheated. Without knowing what happened in Zacchaeus' home, it's hard to say anything concrete about how his interaction with Christ has affected him. But what we can say is that it did, and the same sort of reorientation of Zacchaeus himself around the person of Christ occurs. He says not to the crowd in response to their perspective, but to Christ that he will make right. A statement which is probably not in response to the crowd and their perspective, that they think this way about him is probably not news to him. Rather, I believe that we could say that following his dinner and conversation with Christ, something is changed in the way Zacchaeus sees and understands himself because he has now seen and met with Christ. When the crowd comments that Jesus has poor taste him picking a host, this prompts Zacchaeus to make other areas of his life align with whatever has transformed in him through his interaction with Christ. Now these are very brief observations about these texts, but I believe in both these stories we see the transformative perspective of God at work in Christ. People, who people are, are reoriented around him. Things that are part of their identity complexes, such as ethnicity, actions, and behaviors, past and present, how they come across to others, unchosen or contingent factors of their lives, the good, the bad, and the ugly, are all brought into focus by Christ, not for the purpose of shaming them or defining them by these things, but to reorient their identities around who He is. He becomes the axis around which who they are finds its place. He becomes central to their self-conceptions, their own sense of who they are. I'm a First Testament scholar, but um I believe that this is part of what is described. Uh part, sorry, I believe that what I've described is part of what Paul means when he says in texts such as 2 Corinthians 5, 17, so then if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. What is old is passed away. Look, what is new is come. Now I'm not suggesting that all of Paul's language of being in Christ, and we'll look at a few more texts, has to do with our self-conceptions and our identities more broadly being formed and reformed in him. Paul has very specific theological agendas when he uses this language, when he uses this language, not least of all in the book of Romans, and that his those agendas are not my concern tonight. But I do believe that we can say that a key idea Paul is gets at is that our entire persons, our life, our death, our past, our future, everything is now in Christ and reoriented around his death, resurrection, and ascension. And this would include how we conceive of who we are. 2 Corinthians chapter 5 continues in verse 19 that God in Christ was restoring, reorienting, perhaps we could say, the harmonious relations that have been disrupted by human sin, failure, finitude, and brokenness, so that we might relate to one another rightly, which is part of what it means to give practical weight to the perspective of others and respecting one another. We could all look at also look at Galatians 2, 20, and I'll just read it closely here. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave me for himself. Tiny again, so sorry, and I'll put on my glasses for this one, I think. You can see all this language here, and again, I'm not saying this all has to do with self-conceptions and identity, but it's this general idea of the transform the transformation of the entire person in the person of Christ. You have um, pardon me, being blessed with every blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ, for God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, before him in love, verse six. We are in his dearly loved son, and in him we have redemption through his blood. Moving on, uh, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ toward the administration of all things to head up all things in Christ. Verse 11, in Christ, we too have been claimed as God's own possession. And then verse 13, when you believed in Christ. We could also look at the books of Philippians and Colossians for more of this language, but I think you get the point. Coming in contact with the risen and ascended Lord is how we gain insight into God's perspective of us, and this perspective is transformative in that it reorients how we see and understand ourselves in light of Him and by being in Him. Samaritan-ness or infidelity or shortness or corrupt behavior do not disappear, but neither do they define us. Rather, our total selves are redefined around him or in him, and in light of this, our identities are reconfigured, refined, and reformed. And I want to ensure that something I'm saying, um, uh something that is implicit in what I'm saying is not missed. And so I'm gonna make it just even more explicit now. I believe that the key to understanding what being in Christ means is to see that that which defines us lay outside of who we are. It lay outside of myself. Is that kind of making sense? The answer to the question of who I am and who should I become, and how can I not experience shame, lay not in ourselves, lay not in a better self-made self-conception, not in the unchosen, contingent parts of our histories or lives, not in how we come across to others. That which defines me and around which all those other things find their