Transforming Shame

A Pastoral Response

Jill L Mcnish, Richard L Dayringer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317787426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Explore shame's revelatory and transformative potential within Christianity and the Church Learn to understand shame to allow for positive change in your clients and parishioners. This book explores psychological, spiritual, and theological aspects of shame and shame's transformative potential. It will help pastoral care givers and mental health workers to identify shame issues and become agents of healing. By examining shame in the gospel accounts of the life, ministry, and death of Jesus, it shows that shame is a vital part of what defines us as human, and how shame can draw us into the mystery of our relationship with God. From the author: This book develops the thesis that shame is a necessary and ontological part of the human condition. Shame can become pathological, undergirding and dominating the entire personality, making it impossible to feel oneself either part of the collective or an individual in one's own right. Transformation of shame is a large part of the psychic meaning of the Christ event, what Christianity is about. Transformation of shame is the experience of grace. The great saints and icons of Christianity have used the Christ event to transform shame and experience grace. The more completely they have done this, the deeper their experience of unity with God. With Transforming Shame: A Pastoral Response, you'll explore:

• the phenomenological meaning of shame
• the psychological meaning, implications, and etiology of shame
• shame in the context of scripture and Christian theology
• the methodology for contextualizing theories of depth psychology in theology and religious experience
• human defense mechanisms to shame
• shame's usefulness in coming to a deeper understanding of personal identity
• the role of the institutional church in helping its people find meaning in shame and experiencing the grace that comes from shame's transformation
• how to address the Church's role in fostering toxic shame

With practical examples drawn from pastoral ministry and a thoughtful, interdisciplinary approach, this book will help you understand both the psychology and the spirituality of shame and make the essential connections between the two. Extensive references and a handy bibliography point the way to further reading on this fascinating subject.

Chapter 1

Introduction

When someone asks me what I am working on and I say shame, it tends to stop the conversation. The response is typically a polite, “Oh, shame; that’s nice.” I find shame is not a topic that evokes most people’s lively enthusiasm. Nobody wants to talk about it. There is a sense that even to talk about shame is shaming. I confess that I came to this topic reluctantly myself. It was as if it came to me, and I finally had to accept that this was the topic I needed to pursue.

My perspective is that of a pastor, priest, and teacher in the institutional Church and a spiritual director. I have taught students in college and seminary settings. I have worked as a chaplain in short-term psychiatric units. This issue of shame just kept hitting me between the eyes. It was not something I was looking for, but the fact is that virtually every depressed person I spoke with presented either directly or indirectly with issues that I came to identify as shame issues. When I started reading more about it, I saw it everywhere.

Around the same time that I was coming to this insight about the ubiquity of shame as an element of psychic suffering, I was preaching on a weekly basis in the churches I was serving. When you are the solo pastor in a small church, it means that you preach just about every Sunday. You slog your way through that lectionary week after week. As I worked through all those passages, I began to notice that not only were my parishioners, directees, students, patients, friends, and colleagues dealing with issues which could be seen directly or indirectly as shame issues but also that many of the events from the gospel which I was preaching about—i.e., events in the life, ministry, and death of Jesus of Nazareth—were most fundamentally about shame. When the lectionary passages did not directly suggest shameful circumstances for Jesus, they often implied something shameful in the lives and circumstances of people he was engaged with, ministering to, or speaking about in parables.

I have come to believe that understanding the psychic and spiritual phenomenon of shame and its centrality in human life is key to understanding the psychic power, meaning, and transformative potential of the Christ event. My general heuristic assumption—that is, the reason I study the interface of psychology and religion—is that I believe understanding the psychological underpinnings of the lived faith experience gives us courage. It gives us a place to stand in the midst of shame and other psychic suffering by providing us with insights about how God may be working in the human psyche and what God has done for us in the incarnation. Working at the intersection of theories of depth psychology and lived religious experience, I propose positive, life-giving potential for shame.

