Tag: Shame

Acts 12:20-25 Should we welcome humiliation?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Poor Herod. Back in my post on Luke 23:1-25 I reflected on Herod’s character, how he was a kind of seeker, always wanting to talk to John and Jesus, but never really wanting to take their answers seriously. In fact, when he doesn’t get the answers he likes (or in his encounter with Jesus, any answer at all), he punishes his would-be gurus with torture and death. He is unhappy, discontented, hungry, but he can’t really believe that there’s anything but his own ego to be concerned with. Like most of us, he longs to draw close to divinity, but he is convinced that the best way to do this is by claiming that his ego is divine. In the end, he is so worshipful of himself that he doesn’t correct the people of Tyre and Sidon when they pretend to worship him.

Herod is not a humble man. He would never believe that humility is the answer to his discontent. And yet, as I often said in my commentary on Luke, the contemplative tradition prizes humility above any other human characteristic. Richard Rohr, one of the great contemplatives of our time, says that he prays that one humiliating thing will happen to him every day, so that he’ll always remember to be humble. Humility like Rohr’s is hard to cultivate, because most of us have been conditioned to respond to humiliation with a sense of shame. In fact, it might seem radical to say that we can have any response other than shame. Yet throughout the centuries, some Christians have deliberately sought out humiliation, just so that they can develop other responses to it. They’ve often done so in an attempt to imitate Christ’s humiliation on the way to the cross, but their methods might, to us, seem quite bizarre.

In his book The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau writes about such people as Simeon of Emesa and Mark the Mad who, in the 6th century, would make public displays of eating pastries on Holy Thursday and stealing food from the marketplace, not to mention hanging out in brothels and walking around naked in the streets. Some of the things they did are not at all admirable and should not be imitated, but ever since reading about them I’ve been fascinated by this idea of holy men going out of their way to attract shame and derision. It’s like they wanted to be constantly embarrassed, so that they could act without worrying about embarrassment. To me, that’s a kind of freedom. It’s the opposite of King Herod. Instead of worshipping their egos, these strange Christians sought to demean their egos in every way they could.

I wouldn’t act like them, or suggest that anyone else should, either. I think there are easier and more gentile ways to learn to take the ego less seriously. Yet I agree with Rohr that if we want to avoid being like Herod, we need to learn to welcome occasional humiliations. Not one of us can avoid acting silly and absurd from time to time. Can we come to see our absurdity itself as a gift from God, causing us to take ourselves less seriously, and our mistakes as a kind of introduction to grace?

As a brief addendum to this post, I should acknowledge that I presented this idea to my friend Di, and she very rightly pointed out that it might be good for white men like Rohr or myself to cultivate humiliation, but that there are a lot of people in the world who wake up every day in a state of humiliation because the cultures they belong to have a vested interest in humiliating them to keep them in their place. So I want to amend what I said above, and assert that humiliation is not always good, and that shame, in particular the kind of shame that is used to keep people down, can be just plain ugly. Obviously, I need to think more about this, and am so grateful to Di, a member of my own Beloved Community, for challenging me and remaining in deep and meaningful conversation with me about this and many other things as well.

 

Luke 4:1-13 The Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

There are many reasons why we might find ourselves in the wilderness.  When my mother died, I spent a year in a wilderness of grief. In a way I was lucky, because I could point to some loss, some reason for me being there.  Sometimes, we find ourselves in the wilderness without a reason that we can name. We are simply there. The world has become thin and arid. We feel lost and alone.

Whether we can name the reasons or not, the Gospels are clear that the wilderness is necessary to our spiritual life.  Being in the wilderness is a step along the path of awakening, of realizing the divinity within ourselves. Much of that awakening has to do with stripping away – losing our sense of insecurity and our craving for protection, surrendering our need to assert our status, setting aside useless shame and the stories that we have allowed to define us.

The wilderness is a place where the clutter of life is stripped away so that we can learn to pay attention.  Attentiveness is the first thing that the spirit is inspiring in us and that Jesus is modeling for us. His attentiveness was sharpened by fasting, and anyone who has ever fasted knows that it concentrates one’s attention on the body.  Within Christianity, fasting has always been a primary form of body spirituality, a way of getting us to listen to our bodies, a way of bring our minds and spirits into alignment with our physical forms. It is, of course, also a form of self-denial, of setting aside the demands of the flesh and the mind so that we can focus deeply on God and God’s creation.