home is Christ, who is not me and yet is in me, and I and am him. And it is important for that point to really land. I know it with this language of being in Christ is so familiar, but if we understand that, then we are going to mitigate and manage our experiences of shame much, much, much better. And we could press the point even further. Part of the experience of shame is that something defines me, that is me. I am defined by my nose. I am defined by my being opinionated, I am defined by being a thiece. That which defines us, yet is us, overshadows our self-conception, our own understanding of who we are. When we are in Christ, we are defined, and I'd suggest defined in the sense we're talking about shame, we're overshadowed by who Christ is, including his dignity, his glory, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension. When we are in Christ, we are defined by something not only outside of our self-conception, but outside of who we are full stop. We are overshadowed not by any part of us that falls outside of our self-conception, again, whether actions, behaviors, how we come across to others, et cetera, et cetera. We are overshadowed by Christ. And this does not cause us shame. And I believe the reason why it doesn't is it has to do with the idea of our identity finding its fullness. One could even say its destiny in Christ. To say it kind of again, when we experience shame, we often feel small. It's one of the physiological characteristics of experiencing shame. Exposure is another physiological feeling exposed, another physiological characteristic. Um, we feel small when we feel shame because our self-conception sink shrinks. It feels dwarfed, some people, right? Since we are defined by something of us that isn't our self-conception. So I used my really fancy example before. This is your self-conception. And when you're defined by some aspect of your identity, it covers it. And that's why you feel small, because it's like your self-conception has disappeared. I know this is really technical stuff. It's different when we're overshadowed or defined by Christ, when we're in Christ. The fullness of who we are is found in him, we believe. And therefore, to be defined by, to be overshadowed by him doesn't make our self-con our self-conception shrink and disappear as they do in the experience of shame. But it's more like Christ is a container or a vessel. And when we are in him, it's not like our self-conception shrinks, it's more like it grows and finds its fullness. It's like if he is the container and it fills up, kind of like this, blossoms and grows. I believe something akin to transfiguration happens. As John O'Donoghue John O'Donohue, a Christian theologian, philosopher, um, kind of uh spiritualist, if you want to call it that, like Celtic spirituality. I mean as John O'Donohue describes it, transfiguration is not change. Transfiguration makes something more fully itself than ever, and more, it is irritated with beauty. In Christ, defined by him, overshadowed by him, we have a self-conception that is informed and guided by him, one which allows us to become the kind of the fullest version of ourselves because it is informed by his perspective of us. So, how do we figure out who we are in Christ? How do we have a Christ-informed self-conception identity broadly speaking? How do you, as your individual self, reorient yourself around him? I cannot answer that for you, as I don't know any of you personally, but even if I could, my telling you who you are as reoriented in Christ um wouldn't help, as it's you and Christ together who need to sort that out. Otherwise, I don't think we would ever really believe it. It's that experiential nature of it that needs to happen. You need to see, to experience, to learn, to become that person that Christ has made you to be in a manner similar to the Samaritan woman in her encounter and that's similar to Zacchaeus. The difference is that we can't bump into Jesus at a well or shimmy up a tree to get his attention. So how do we come to see this perspective of us and reshape our self-conceptions in light of that? Um, sorry, one slide behind. Um I think, then this is where I just general practicalities in the next slide, too. I would say that scripture is an excellent place to begin, not simply by reading to find texts about identity, but reading as guided by the spirit to hear what God is saying to you about you. Prayer is another way to talk to God about who you are, as well as a way to bring your experiences of shame to him, to be your arbitrator and defender. That was the key means for me and my struggle with identity. And God really met me in prayer, and that's something I'm happy to share if it's relevant later. But I also returned to a comment I made at the very beginning of the first lecture. This is not a strictly me and Jesus thing, as much as it sounds like I'm just talking about you and Jesus. God uses the relationships we have to reveal his perspective with us and help us to figure out what this being in Christ thing means. Why? Because he's made us to be this way, humans in relation who complete one another and with whom we experience the fullness of our identity with. And I believe that is what nakedness is signaling in Genesis 2.25. In fact, in the garden, the man and woman were naked, but not