I’ve been reading Dan Allender and Tremper Longman’s excellent book, Cry of the Soul , about how our darker emotions of fear, contempt, envy, and shame are expressed in the Psalms and help to illuminate the character of God, albeit dimly at times. One of their most provocative chapters is on shame and its close relation to idolatry. I’m not sure if I agree with them completely, but it has caused me to start evaluating some of my sources of shame or embarassment (i.e. spilling something; which I do often enough to call it a habit) from a different perspective.
To begin, they identify shame as the traumatic exposure of nakedness (195). Whether it’s just feeling dumb or deeply ashamed its because we’ve been made vulnerable and others have seen something we didn’t want them to see. Normally we think that the problem is that we have a low sense of self-esteem and that if we could stop thinking so negatively about ourselves and if others would me more supportive we could do away with our shame. The problem, however, is that this view arises out of a worldview that sees humans as fundamentally good, and where we must only realize our goodness in order to be healthy. It doesn’t leave much room for our sinful nature and it is not true to the reality of what underlies shame: idolatry.
As they put it, shame is rooted in our inherent preference to trust false gods rather than depend on God for each every moment of our existence (196). So, when I feel stinging shame when I begin to cry in front of others it’s fundamentally because the false god of coming across as a person who’s “got it together” that I’ve been trusting in is exposed as lacking the power to save. The shame I feel only serves to turn my thoughts inward so I don’t realize that I’m not trusting God to protect me, and it numbs me from the sorrow I should feel over my sin of idolatry and inability to enter into that emotion of sadness.
What’s more, Allender and Longman think this view of shame holds true even where someone is a victim of something terrible and feels deep shame about what happened to them. They give the example of someone who has endured sexual abuse and feels shame about it. Instead of sorrow over the violation, the person feels shame and an inability to be drawn toward forgiveness. It is here that I wonder if the theory breaks down. When others rip from us our dignity are we not to feel a deep awareness that something is wrong, that we are being exposed as naked and it is shameful? Is shame our internal signal that we are not being protected as we were meant to be?
Despite not having fully come to grips with their theory I have still found it to be a sharp insght for exposing some of the more insidious and hard-to-see idols that I have been relying on for so many years.