This book draws upon scriptural descriptions of the life, words, trial, and passion of Jesus to demonstrate that he—or at least the figure that the gospelers describe—experienced the sting of shame at many points in his life and death. It discusses theological understandings of the human shame experience, and it attempts to relate these understandings and lived spiritual experiences to the psychological underpinnings of shame in human life, as proposed in the theories of depth psychologists.

I believe that shame is an integral and inevitable part of the human condition and indeed is at the core of most profound religious conversion experience. In that sense, shame can draw us to God. Depth psychologists, theologians, and mystics have independently discovered that when shame experience is honestly confronted instead of bypassed and defended against, it is transformative and revelatory of identity because it is the affect closest to the experienced self. As one follows and connects the insights of depth psychologists, theologians, and mystics, one sees that shame arises most fundamentally from the tension between the understanding of the human finite, creaturely nature, and the consciousness that comes from being created in God’s image. On another and parallel level, there is a fundamental tension in human life between the competing desires for separation and union, between wanting to pull apart and longing to draw close, between wanting to be part of the collective and wanting to be one’s own most authentic and creative individual person. This tension, which ultimately may play out in the experience of oceanic unity with the Absolute, as well as through truly creative and abundant life, is central in religious experience and, I believe, central to the meaning and paradoxes of shame. It is in our confrontation and negotiation of shame that this tension is resolved. This is so because the affect of shame has the paradoxical property of being both a uniting and dividing force. Shame is a uniting force because it moves us to try to fit in and conform to societal conventions and standards. It is a dividing and isolating force because it moves us to seek privacy in our physical lives and creative impulses. In its more pathological forms, the processes of shame may separate and isolate the individual altogether. Thus, shame pulls us into society even as it separates us from society. One aspect of shame serves social adaptation and ensures membership in human society through conformity; the other seemingly opposed attribute of shame ensures that the collective does not violate the individual’s boundaries of personal integrity and is responsible for the maintenance of privacy in our thoughts and ideas.

This book also looks briefly at the tendency of the institutional Church to unhealthily exploit, even if unwittingly, the shame affect in human experience. I propose some ways for the Church and its ordained representatives to begin to use shame more constructively to facilitate its transformative potential in individuals and to build up the Body of Christ. It is recognized, however, that this work only begins to scratch the surface in raising issues and proposing strategies for the consideration of the Church on the subject of how it might more effectively facilitate the resurrection and transformation of the shame affect. It is my hope that future work will go farther in proposing liturgical reform and methodology for pastoral caregivers in helping people to confront and transform shame, thereby growing in relationship with themselves, with one another, and with God.

The great Rollo May once said that an important part of healing is “utilization of suffering.” This is an invaluable insight for pastors, especially when we feel tempted to cop out by taking the “There-there-things-are-not-so-bad-Jesus-loves-you” approach. May also noted that, “a human being will not change his or her personality patterns, when all is said and done, until forced to do so by suffering…. Suffering is one of the most potentially creative forces in nature.”¹ Shame is a cause of great suffering in human life. The idea that suffering has creative potential is hopeful and optimistic. It is therapeutic for pastoral caregivers to set this reality before those to whom they minister—especially in a society in which many assume that happiness is the ultimate (and most realistic) human value, and that it is somehow neurotic not to be feeling happy most of the time. As John Hick once noted, “The capacity to find God in suffering and defeat as well as in triumph and joy is … the special genius of Christianity.”² This is most particularly and obviously true with the shame experience. The central figure of the Christian faith suffered the worst imaginable shame—the public exposure and shame of the cross—and was transformed (i.e., resurrected) in and through that experience. We too can be transformed—spiritually and psychologically—if we face shame honestly.

Chapter 2

Shame in the Gospel Accounts of the Life, Ministry, and Death of Jesus

O sacred head, now wounded,

With grief and shame bowed down;

Now scornfully surrounded

With thorns, thy only crown.

Paul Gebhardt, Passion Chorale (1656),
based on twelfth-century Latin hymn, st. 1.