ashamed. This ability to be humans in relation, the fullness of reciprocity, finding out who we are in the context of relationships. We are made to be in this harmonious relationship with God and fellow humans. I believe that God reveals his perspective of us by using us to speak to us through one another, to one another. And as I said earlier, as we all know, we can all get it wrong about ourselves and others, but that doesn't mean we always get it wrong. And it doesn't mean that God won't use us to speak into one another's lives. Discovering who we are in Christ and having our understanding of who we are informed by Him, and discovering that in the context of human relationships does not mean that you will never experience shame again, but it does mean that your sense of self will be stronger, divinely inspired, and thus less liable to be shaken, not because we are shameless, but because we have become open to a divine perspective that is reshaped and reoriented who we are around the person of Christ, who himself cannot be shaken. 1 Peter 2, 6 says, and he himself is quoting scripture, for it says in scripture, for I lay in Zion a stone, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and whoever believes in him will never be put to shame. And in this verse, I believe it's suggesting that our belief in Christ cannot be brought into question through shame, in that our belief in the person of Christ, his lordship and what he's accomplished cannot be shamed. It cannot be overshadowed by another perspective on this particular matter, on what he has done for us in love on the cross, on this salvific point. He is the final authority on our position of salvation and our standing with God. And in that we can take great comfort. Final point for tonight. Again, I just assume that some of you guys have come here tonight with very real experiences of shame. So I just want to be very sensitive to this topic. And so these are just my ideas to consider practicalities for mitigating and managing shame. Um I think we're done at the quarter two hour. Oh, I have four, oh, I have four minutes. Okay, great. Um again, when you're these are when you're experiencing shame, try to figure out what's defining you in the moment or otherwise afterwards. Um, do your best to wrench yourself out of whatever you feel defined by and don't make it worse by agreeing with it, by saying, I am this awful person that this person said I am, or I am ugly as they said that I am, or I am whatever, whatever, whatever. That's very hard to do. I realize this is extremely hard. It's hard work to wrench yourself out of being defined by whatever it is you're feeling defined by, but to the extent you're able to try to ask yourself, what am I feeling defined by? I'm why? Where did that come from? Is it was it a side comment not even directed about me? Was it an act of shaming, whatever it might be? These might have to be hindsight questions, I already said, if your experience is too strong. But the more you do that, um, whether in the moment or in hindsight, the easier it's going to be to manage shame in the moment and even avoid experiencing it. One more shout out to my friend Blake. It's because I had worked through so much and and learned so much about shame that I didn't have to experience it in that moment, though I know years earlier I would have and been occupied with it for days and days and days. Um, psalms, as I said, are prayers and tools to bring our shame to God and work through it with him. He is the arbitrator of perspectives in the Psalms. And note also that many of the psalms that feature shame end up focusing, if not all of them, on who God is as the key means to help the psalmist find the path out of his shame. Declaring who God is and praising who he is can go a long way in managing and mitigating our experiences of shame because it takes the focus off of us and who we are and focuses it, focuses it instead on who God is. And as I've said in various ways tonight, we find out who we are in the face of another. Community is extremely important. They are a crucial perspective in our life that we need in order to discipline us, encourage us, help us along the way in our being in Christ. We're all trying to figure that out together, so we might as well put our brains together and see if we can help each other along the way. If possible, have some trusted friends and families who know us and are willing to speak the truth and love to us and forbear us as we work through these difficult issues. Um, I have my short list, which would be my mom, who's my best friend, trusted friends who've known me for a long time or gone with me through difficult things. Again, Blake or uh partner. And then a final suggestion pray and ask God who you are. This is what I did. I went away on an eight-day silent retreat 10 years ago to ask God, who am I and what am I on this earth to do? And at the end of it, God revealed that to me. Be sure you're ready to do that. And you don't need to go on an eight-day retreat. I just encourage you to set aside intentional time to talk to Jesus about these things. Um, but be sure you're ready to do that. It is, it'll probably open up many things in you that will require his patient transformation. Um I'm gonna leave it there for now because it's basically at the end of the time here.