Is Shame Something to Resist—or to Reconsider? - Lecture 2

What is shame, and why does it shape us so deeply? Shame is a shared human experience, yet we struggle to describe it. In some cases, we sense that we should not feel ashamed, and yet we do. In other cases of moral wrongdoing, a lack of shame, or at least the ability to experience it, is often deemed problematic. To be shameless is viewed as a moral deficiency in such circumstances.  

Scripture only deepens the complexity. Across both the First and Second Testaments, the Bible seems to present the experience of shame as something integral to the human experience— and as something we should not resist.

In this Friday Night Lecture, Dr. S. J. Parrott will explore the dynamics of shame, what it contributes to our moral psychologies, and how Scripture can reorient our thinking about shame in order to consider how we find out who we are, and who gets a say in the process.

Friday Night Lectures feature three short and engaging talks woven together with live Q&A, brief intermissions, and time for conversation. Join us for a warm, welcoming atmosphere and meaningful reflection on compelling questions within the Christian tradition. 

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER

S. J. Parrott completed her DPhil in Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford after obtaining two master's degrees at Regent College in Vancouver. She specializes in topics of shame, ethics, human formation, rhetoric, prophetic and poetic literature, and more.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I hope that we begin our second lecture tonight with a clear understanding of what shame is phenomenologically, experientially. And in light of this clear understanding, I want to return to something I said very briefly at the beginning of my first lecture. I said it very briefly and short quickly, because I didn't want to scare you too much. I said, it would be a mistake to not be capable of experiencing shame. Why is that? Why would it not be best if we were shame resistant? By which I mean we moved beyond shame to never experience it again, also known as shamelessness. Is that even possible? The book Zephaniah seems to take another position on the matter and is the book which inspired the title of the second lecture. It reads, The Lord within her is righteous, he does no wrong. Morning by morning he dispenses justice, yet every day he does not fail, yet the unjust know no shame. I take my cue from the unjust know no shame in Zephaniah 3.5, in order to make the case that a capacity to experience shame is important. And here I'm not talking about the fact that shame is a moral emotion and it can be formative for one's character in moral instances, something recognized by virtually every scholar of shame, irrespective of their field of study. Instead, I'm talking about what the capacity to experience shame represents in our moral psychologies, what the capacity adds to us, and what would be lost if we lost the ability to experience shame. I realized what I am suggesting might make some of you confused, uncomfortable, or even angry. Some of you might be thinking shame can be so awful. How could it possibly be bad to never experience it again? Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that we ought to experience shame because the experiences of shame are important. Many, if not most, experiences of shame are not formative in any way. Some experiences of shame are destructive and harmful. I'm not advocating that we ought to experience it, or that we can do a little fancy thinking and make harmful experiences better by putting a spin on them. I'm not doing those things. And here again I make a personal note. It was my personal decades-long struggle with chronic shame that eventually led through a series of twists and turns to my researching it now. And my understanding has changed a lot over the years. I personally feel called to do this research to help others mitigate and manage the shame in their lives. Along the way, I have simply learned that shame is related to other important concepts, which I want to share with you tonight. And my hope is that any thoughts or fears you might have will ease as we continue to learn to discuss together. So to ease some discomfort at the outset, perhaps I can frame what I am saying in this way. When we eliminate our capacity to experience one thing, we limit our capacity to experience another thing, often unintentionally. This is particularly true of emotions. We cannot pick and choose which emotions we experience without compromising other emotions. For example, fear. It sounds desirable to never experience it again, does it not? When we suppress our capacity to experience fear, we also suppress the capacity to experience joy because these two things are related, an argument made by others. The elimination of or suppression of a negative most often comes with a consequence for a positive thing too. In the case of shame, the immediate consequence would be the suppression or elimination of our ability to respect one another's moral agents. This is an argument not made by me uniquely, though I'll give you the how I've researched that in the context of the Psalms. This is the argument made by Thomason, which informs this lecture. But there are other consequences too, not recognized by Thomason because she does not consider the role of religion in her work, consequences, which I've come to see through my research in the Psalms and Scripture more broadly. The suppression of our ability to experience shame will lead to a suppression of our ability to acknowledge God, to be in Christ in a way that actually impacts our lives, and most significantly significantly a suppression of our ability to be transformed by Christ. I realize these are very big claims, and we're going to jump into them now, beginning with a little bit more theory, and then I'm going to turn to scripture to see these ideas in action, in this lecture, just in a psalm, and then we'll continue this in our next lecture, our final lecture together. Okay. A good place to begin is by painting a picture of what the elimination of the capacity to experience shame would look like. To remind us, our definition of shame is I feel shame when some aspect of my identity overshadows my own sense of myself. If someone lacked the ability to shame, lacked a liability to shame, pardon me, it means that they would not experience this tension. They would not feel overshadowed or defined by any feature of their identity that fell outside of their self-conception. They would not fear or anticipate that others might see only one thing about them or think of some feature of their identity as their most prominent