In my last podcast, I began what I promised was a series dealing in various ways with the topic of shame, and I want to continue that today with this podcast. Remind you that the definition I’ve used for shame is, at least as an emotion, how we feel about who we are, and that’s to be contrasted with how I feel about what I’ve done, which we would label as guilt. Shame is a very deep and powerful emotion, some say the most powerful of all the emotions.

Earlier this year I was working on a paper for a conference, and the topic was “Encountering God,” and I spent some time to think about how shame is involved in the experience of encountering God. I have continued, over the last five years in which I’ve been working on this topic, to mine the Fathers, looking for their thoughts on shame, quite notably St. John of The Ladder, in his work, The Ladder, says you cannot escape shame except by shame. Observing myself and others, I know that shame is omnipresent, always there though frequently mislabeled and very often quite crippling.

I can’t begin in this podcast to say everything that needs to be said on the topic, but I want to make a particular observation, and that is the experience of shame can be described as “global” in character. For example, I could say that I’m not very good at sports. That’s a specific observation that may carry no particular sense of shame. But on the other hand, if I say that I am clumsy or awkward, I’m making more of a global observation; I have gone from the specific to the general, and the wound begins to be felt. Shame is about who I am, and that is my global sense of self.

It’s a bad habit in our speech that we frequently make global statements about very specific things. A husband and wife, for instance, begin an argument with a global statement: “You never pay attention to what I’m saying!” Really? You never? “You never pay attention to what I’m saying.” That’s a global statement. And shame begets shame, which, most often, particularly in men, begets anger. So the argument rages in a spiral of shame and anger and shame and anger, and the wound grows deeper.

The wounds of shame last long after the argument has ceased. We indeed experience a separation dividing us not only from the other, but from ourselves as well. The psychologist Gershen Kaufman observed that shame is a wound made from the inside, dividing us both from ourselves and others. A wound made from the inside.

The conversation that shame creates often continues in our heads for an extended period of time, sometimes for days. You say to yourself, “I pay attention! She’s the one who ignores what I say… I can’t believe she said that! My mother used to say things like that, and I hated it!” And on we go with the little voice; it goes on and on. You can write your own version of this, because these inner voices in our head are universal.

The inner argument is an extremely ineffective way of restoring and healing the alienation that has occurred. It stays in our mind, not because we are alienated from the other, but because we are alienated from ourselves. This is a wound in ourselves, on the inside, and we continue the argument trying to heal a wound—while the inner argument is only deepening the wound. Most often, we “get over it” not by healing, but by the distractions of other things. But the wound remains, simply waiting for the next assault or for the next time for it to be triggered.

Our culture’s language has become increasingly shaming in character. We make global pronouncements at the drop of a hat. The bitterness and pain of our political life in which this last year people could hardly speak to one another—but the bitterness and pain of our political life is driven largely by the mutual shaming that occurs. “How could you vote for him or her? What kind of person are you that you could vote for him or her?” The same language of shame. We not only disagree with people, we globalize the argument. They do not merely disagree with me; they are racist, stupid, homophobic, Neanderthal, haters—pick your word; we’ve heard them all. This is warfare rather than speech—a warfare of shaming that only deepens the spiral of misery. It becomes demonic at some point, in that our adversary utterly hates our existence, that is, our adversary the devil hates our existence, and nothing wounds us as effectively as shame, and so he encourages it. He encourages it.

Nations regularly shame one another and often have a difficult time being reconciled within themselves. The shame of defeat after WWI was doubtless the single greatest engine driving the angry rise of Hitlerism. The triumphalism of one nation over another can be a repeated source of shaming. Americans often wonder why they encounter anti-Americanism. We have excelled in a foreign policy that begets shame. Acts of generosity, well-meant, easily and unwittingly produce shame. The so-called “export of democracy”—as though we were really good at it—can also be a way of saying, “You’re primitive, backwards; you don’t even know how to run a nation.” I don’t mean to be getting off on political themes; I’m just using this because it’s part of our life and an experience that we see on a daily basis.

Contact with shame begets shame. When a child suddenly comes to a stop during a piano recital because they’ve forgotten their piece, all of the eyes in the audience go to the floor. The child’s shame and embarrassment is in fact felt by everyone, and we can’t bear to look at each other. The comedian Andy Kaufman did comedy routines based on performing in a shameful manner, causing a deep discomfort in his audience. It wasn’t comedy; it was sort of a public act of shame. And so in our exchanges of shame we create a mutual prison, a common hell in which we cycle between the shame of our unworthiness and the anger of our protest against life.

The accusations that produce shame don’t even have to be true. We carry enough shame within us to easily subscribe to even unwarranted shame.

In our Orthodox prayers, we pray that we may someday stand before the fearful judgment seat of Christ “without shame.” Sometimes it’s translated as “blameless,” but it’s literally “without shame.” That would be to stand before God, in the integrity of ourselves-made-whole. Repentance is, on its deepest level, the willingness to “bear a little shame,” in the words of the Elder Sophrony, that is, to reveal ourselves in the truth and the nakedness of our being. The Elder wisely says, “a little,” since we cannot bear more than that most of the time.

In no way does this endorse shame as good, or give a pass to toxic shame. It is to recognize that shame is a fact of life, something that, according to clinical studies, is “hard-wired” into our bodies. It is the abuse of shame that creates the deepest wounds of our lives. As God heals those wounds, he does so by touching them, removing the sting, and reestablishing the wholeness of our lives. In our shame, we feel bad about who we are, and it is who we are that God loves, that God declares to be righteous in the waters of baptism, that Christ died for, that Christ said, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”

So standing before him, face to face, beholding him, without shame, without having to look away: this is the great promise of true wholeness, and the more we experience that, the more we can stop doing the shaming to other people and help them find the wholeness that can be theirs in Christ who loves us without shame or fear. Glory to God.