Tag Archives: Shame

Thomas Mann Poignantly Presents Shame in Old Testament Story

Leave a reply

PREFATORY NOTE: I have discovered that I have failed to respond to many comments over the past few years. This is not because I have so many responses! but because I am not completely on top of things, especially the intricacies of WordPress. I will try to do better!

I have a brother-in-law who has been a key figure in the development of my intellectual and spiritual life.  He is better educated, more accomplished, and more successful in all respects than I have been…or will be.  One gift several decades ago from his erudition was the Thomas Mann novel, “Joseph and His Brethren.”  I stumbled across that tome moments ago when perusing my library and it fell opened to a page, a paragraph of which I will quote shortly.  In this fictionalized story of Joseph from the Hebrew Old Testament Jacob has just learned of the apparent death of his beloved son, Joseph. Jacob was so overwhelmed that he proceeded to tear off, not only his upper garments in grief, but was in the process of what his friends and family realized would be a complete stripping of all his clothing.  This was such a profound gesture that the people turned away.  The following is one of the most powerful descriptions of shame I have ever discovered, reflecting the depth and power of this wonderful German novelist:

There is only one right and proper word for the feeling which was at the bottom of their action:  shame.  But one must understand it in its ultimate and often forgotten sense, as a monosyllabic description of the horror we feel when the primitive breaks through the layers of civilization, at the surface of which it is only active in a much softened and allegorical form.  We must regard the tearing of the upper garments in heavy sorrow as being of such a nature; it is the civilized and domesticated form of the original custom of shedding every covering and adornment considered as the badge of human dignity now destroyed and ruined by the extremity of human woe.  It is the abasement of man to mere creature  So it was with Jacob.  In the depth of his grief he went back to the original meaning, from the allegory to the crude thing itself and to the horrible reality.  He did what “one does not do”—and that, rightly considered, is the source of all horror.  For therein the undermost becomes the uppermost.  If, for instance, it had occurred to him to give utterance to the abandonment of his misery by bleating like a ram,, his people could not have felt more nauseated than they did.  (“Joseph and His Brethren,”  Thomas Mann)

I Feel Sympathy For Jerry Falwell Jr.

Leave a reply

I really do!  Being a Christian, especially one with the last name Falwell, is quiet a burden.  I too was “guilted” into the Christian faith and when “guilt” continues to compel you to any particular mind-set, noble or otherwise, it is hard to let it go.  I firmly believe that Falwell Jr. is a good guy.  He would have to be, being raised a Baptist and that tradition does teach you to “make nice” in the whole of your life.  And, I’m glad that I’ve had that guilt ridden mandate, “make nice” to tyrannize my life as I realize that if it had not been there I sure as hell could have gotten into a lot of mischief.  And “mischief” is a nice way of putting it!

Guilt, and its sidekick shame, have their place in the human psychic economy  The orientation to “what are they thinking” and giving a damn about it is an important dimension of being human.  BUT, there is a limit to it. And when it comes to a spiritual tradition, that “dynamic duo” (shame and guilt) really need to get a rest at some point, allowing one to just quit the pretences and realize that the “making nice” can become more genuine.

I suspect that Falwell like myself was “encultured” into the Christian faith.  How could one not become a Christian if one’s father was “The” Jerry Falwell, the pastor of the fundamentalist hysteria known as “Thomas Road Baptist Church?  But if one lets his faith be his persona, that morass of ugliness that a persona is designed to cover up, is always apt to ooze through the cracks.  This has certainly been my story, though my “fall” was simpler and easier than it will be for Falwell Jr.  I was a nobody and if I’d have fulfilled the ambitions of my youthful heart I would have become “somebody”, though only a small fish in a very lonely little Arkansas ecclestiacal pond.  I just couldn’t master the “performance art” needed to become successful.  “Whew, what a relief!!!”

“Whew, Trump Got By Once Again.” Or Did He?

Leave a reply

Yes, he screwed up with bleach and heat nonsense the other day. But his crisis-management team immediately convened and one of them quickly dug into his always-ready folder, just beside the one marked, “binders full of women,” and pulled out, “Well he can say it was sarcasm, that or ‘irony’ and both have worked before.”  Another countered with, “Just deny that it happened or was ‘being taken out of context’ and that will likely fly.”  A crusty old veteran then stood up, stroked his beard, appearing to be wise, pondering studiously for a moment,  then noted, “Hey, we could use the old tried-and-true maneuver, blaming it on Obama…or Hillary…or Biden or China. Hey, the “deep state” always works.!” So, an hour later, this group of advisors opted with the “sarcasm” defense, after sucking down tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars” to employ this “CYA contrivance”.  They quickly adjourned, pleased with themselves for again arming the president with “BS” that would satisfy Fox News and the rest of his devotees.

Speaking from experience, when you have so much to hide in the depths of your heart, any bit of lame-ass denial will suffice to satisfy your need to cover up your heart’s insecurity, fear, and anxiety.  I should know, having done that for most of my life.! And  that will keep you from admitting, “I  made a mistake. I goofed,” or even Rick Perry’s famous, awkward, admission of faltering in a debate in 2016 when he could not recall the third of “three points,” shame-facedly uttering, ‘Oops!’”

Yep, life is often tough as we plod along in the “tale told by an idiot” that we have contrived to save face, disregarding that this “tale” is always “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But even then Shakespeare wisdom must be taken with the body of his profound work, that beneath the surface of our collective falderal there is “Something” undergirding the apparent “nothing-ness.”  But when we are so deeply ensconced in falderal, this “nothingness” we inevitably will take it to be “the real.”