characteristic. What might be bad about this picture? This picture reveals someone's failure to recognize the limitations of their own self-conception. We've already briefly touched on this. We all know that we do not always see ourselves aright. Case in point, the arrogant person, an example I'm going to return to. But what about the person who has a negative self-conception that is not accurate and cannot have this altered by coming into tension with an external positive point of view? Shamelessness is a failure to entertain other points of view about who we are. That failure is due to a refusal to take seriously the idea that we may not be the people that we always think we are. Think again about the example I gave with my friend Blake, pointing out that I was opinionated. I entertained his point of view and it affected my understanding of myself. But what if I hadn't? And moreover, Zephaniah is one example, and our culture more broadly views shamelessness as a moral deficiency, as not good. We'd probably agree with that. Most of us, I would say. So if we are not going to go the shamelessness route, then we need to understand the social nature of our identities in more detail. I don't have my glasses on because they don't work at the Oh yes, sorry, one slide behind. Okay. Uh, French philosopher, uh, my French is non-existent, Jean-Paul Sartre. I don't know how to say his name, I can never get it right. He argues that a basic structure of shame is one of self-consciousness, a consciousness of being an object for the other. Thomason makes consciousness of being an object for the other easier to understand when she describes it as our awareness that our identities extend beyond our self-conception and are partially determined by others. Put in my words, put simply, my self-conception does not exist in isolation. Rather, our identities are socially and therefore partially are social, pardon me, and therefore are partially socially constructed. When I interact with others, they can come to conclusions about who and what I am independently of who I take myself to be. Unless I am shameless, I will have to contend with these conclusions. Let's return to the example of the arrogant person. They have overestimated themselves in some way, and thus they are arrogant. Most likely they do not see themselves to have overestimated themselves, but believe themselves to be excellent, beautiful, talented, whatever they are arrogant about. They have too inflated a high IQ political too, they are too inflated about a high IQ or political connections or social influence or whatever people are arrogant about in culture today. In contrast, other people treat him or regard him as though he is arrogant. He is perceived as having an overinflated self-conception. Here there is an incongruity between how the arrogant person sees themselves and how others perceive them, revealing that the arrogant person's self-conception is not the whole story on who they are. Notice further that we often fear that others will draw conclusions about us regardless of how we see others. Sorry, how we see ourselves. Take another example, a person who is shy might worry that others attribute her silence to snobbishness. Even if she does not agree with that conclusion, she still has to deal with it because others will interact with her based on who they take her to be. Think again about my story about Blake's perspective that revealed that my self-conception wasn't the whole story on who I was. In all these examples, there's something important to see about the social nature and construction of our identities, emotions of all sides set aside. We are not the final authority on who we are. Unless we attempt to be shameless, the perspectives of others are something that one must contend with even if you don't agree with them. Contending with the perspectives of others means that we may experience shame. Instead of viewing this as an unfortunate alternative to the worst option of being shameless, the lesser of two evils, if you will, I would suggest to you two reasons why maintaining this capacity to shame is important to maintain without advocating that the experience of shame is necessary. I want to make sure that distinction is clear: the capability for something versus the actual experience of it. I'm talking about the capability for something, not the actual experience of it. Okay, two reasons why this is important to maintain. First, we mentioned already we're prone to get it wrong about ourselves, which is the reason why we're not going the shamelessness route. I'm not suggesting that we ought to experience shame when we are limited in our view of ourselves. Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that we ought to experience shame when we are limited in our view of ourselves. Rather, I'm saying that because we can get it wrong about ourselves, the perspectives of others can bring insight to our limit the limitations without necessarily causing shame, though they can. Once again, the example of Blake. You'll hear his name all night. Now, he doesn't even know he's an example. I should tell him that he's an example, the poor guy. Now I hear your concerns already that others are also prone to get it wrong about us and can hurt us with their perspective, causing great shame. I will deal with his objection in due course. Second, a capacity to experience shame is important because it means we have chosen to give practical weight to the perspectives of others. Their perspectives hold authority, and I am open to these views because they are moral agents capable of thinking and seeing differently than I. Pardon me, their perspectives are different than mine by virtue of their not being mine, and I choose to acknowledge them. Now, by authority, that's Thomason's word, that means that we recognize their perspective and its ability to compel us to do, think, or feel things if we even if we are not inclined to do, think, or feel those things. In the experience of shame, the recognition of another person's authority is reflected by the fact that others are able to call attention to ourselves. An important caveat is that we must not agree with their perspective. Authority here does not mean correctness or expertise. It's talking about this practical weight. I'm speaking about the fact that others can make judgments, including judgments about us, which can call our call attention to ourselves, um, pardon me, which can call our attention to that which prompted their judgment. We do not have to like, dislike, agree, or disagree with the content of their judgments. I'm simply speaking about the fact that we recognize them. That's what I'm talking about here. And here's the critical point in all of this.

