Thursday, December 14, 2006
Shame and Grace by Lewis B. Smedes
Shame and Grace by Lewis B. Smedes
If you've ever felt worthless or unworthy of God's love, I highly recommend this book. In Shame and Grace Lewis Smedes explores the human experience of shame, especially as it relates to our relationship with God. His writing is incisive and liberating.
This book begins by describing the feeling of shame, and distinguishing it from other feelings, such as embarrassment, guilt, discouragement, depression and frustration. He says, "shame is a very heavy feeling. It is a feeling that we do not measure up and maybe never will". I have had that feeling many times in my life - when I hear how God is blessing other people's ministries, while mine is progressing slowly; when I do something to hurt another and the accuser begins reminding me about "what a loser" I am. Shame comes in many forms and guises.
"We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are." Page 9
"The shame equation is this: one wrong act equals one bad person." page 17
In chapter four Dr. Smedes carefully distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy shame. Regarding healthy shame he says: "Only a very noble being can feel shame." page 31 Healthy shame is a voice from our true self. "Shame may be a symptom of something going wrong." "Shame protects us from our falseness." When "we probe our shame, we may discover a great deal about ourselves that is worth knowing."
On the other hand he says, "All unhealthy shame is rooted in deceit of one sort or another.", page 38 "Unhealthy shame exaggerates our faults and often pervades our whole being." This unhealthy, social shame is "to be disgraceful is to be weighed and found unacceptable for those who we need most to accept us." To quote a line from "Knight Tales" "You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting." Do you know this feeling?
- "We are shamed when someone looks on us as if we were things and not persons."
- "We are shamed when our own people reject us."
- "We are shamed what our group is despised by another group." (Chapter 7)
The worst shame is public shame. Public shames sends people to the tops of buildings and bridges. The author distinguishes between secrets and privacy. Shaming someone is often a public act, which deeply hurts. "We keep secrets to conceal facts; we need privacy to conceal ourselves. People love secrecy, the Bible says, because their deeds were evil, but people love privacy if their deeds are honorable." Page 62 In Matthew 18, Jesus instructs the disciples to go to great lengths to avoid public shaming someone.
"We are ashamed to be exposed in public. We long to expose ourselves in trusting love." Page 63 We all want to know and be known by some people. No one wants to be a phony, but fear of rejection causes us to build giant facades.
"We want people around us when we die, we trusted with our mysteries while we lived; we want family, trusted friends, children, parents, nobody else around us when we enter the dark passage." Page 64
Sources of Shame
Sources of shame include parents, church, others, ourselves. A parent shame a child when they do not own their child, i.e., they disown him/her. To own a child does not mean to possess the child. "if we own a person, we give her our commitment of an unconditional love and thereby tell her that she will never be disowned, never rejected, never despised." Page 70 Owning a child means at least three things:
Taking responsibility (to be there for them, to unconditionally love and accept them), feeling pride in them, finding joy in them.
Feeling owned tells me:
- I am someone who is loved from the beginning by the person who gave me life.
- I am someone to whom someone else made in an unconditional commitment from the beginning.
- I am someone whose parents consider me worthy of the love they give me.
- I have the power to own myself: I take responsibility for my life, I am proud to be who I am, and I have joy in being myself.
Churches are also a source of shame. In church we often hear three voices: the voice of duty -- God requires me to be perfect before I can be acceptable; the voice of failure -- I am worse than imperfect - a totally unacceptable, human being; the voice of grace by the grace of God: "I can be forgiven for my failure."
We also shame ourselves; "shame prone people translate criticism of what they do into judgment of what they are." page 86
"shame prone people read their own shame into other peoples minds."
Wrong ways to deal with shame include: lowering our ideals to the level of our abilities to meet them. Making ourselves acceptable enough to satisfy the ideals we already have. Persuading ourselves that we are just fine the way we are. Chapter 13
In the chapter entitled "Singing Amazing Grace without feeling like a 'wretch'" the author says: "A grace that makes us feel worse for having it is an ungracious grace and therefore not really grace at all. If grace heals our shame, it must be a grace that tells us we are worthy to have it. We need, I believe, to recognize that we are accepted not only in spite of our undeserving but because of our worth." Page 119
This (above) is an exceptional statement. Can I, at the same time, be both worthy of and undeserving of grace? The author contends that though we are undeserving of God's grace, because we are his creation we have the image of God, and we are worthy of his grace. It is important to distinguish between deserving and being worthy of grace. We can never deserve or earn grace, but God deemed us worthy of his grace or he wouldn't have given it to us. The idea he is trying to get across is that we were "worth it" to God. Jesus for the "joy set before him, endured the cross". It gives me the idea that God gladly rather than reluctantly saves us. He values me.
Chapter 17 deals with coming to terms with our shamers. We cannot undo what was done to us. "If we think we have forgotten, we are probably only stuffing the memory beneath our consciousness to fester there as the poisonous source of assorted other pains. Besides, something should never be forgotten."
"The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving." Forgiveness is a personal drama with five scenes.
Scene one: we blame the shamer.
Scene two: we surrender our right to get even.
Scene three: we revise our caricature of the person who shamed us.
Scene four: we revise our feelings.
Scene five: we accept the person who made us feel unacceptable.
The authors suggest that we do not be too hasty to forgive, but also don't wait too long. Be concrete in our forgiving: "we should forgive in verbs, not in nouns. Forgive people for what they do, not for what they are." He admonishes us to not wait for the shame or to repent, but do not forgive out of a sense of duty. Try "pretending if you need to, and settle for a silent forgiving if you must.
Accepting ourselves: "what we forgive ourselves, we heal our guilt; when we accept ourselves, we heal or shame." (Page 143) What we accept ourselves we acknowledge our depths: "many of us have pressed our feelings down beneath the surface away like the trash compactors that compress our garbage behind her kitchen cupboards. We cannot shoo our shadows away by denying them: they trail along with us like the tail on a lizard." Page 148
There is,..., a healthy pride that comes with grace." "I see it in a child who has just tied her shoestring for the first time or turned a somersault: "mommy, mommy, look! Watch me. No, mother, stop talking, and come look." She feels, I suppose, like the creator felt after he made himself a fine world. When he saw how well he had done, he created some people who could share the world he was so proud of having made. Excellence cries for applause." Page 150
"Unhealthy shame is like a hardshell that we need to crack in order to find the beauty within us." Page 154
"Critics are terror to people with unhealthy shame... Grace-based people take their critics lightly." Page 156
"The secret? It comes in Paul's punchline: "the only thing that really matters is what the Lord thinks of me.""
The author concludes by saying that those who learn to deal with unhealthy shame,, and also with healthy shame, will rediscover joy. This joy is a gift from God. "The fact is that I paid nothing for the breath I am taking at this moment. Or the mysterious energy that is kept my heart pumping 10 million times without missing a beat. I did not pay a cent for the time I have of my hands. Or the touch of that woman's soft finger on the back of my hand. Not a penny for Mozart." Page 162
"Joy in a world that does not work right must be a generous joy. Joy is always, always in spite of the fact that the whole world was groaning while it waits for its redemption." Page 164
There is much more in this book and I recommend that you buy it, read it and pass it along.
Labels: shame grace parents church