We read Thee best in him who came

to bear for us the cross of shame;

sent by the Father from on high,

our life to live, our death to die.

From Hymn 455, Episcopal Hymnal (1982)

Some modern scholars, including Andries Van Aarde and Donald Capps, have convincingly asserted that, by reason of the unusual and unorthodox circumstances of his conception, the historical Jesus was not a completely accepted member of the house of Israel. Van Aarde understands there to have been seven categories of Israelite men based upon their parentage and the circumstances of their birth. Priests, Levites, and full-blooded Israelites made up three of these categories.¹ “Illegal” children of priests—i.e., children of priests who had married prohibited women—and proselytes made up the fourth category. The fifth group was “made up of bastards, the fatherless, foundlings and those made eunuchs by human agency.”² The sixth group included those who for physical reasons could not have sexual intercourse, such as born eunuchs, men with deformed genitals, and hermaphrodites. The last group consisted of non-Israelites who by definition were “impure and outside the covenant and thus excluded from any kind of social relationships” with Israelites.³

Van Aarde believes that Jesus belongs in the fifth category. He writes that “the historical claim may therefore be made that in terms of the criteria of the period of the Second Temple, Jesus was regarded as being of illegitimate descent.”⁴

The image of Jesus as the fatherless carpenter, the unmarried son of Mary, who lived in a strained relationship with his village kin of Nazareth, probably because of the stigma of being fatherless and, therefore, a sinner, fits the ideal type of the fifth category.⁵

If this is true, Jesus would have been without “proper covenant membership” in the house of Israel. People in this fifth category were those “of doubtful parentage, perhaps even of disreputable descent. Thus, their membership in the true Israel was … suspect”—and they were therefore “not allowed to enter the congregation of the Lord in terms of the ideology of the temple….”⁶ This view accords with that of other contemporary scholars, including the significant work of Jane Schaberg in her book, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives.⁷

It is not my intent to enter into the thicket of the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christian faith or the direct fatherhood by God of Jesus by the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit. This is of not the concern of the present work. Here I am concerned with how the circumstances of Jesus’ birth would have been construed by his own historical community and by the gospelers. Joseph is not a factor in what are believed to be the earliest sources (Thomas, Q, Paul, and Mark).⁸ The later gospels of Matthew and Luke go to great pains to attribute divine and virginal conception of Jesus. Thus, it may well be that central to the historical Jesus’ identity in first-century Palestine was an illegitimate and fatherless status.⁹ Mark—the earliest gospel—refers to Jesus as “son of Mary” (Mark 6:3) and does not mention Joseph at all. Matthew and Luke refer to Jesus parenthetically as Joseph’s son, and “[s]ince later traditions are intent to show Jesus’ divine origins (John 1:1–18; Hebrews 1–2), the general New Testament tendency is to obscure the factual origins of Jesus while ‘theologizing’ them.”¹⁰

Honor and shame were (and still are) pivotal values of the Mediterranean world of which Jesus of Nazareth was a part. Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey have elucidated the centrality of the honor/shame dynamic in their article “Honor and Shame in Luke-Acts: Pivotal Values in the Mediterranean World.”¹¹ “Honor,” they write, “is the positive value of a person in the eyes of his or her social group.”¹² Ascribed honor (as distinguished from acquired honor) is honor that a person has because of his or her kinship, not because of any effort or achievement of his or her own. To “be shamed” was to be publicly stripped or denied honor. However, to “have shame” was positive, especially for women. It is a good thing to care about one’s honor. Most human beings think it desirable to “have” shame; however, we do not want to “be” shamed.¹³

The first-century male ideal, the honorable man, was

one who knows how to live up to his inherited obligations. He neither encroaches upon others nor allows himself to be exploited or challenged by others. He works to feed and clothe his family. He fulfills his community and ceremonial obligations. He minds his own business in such a way as to be sure no one else infringes upon him, while looking for possible advantages for himself.¹⁴