unknown 12:48

Good.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Our liability to shame is partially constitutive of our respect for others as moral agents. Simply put, shame and respect are related. Put another way, it is because we are able to respect others that we are liable to shame. Let me be clear again. I'm not saying that the experiences of shame and respect are related or happen simultaneously. I'm not saying that we should experience shame as a way to respect others. I'm not suggesting you accept your sexist uncle's perspective of you because you want to respect your mom's brother. That would be foolish and dangerous to suggest. Rather, I'm saying that shame and respect share features in our moral psychologies. To return to that word authority, authority as it's being used here is the ability of an other, another person, and their perspective to make demands and to compel people to alter their behavior. That is the same authority we recognize when we respect other people. This is seen when we make ourselves accountable to others because of that respect. We see ourselves as beholden to them, as being beholden, to justify our actions to them and to respond to their demands, even if they never ask anything from me. You do this with your boss at work. You do this with your family or in your significant relationship. You do this hopefully with your friends and the groups you're in, and we hopefully do this in our church communities. Hopefully we're kind of tracking with what I'm saying here about this practical weight that we give people. Think again about how I gave practical weight to Blake's perspective. He caused me to see, think, and feel in a way that I was not inclined to. Most importantly, we do this in our relationship with God. His perspective has practical weight and authority. And here in our relationship with God, there is a double meaning with this word authority with respect to correctness, an idea that I'm going to return to. The liability that comes with respecting others, acknowledging their perspective, and that it can affect us is that we might experience shame for better or for worse. I hope this is making sense because this is a very important point that I'm making. I'm hoping that this capacity to experience shame is first different from the experience shame, and that shame and respect are related in our moral psychologies because we've chosen to give practical weight to the perspectives of others simply as part of being a human in a relation. And the liability that comes with that is that we may experience shame. Okay. Following Thomas in, I've given these two reasons why shamelessness, not ever experiencing it, not um uh not having this capacity, that's not the right path to take. That's because we take seriously the idea that we may not always be the people that we think we are, that we don't view of ourselves as the final authority on who we are, and second, because we've chosen to respect others, and that comes with the liability to shame. Now, at the beginning of this lecture, I said that Thomason's conclusions are not complete because her work is done in a context that does not consider the role of religion, and it's here that I'd like to make a couple notes from my own research that I believe are meaningful for us tonight. If we choose to contend with the perspectives of others, we choose also to contend with God's perspective. If we choose to eliminate shame and be shameless, we will not entertain other points of view about who we are, which would also include God's. It's not very realistic to think that we can only listen to God's perspective and be immune or shameless to all the human ones that we encounter every day. And I think that most of us here would very much like to hear God's perspective in general and specifically about us. I sure did when I went out and away on an eight-day silo retreat 10 years ago to ask God who I was. And I think that most of us here would very much like that. I hope I'm not wrong in thinking that. This begins with choosing to acknowledge or recognize God in the same way we choose to respect our fellow humans. I say acknowledge or recognize, I prefer acknowledge, but recognition is another word too. Instead, acknowledge or recognize God instead of respect God, because according to the research that I've done in both the prophets and now the Psalms, God is understood to have a perspective that is accurate, unlike ours, and of the ultimate value, which certainly not everybody's perspective is, especially when it's uh in acts of shaming. I'm going to use the final part of this lecture to look at a psalm more in more detail to help us understand this point more, hopefully bring this all home. And this would obviously be coming from my research on the Psalms here. Psalm 71, I I know it's tiny. I'm really sorry. And it didn't even all fit on, but I'm really sorry. But I'll have fancy circles that come on to help you see what I'm talking about. Psalm 71 opens with a request that many of us would also desire. In you, O Lord, I have taken shelter. May I never be ashamed. And following these pleas, that uh pardon me, following this plea, um, are requests by the psalmist that he is indeed in a state of shame. He wants vindication, deliverance, and