So the wilderness teaches an attentive, embodied, self-denying spirituality, and most of us are poor students.  I don’t think I’m alone in being afraid when I enter the wilderness, and continuing in fear as I consider what each of the wilderness’s lessons will reveal about me – about the person I’ve been and about my limited capacity to change.  At the end of Jesus’ wilderness sojourn, when Satan inflicts three trials upon him, those trials enact our usual responses to fear, and assure us that those responses can be overcome.
Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread.  When we are afraid or threatened, we reach for those things that normally give us a sense of security.  We might stuff our bodies like squirrels preparing for a long and dangerous winter. “Eat, eat” our fear shouts at us, “because you may not know when you can eat again!”  We are tempted to satiate our bodies so that we can go back to ignoring them, and curl up into a kind of hibernation until the reason for fear goes away again.

Jesus was tempted to assert his sovereignty over all of the kingdoms of the world.  When we’re afraid, we might take our security from a sense of power and prominence. Surely we are too powerful and important for anything to hurt us, and we should remind people of that just in case they get any funny ideas when they see us in a weakened state.  More than that, we should remind ourselves that we’re still in control, that God is only there to help us get through this, not to change us or show us the limits of our strengths.

These first two temptations are basic and recognizable, and we all fall prey to them.  But if we follow Jesus’s example and get past them, there’s still one tough temptation awaiting us.  Because the very fact that we overcame the fears that wanted us to fall back on our old patterns of security is going to make us feel pretty good about ourselves.  And it’s then that we might begin to feel that we’re better than other people. What enlightened spiritual beings we must be, to have resisted the first two temptations so well!  Surely other people must recognize our exalted state and find us just the teensiest bit worship-worthy. This, too, is in the end only a scrabbling after security. We tell ourselves that if we can’t fall back on ourselves and our known patterns of behavior, we can at least fall back on our community.  But we secretly suspect that they won’t take care of us, even when we know that they’re good and they love us. We need to give them other reasons for caring for us, we need to earn their love and admiration, or show them that we have earned it by our spiritual goodness.

If we avoid these temptations, then we emerge from the wilderness awakened and transformed.  Or, more accurately, we emerge with some wisdom gained that can help us as we continue down a path of more profound awakening and transformation.    Many things have changed in us, and there are many difficulties still ahead. We might, even, find ourselves returned to the wilderness as we move through life.  But always with the awareness that we’ve come through it at least once, and with a better appreciation of our ability to imitate Christ.

 

What should we do with our pasts?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been watching Girls on HBO lately.  Amy and I curl up in bed, watch, and cringe.  The characters treat each other so horribly.  Watching the show makes me remember what I was like at that age, and realize that I didn’t treat people any better.  My cringing is as much about my own shame as it is about anything the characters do.

I spent last week revisiting that shame, but while I was thinking about my youth, I happened to read a passage written by Bernard of Clairvaux.  Bernard was twenty-two years old when he decided to enter the Cistercian abbey at Citeaux.   He convinced his brother and twenty-five of their closest friends to join him.  It’s hard to imagine that Bernard had much to feel guilty about in his previous life.  But apparently he was assailed by the same guilty memories as the rest of us.  Still, he didn’t think that these memories should or even could be ignored.  “In what way will my life be displaced from my memory?” he wrote.  And then went on to write that it wouldn’t be – that his life, all of the things he’d done, good or bad, could not be forgotten.  But he could be forgiven.  “God’s forgiveness blots out sin, not in causing it to be lost from my memory but in causing something which before used to be both in my mind and dyed into it by my moral habits to still be in my memory but no longer to stain it in any way.”

I wish that I could just push that past self away, and forget the things it did. But memory doesn’t work like that – it can’t be abandoned.  But it can be forgiven.  I once described my past to a mentor, and he asked me, “Who loved you, then?”  I thought back to that time when I was being so reckless and indifferent to the damage I caused.  I was able to name quite a few people who loved me.  “Were they fools?” he asked me.  No.  They must have found something lovable in me, even when I couldn’t see it in myself.

So, says Bernard, does God.  If we can face our pasts with the awareness of God’s forgiveness, the story changes.  We no longer live within stories of our shame, but within stories of God’s forgiveness.  God isn’t interested in knowing only half of us, the half we’re proud of and choose to show to the world.  God wants to know all of us, and is willing to forgive and absolve us in order to be part of our wholeness.