The Soul of Shame (Curt Thompson, MD)
Ten Takeaways:
“One way to approach [shame’s] essence is to understand it as an undercurrent of sensed emotion, of which we may have either a slight or robust impression that… I am not okay.”
“… shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity… Shame is a primary means to prevent us from using the gifts we have been given.”
“And all sin, all idolatry, all coping strategies in which I indulge are ways for me to satiate my hunger for relationship, my longing to be known and loved, my desire to be desired.”
“Long before we are criticising others, the source of that criticism has been planted, fertilized and grown in our own lives, directed at ourselves, and often in ways we are mostly unaware of.”
“Our vulnerability, ultimately to potential abandonment (of which shame is the herald), is simultaneously both the source of all that is broken in our world as well as its redemption.”
“In reality, vulnerability is not something we choose or that is true in a given moment, while the rest of the time it is not. Rather, it is something we are. This is why we wear clothes, live in houses and have speed limits. So much of what we do in life is designed, among other things, to protect us from the fact that we are vulnerable at all times. To be human is to be vulnerable... The question, then, is not if we are or will be vulnerable but rather how and when we inter into it consciously and intentionally for the sake of creating a world of goodness and beauty.”
“[God] is asking us to be as vulnerable as he was in creating us in the first place. He is looking for us because he longs for us to be with him even as he is with us, for us to know his delight with us which is present at all times, even in the presence of other things he may simultaneously feel. He is not asking [Adam and Eve] their whereabouts to acquire their geographic location, nor simply information about the state of their souls. His question is a means of connecting… vulnerability is the state we must pass through in order to deepen our connection with God and others, given our condition. There is no other way.”
“We hear of a God who comes to pitch his tent among ours. A God who in Jesus is not merely with us as a chair is with us, but who sees us, speaks with us, sits at our table for a meal and asks us questions.”
“What emotion coursed through [Jesus] as he revealed these deeply intimate parts of who he saw himself to be? These words were not mere declarations of truth. They were acts of vulnerability, for in his context he opened the door to ridicule, rejection and eventual subjection to tortuous death.”
“To ‘fix our eyes on Jesus’ means watching him and doing what he did. It is to intentionally seek out our shame, expose it and reframe it in light of our Father telling us that we are his daughters and sons in whom he is well-pleased. For this to happen, we must practice embodied acts of imagination that enable all our sensations, images, feelings, thoughts and physical actions to reflect our sense of God’s delight in us… Concretely, this means regularly and intentionally revealing our most hidden shame in the context of those relationships that comprise the great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. In this literal embodied act, our whole self is liberated from shame.”