protection. And then the next section in Psalm 71, it introduces the psalmist's enemies, the ones whose perspective are causing the psalmist shame. He requests to be delivered from the unjust treatment of the wicked oppressors, which is accompanied by statements of trust in God. It's in verse 11 that the psalmist complains about what these enemies are saying about him. The psalmist then asks God to cause his enemies to experience shame, who are now called accusers in verse 13. And that's followed by a much larger section that's filled with statements about the psalmist's trust in and praise of God. The psalm ends with the psalmist using his tongue to praise God consistently, since those who spoke ill of him and wanted to harm him will themselves be ashamed. The point is from beginning to end, shame is featured in Psalm 71, yet also prevalent, if not more so, is the psalmist's acknowledgement of God, his saving power, and his trust in him. Now, this again comes from the research that I've done that trust, usually trust and acknowledgement of God, is the antonym to shame, not honor. That's where that argument comes from. I'm not the first to argue it. There's other articles and scholars who have done that. Psalm 71 ref uh reveals a contest of perspectives between the psalmist's understanding of himself and the enemy's understanding of him. The psalmist sees himself as faithful. He has continually fulfilled God's command and pursues God as his refuge. The statements of trust and praise littered throughout the psalm also reveal the psalmist's self-conception, we could say. They are evidence of the psalmist's actions and behaviors which factor into how he sees himself. The psalmist associates himself with God throughout the psalm, and therefore his relationship with God is central to his self-conception. In short, he sees himself as upright and as having done right, faithful to God and trusting in him. And it is this self-conception articulated by the psalmist that is in danger of being defined by something outside of it. Something other than faithfulness is threatening to overshadow him. And this danger comes from the enemies in the Psalm who view the psalmist differently than the psalmist himself does. His enemies are disputing his relationship with God in verse 11. It says, it's circled on the screen, God has forsaken him. This is what the enemies are kind of saying to each other. God has forsaken him, run and seize him, for there is no one who will rescue him. But it is more than this. The enemies are not just disputing his relationship with God, they're dispat just they're disputing who the psalmist is as revealed through his relationship with the deity. If the enemy's perspective of the psalmist reveals something to the psalmist about himself, then the psalmist would move to the periphery of his social order and community. He would be defined by the word forsaken and thus abandoned. And therefore, the avoidance of this situation and the maintenance of the psalmist's relationship with his God is the central concern of Psalm 71. He does not want to be defined by forsakenness because he wants and believes that his understanding of himself to be true. He wants to be faithful unto God and in relationship with God, and he wants this to not be defined out of existence by the perspective of the enemies. Psalm 71 as a very I don't have much time, so I can't go much, can't say much more than that. But Psalm 71 shows us how to contend with the perspectives of others. Psalm 71 shows us how the psalmist brings his experience of shame to God and asks God to arbitrate. The psalmist is doing what I have said we have to do if we're not going to go the shameless route. He is contending with the perspectives of his enemies that he cannot ignore. They are causing him shame. You cannot ignore that. And he's struggling to work through them. The psalmist believes he understands himself correctly and that it is his enemies who are mistaken in their perception. Nevertheless, he's feeling defined by how they have called attention to himself, and it is this contest of perspectives and experience of shame that he needs help with and needs help out of. And what's important to note is that even while the psalmist espouses utter trust in his God, prays for his God, declares the justice of God, and certainty that the enemy's perspective is wrong, so to speak, he nevertheless submits himself to God's judgment. That is, he ultimately acknowledges that it is the perspective of God that is consequential, accurate, and of ultimate value. The psalmist and the reading community of the Psalm, which includes us tonight, while assured of the psalmist's uprightness, ultimately submit to the implicit fact that it is neither the perspective of the psalmist nor the enemies that is definitional, but God's. He waits for God to respond to his cries for help and to answer him. And here we can circle around to what I suggested earlier about respect and acknowledgement of God. The psalmists, the enemies, and the witnesses or hearers of the psalm are shown that who one is is not totally up to oneself. The psalmist does not have the final say on who he is, but neither do the enemies about him or themselves. God does. And Psalm 71 seeks to assure that God's