The quantity of honor available in the first-century Middle Eastern community was perceived as fixed and finite. Thus males were continually jousting to maintain, and if possible increase, the honor that they had. Acquiring honor typically meant taking it from someone else. There was frequent challenge and response, “a sort of constant social tug of war, a game of social push and shove” to protect honor and test the possibility of acquiring more of it at someone else’s expense.¹⁵ We see this jousting in some of Jesus’ conversations with Pharisees and Sadducees. For example, in Matthew 22:24–34, the Sadducees attempt to trick him by asking him whose wife a woman will be in the resurrection after she had married seven brothers. Jesus effectively silenced them with his response. It is only by fully understanding the centrality of the honor/shame dynamic in first-century Palestine that we can begin to appreciate the radical, countercultural nature of Christ’s life and work, and the agony and isolation that his convictions, his teachings, and his choices must have caused him.

There is a cultural difference between the concepts of honor and shame for men and women in Mediterranean culture. A male’s honor is at stake in the sexual purity of his mother, wife, daughters, and sisters. “The sexual purity or exclusiveness of the female is embedded within the honor of some male.”¹⁶ Thus, regardless of whether we believe that Jesus’ conception came about to a virgin through the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit and without any involvement of a male human being, if Jesus’ conception and birth were viewed by his community as unorthodox, it surely would have affected his worldview, as well as the way he would have been viewed in the world into which he was born. Capps puts it this way:

If Jesus was viewed as illegitimate by villagers, and was therefore the victim of considerable social ostracism, this would have affected his marriageability, his occupational prospects, his chances of an education, and, of course, for participating in the religious life of the community. In that case, we would not be surprised if what most scholars believe happened did in fact happen, that is, he left Nazareth to make his “home” in Capernaum; that he probably did not marry and father children of his own.¹⁷

What does it mean if the most important person in Western history, the one that Christendom proclaims as part of the Godhead itself, was born with the shame and stigma of illegitimacy, in the context of an honor/shame Mediterranean culture for which the virginal purity of a woman bore “almost mythical importance”?¹⁸

It is also informative to take a brief look at Jesus’ genealogy as set forth in the first chapter of Matthew. It is, of course, acknowledged that this genealogy is not historically “factual.” Nor can we even say with certainty that the individuals whose names appear in the genealogy were actual historical figures. However, as will be developed later, their stories as recorded in the Hebrew scriptures are true in the mythic sense; they rose up from the collective and were preserved in oral and written tradition for hundreds of years. The characters are bearers of archetypal truths, if not historical truths. In religious life—life in the spirit—symbol and mythic truth are the most important truths.

We can look at the gospel accounts of the birth, life, ministry, and death of Jesus of Nazareth on least four levels of “reality.” First is the level of factual historicity. Most of the historical Jesus has been permanently lost to us, although historians and archaeologists can with some credulity uncover realities of the cultural and material world in which he lived. The second level of reality is the experience of Jesus by people who knew him or had contact with him in his own time. The third level of reality is seen in the reformulation and reworking of the story of Jesus of Nazareth by those who wrote about him decades after his life. The fourth level of reality is the psychological, archetypal meaning with which scripture is experienced by us today. This experience can be enhanced by understanding something of the social and material world in which Jesus lived.

I contend that on whatever level ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Shame in the Gospel Accounts of the Life, Ministry, and Death of Jesus
• Chapter 3. What Is Shame? Toward a Working Phenomenological Understanding
• Chapter 4. The Revelatory Potential of Shame
• Chapter 5. Defenses Against Shame
• Chapter 6. Methodology in the Use of Depth Psychology in Theological Study and Ministry
• Chapter 7. Toward an Understanding of Shame from Perspectives of Depth Psychology
• Chapter 8. Toward a Theology of Shame
• Chapter 9. Reflections on the Orientation of the Institutional Church and Its Ministers Toward the Meaning and Phenomenon of Shame
• Chapter 10. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index