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July 30 - August 31, 2020
it prepared him for how shame would show up later in evil’s attempt to convince Jesus that he was not God’s Son, that he was not enough.
we all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us,
We will not be rid of shame this side of the new heaven and earth; rather, we grow in our awareness of shame in order to scorn it.
Joy is the byproduct of integration, of connection within a matrix of safe relationships.
Joy, in this sense, is the outcome of Jesus’ awareness of his Father’s absolute delight in him, his joy in Jesus’ presence, not just Jesus’ behavior.
And like Peter, we need to take responsibility for our actions that prove to be disintegrating.
we learn and grow in our awareness of just how important our lives and connections to others really are.
This requires the admission of responsibility for our role in the rupture. Shame is the emotional energy behind our resistance to this. It does so by fueling our anticipation of being forsaken upon our admission of guilt.
And whenever genuine acts of goodness evoke responses of distress, you can count on shame being at work,
Healing always requires vulnerability and exposure of our sick and wounded parts, parts often kept hidden and away from our awareness—just
Shame would like nothing more than for us to believe we should be able to work out our problems on our own, to do our best at everything and limit our mistakes—we must in order to prevent being abandoned.
How do we directly address the issue of shame in the church so that shame can be healed through the church?
But curiosity is an important starting point.
Curiosity depends on being relationally safe
praise of effort rather than outcomes.
students who are not necessarily top performers eventually excel, largely because of their perseverance, their resilience.
but in terms of the persistent effort required. We see this progression in what Paul wrote in Romans 5:1-5: suffering (this is hard), perseverance (praise for effort), character (developing resilience) and hope (an anticipated good outcome).
We tend to practice learning as a regurgitation of memorized facts rather than possible ideas.
Shame takes advantage of this by driving us to certainty in order to protect ourselves from our anticipated humiliation at being mistaken.
We have seen how shame can take root—planted in our first family, sprouting in the family of faith, then extending into educational contexts, which become the foundation for how we practice life in our vocational callings.
But with each act of storytelling, shame is waiting to infiltrate, looking for ways to disintegrate any attempt to create goodness and beauty.
In the way that a foot or ear tells itself that it is “not enough,” so also we listen to our shame attendant who reminds us of our inadequacies.
These “weaker” and “less honorable” elements are understood to carry the weight of shame in that culture.
when there is an outbreak of shame, no matter how subtle or private, it becomes the base from which evil launches its mission of disintegrating minds and systems in God’s good creation.
love is neither an abstract idea nor an achievable object, something that can be acquired or realized, as if there is a finite quota. It is a way, suggesting a path,
Where shame attempts to push us into static inertia, love bids us to move.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
God intends to move us from immaturity to maturity, from disintegration to integration, from places where shame hides to where it, being brought into the light, can be disregarded.
We must do the sometimes painfully hard work of perseverance, of looking at shame repeatedly and disregarding it repeatedly.
In any instant it boils down to microdecisions we make that generally move us in one of two directions: a more integrated, resilient life of connection with God and others, or a more disintegrated, separated, chaotic and rigid life.
Leadership can be understood as enabling, with intention, those who are relationally close, and for whom the leader has responsibility, to flourish—to joyfully do the good works God has foreordained.
Those we shepherd, for example, will flourish in a culture that exposes shame, allowing room for healing and creativity.
It will find us in our mistakes, our unrepaired relationships and our drivenness to control our emotional states in isolation rather than through the interpersonal regulation we find in community.
How does the literal rewiring of my brain, the embodied alteration of my neural networks and my physical behavior, strengthen and make more permanent the witness of a church in its community?