judgment, his perspective, will be in favor of the one who is correctly perceived God, his as just, as righteous, and as praiseworthy. I'm going to repeat that because that's extremely important. Psalm 71 seeks to assure that God's judgment, his perspective, will be in the favor of the one who is perceived God correctly. Do you see that shift? You see this movement away from looking at the self to looking outward toward God. And that's important to note as to an important note to end on for this lecture tonight and will bridge us into the final lecture. Now, while I've only presented to you Psalm 71, there's many other psalms that we could use as tools, and here I again this is a very sensitive topic. I want to be decently practical with this. We can use these psalms as tools to bring our experiences of shame to God. There are psalms where the psalmist is innocent and he's treated unjustly by his enemies, like Psalm 71, one where he fears that he might experience shame but isn't and wants to avoid that, others where he is guilty and experiencing shame and desires mercy and relief. The point is that the Psalms can teach us how to bring these experiences to God, including our anger towards anyone who has treated us poorly. When we are experiencing shame, we can bring whatever it is that we feel defined by to the Lord and ask him to inform us of his perspective on the matter and ask him to arbitrate the situation. When I say that we ask God to help us arbitrate, I'm not really suggesting that we ask God if some perspective of us is right or not, which I suggested very subtly of Psalm 71, but I want to tease this point out, this point out now as we start to close. To use examples of a very particular and an intentionally chosen nature, I am not suggesting that we ask God, these are all, again, fictitious. I'm not suggesting that we ask God if Stacy's perspective that I am fat and ugly is correct or not, or if he thinks Jeff is right and I'm boring and not funny, or if he thinks my dad is right or not and I'm destined to do nothing of significance in my life. That would be foolish to suggest that we ask God, are these things right or not? Hopefully you agree with me. It would be foolish to ask God, is it true these things? But if what if that is what Stacy is saying and we feel defined by our physical appearance to the exclusion of all else, and we're experiencing shame, bringing this to the Lord to be our arbitrator and defender is crucial. It's not about, it's not whether Stacy is right or not, but what the Lord says about who we are. According to biblical faith, what defines us is not our physical appearance, no matter what we look like, whether we are large or slim, whether we are attractive or not attractive, and that is crucial to understand. The band-aid way, the surface level way, to get through shame is by saying Stacy is wrong and God thinks I'm beautiful the way I am. That never solves fundamental issues for the person experiencing shame, which has to do with their identity and their struggle to know who they are apart from their physical appearance, and reveals its band-aid-likeness in how this solution doesn't apply to someone who is slim and attractive or just normal and average, that God thinks the attractive person is beautiful the way they are does nothing. Do not misunderstand the example I'm using. I'm not saying that telling your son or daughter they are beautiful is pointless. Tell your children every day how beautiful and delightful they are. And moreover, I believe with my whole heart that God thinks all of us are beautiful, but I think that has very little to very little to do with our physical appearance and how attractive or not attractive we are. Hopefully that makes sense. To me, beauty has to do with freedom, if it's of anything worth noting. I am saying in the context of experiencing shame, this won't get at the fundamental issue, which is the desire to know who one is apart from one's physical appearance, or whatever example you want to use that I just I just suggested. Let me put it this way: we're not simply assigning to God a perspective counter to the destructive one. That holds little significance in our life or little hold, because the source is not God Himself, but what we think is right or what we think the right perspective should be, and then we label it as God's. Rather, I believe that when we comprehend that what defines us lay outside of ourselves, in the context of faith, that is, that is where transformation happens, and we realize that there is more to who we are than our physical appearance or whatever it might be that we're struggling with. And this is what is so crucial in Psalm 71. What defines the psalmist is God, his relationship with God, which is not himself, but lay outside of himself, outside of that identity complex, yet is crucial to how he understands himself. And as we close this second lecture tonight, I'm going to open our final lecture by continuing the discussion of this accuracy and value of God's perspective and how it is key to moving forward from shame toward transformation. God has provided us a way, the way to find and ground our identity not within ourselves, but beyond ourselves, what Paul calls being in Christ. More on that in our final lecture tonight.