Shame, the great teacher

Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

For various reasons, I’ve been thinking about shame recently, and I was taken aback by this quote from John Chysostom, on Romans 1:17:

But he who hath become just shall live, not for the present life only, but for that which is to come. And he hints not only this, but also another thing along with this, namely, the brightness and gloriousness of such a life. For since it is possible to be saved, yet not without shame (as many are saved of those, who by the royal humanity are released from punishment), that no one may suspect this upon hearing of safety, he adds also righteousness; and righteousness, not thine own, but that of God; hinting also the abundance of it and the facility. For you do not achieve it by toilings and labors, but you receive it by a gift from above, contributing one thing only from your own store, “believing.”¹

In our therapeutic age, and our Western individualist culture, we have a tendency to see things like the experience of guilt and shame as something to fix. In other words, we think the experience of these things is a problem, and that the goal should be living a life where I no longer experience such things.

But then I remember the woman at the well - that blessed Samaritan woman - who Jesus not only reveals himself to, but takes time to point out her bad theology and calls her into her shame.

Likewise, when Jesus calls Peter to feed his sheep he does so in such a way that recalls Peter’s denials of Jesus. Jesus does not ignore his shame, but he calls him back into it to receive Jesus’ forgiveness and calling.

There is a continual temptation in our age to try to get past these things, and not feel the weight of them, instead of finding the grace, mercy, presence, and the calling of God in the midst of them. Numbing ourselves to the effects of our sin, brokenness, and pain, we often also numb ourselves to receiving the Lord’s kindness and mercy in the very places we need it.

For those of you who know what I do, you know that one of my responsibilities is to help run a Marriage and Family Therapy program at Talbot School of Theology. As an aspect of that role, we are cultivating a place where we can wrestle through various modalities of soul care (pastoral care, spiritual direction, and therapy) in a distinctively and explicitly Christian frame.

One of our new endeavors is to cultivate spaces where we can honestly talk to our marriage and family therapists about being Christian and doing therapy in a therapeutic age. So I, along with my good friend Berry Bishop (who is also my associate director) led a discussion on these things over lunch with our students.

Berry, who is a therapist (but also the first one in the room to remind everyone that theology is the queen of the sciences), and myself, who recognizes that my own background in systematic theology was through a training that did not consider the care of souls as an essential aspect of what a theologian does, recognize that we need each other in this.

We need space to wrestle through what it means to give ourselves to Christ all the way down. We need to see ways our sin warps us, not only consciously, but subconsciously. We need to see ways that we are often blinded by the strength of our affirmations, looking through the lens of our zeal and not seeing the truth of how deformed our souls may actually be.

Unfortunately, there are few spaces where real conversation is happening between theologians, psychologists, spiritual directors, and pastors about the ministry of soul care. This is what we are cultivating at Talbot, and this is my vision for the Institute for Spiritual Formation.

It was in this conversation that Berry shared about shame, and how she has come to see how shame is the great teacher. She shared about her worry that in a therapeutic age we try to rescue people from their shame rather than allowing it to lead them to Christ.

This is the fruit of these sorts of conversations. We can wrestle honestly, not only with the “state of the question” in our academic guilds, but the state of the question in our souls as we stand face to face with Jesus by faith. We recognize that these sorts of questions don’t simply run in one direction, but must truly be a conversation between disciplines and backgrounds.

The gift of having Berry as a psychologist to talk to, is that she can help me as a theologian consider what it means to be present to another. Likewise, having Jamin Goggin join Talbot after 20+ years pastoring, gives us the benefit of his having on-the-ground experience of shepherding souls in the church to help shape a discussion of how the differing modalities of soul care function.

But as we consider shame, let us not be afraid of it. Shame is not the endless abyss it often feels like. Shame is unraveled before the face of Christ, because Christ meets us in our shame. It was not in our goodness that Christ died for us, but in our sin and shame. Meet him there now.

1. John Chrysostom, “Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” in Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistle to the Romans, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. B. Morris, W. H. Simcox, and George B. Stevens, vol. 11, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1889), 349.