And with this organized, systematized denial system, we go merrily along our way, as in Goethe’s observation, “When folks made all the week a holiday/With scanty wit, yet wholly at their ease/like kittens given their own tail to tease.” W. H. Auden put it even more bitingly, describing humankind as, “bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collected lie.”

” Oh my,” I am often wont to say, realizing that honest, human admission of fault must never be utilized.! We must keep from appearing “human” even though our “human-ness,” with all its frailty and shame, is our most valuable God-given treasure.

Ego Integrity, Shame, and Politics

Leave a reply

At a family get together decades ago, one of my young nephews got into some mischief, did something “wrong,” and his mother challenged him sternly, “Billy, why did you do that?”  I’ll never forget the look on the face of that five year old boy.  His eyes glared with guilt and fear, he looked away, he stammered and then announced, “No!”  His guilt was obvious to all; some of us smiled, remembering our youth when we had been there in Billy’s shoes.  Years later In my clinical practice I was presented one morning with a six year old boy with impulse control issues (adhd) who had been rescued from an abusive family by his kindly grandparents.  Sammy, as I’ll call this young tyke, eagerly greeted game playing as part of his treatment plan.  This strategy was invaluable for a patient with these issues, providing an opportunity to teach respect for rules of simple board games, as well as patience.  His moments of frustration and anger could then be explored in relation to behavior in school and family life.  Sammy had very little control over his impulses, not able to accept having made a bad move and insisting that got to have a “do-over.”  He even threw the board one time in frustration as I emphasized a simple rule.  Often he would simply lie though it was obvious that he had cheated.

Both of these young lads had not reached the developmental stage of being able to admit having made a mistake, having been “wrong”, which is a basic skill in participating in the human race.  The social body functions only if certain basic rules of organization, structure, civility, decorum, and respect for others can be adhered to.  In each of these instances, they were off to a poor start in accomplishing this goal.

“Ego integrity” can handle critical feedback from others though it often still hurts deeply.  I remember the impeachments of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.  Each of them were deeply humiliated, and tried to lie their way out of it, but ultimately had to accept their fate and admit they had erred.  In Nixon’s case, he had to accept the great humiliation of being forced to resign from office.  Each of us have an ego and our ego is designed to attempt to save face; this is how the ego is designed.  But when one has developmentally matured enough, his ego can have the integrity to accept the shame of humbly admitting, “I was wrong.  I made a mistake.”  In some contexts this might even be framed as, “I have sinned.”

When one lacks this ego integrity, and is is extremely immature and overwhelmed with shame and humiliation, the individual will go to any extreme to save face, even resorting to violence.  This violence can be overt but also subtle, i.e. taking political form, and having a devastating or catastrophic impact on the social body. This individual cannot back down.

Shame, Truth, Courage, and Jeff Bezos

Leave a reply

Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, shocked the world yesterday by disclosing an effort by AMI (the National Enquirer publisher) to blackmail him with salacious text messages they had uncovered, including sexually intimate photos.  Yes, these photos even included the now quite common “d…k pix.”  Ami was trying to get him to back off an intense investigation he had initiated to determine how they had intercepted his texts and emails. But Bezos did not play ball, declaring he preferred to “roll this log over and see what crawls out.”  He admitted the shame of this experience but determined he would not be blackmailed and was willing to call the bluff of the National Enquirer. The National Enquirer and its CEO, Jeff Pecker (chuckle, chuckle) have been intimately involved with Trump, Pecker now having defected under pressure from Robert Mueller’s investigation of the President.  Trump and Pecker colluded to pay off Trump’s hush money to a prostitute and former Playboy bunny.

My concern with this story is shame and its relationship with honesty.  A sense of shame…a “healthy shame”…helps make us human, giving us the motivation to participate in the very necessary social fiction that makes us human.  We keep things hidden and should do so.  Not everything needs to be disclosed.  But when “healthy shame” has been obliterated by toxic shame, it reveals that there is so much to hide that the individual will go to any extreme to keep the secrets of his heart hidden.  Mr. Bezos, like all mortals, has sexual peccadillos fluttering about in his heart and mind and he “imbibed” of a few like most of us have.  But he found the courage and stubbornness to not be blackmailed and owned up to the accusations, taking the “wind out of the sails” of the National Enquirer.  (And, admittedly this “courage and stubbornness” was facilitated by the fact that he is one of the richest men on the earth.)

Life, i.e. “reality”, often pushes us into a corner where we are forced to admit things that are not pleasant.  But when shame tyrannizes us into a façade that is not simply a persona but a prison, we cannot allow “truthfulness” to break out; sometimes we will go to any extreme to deny what we are accused of.  Related to this machination, Trump introduced to us the term “fake news” as a simple term for, “whatever I don’t like or is unpleasant,” is not true.

This issue, given Trump’s intimacy with the National Enquirer, brings to my mind the question of what he and his compatriots have dug up on members of Congress.  We all have stuff we don’t want to come out and it is now clear that if the intent is there to uncover it, it can be uncovered.  Blackmail would explain some of the blind compliance with Trump’s whims that many noted Republicans have demonstrated; Lindsey Graham and McConnell comes to mind, to name but two.

“Good” and “Bad” Shame

2 Replies

Theodore Roethke with his poem, “Dolour” capture so poignantly the prison that shame can create for us.  He captures the daily grind of routine, devoid of spontaneity and spirit, which Emerson had reference to when he bemoaned that, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.”  For desperation is what ensues in spiritual deprivation, which always leads to addictions such as drugs, alcohol, ideology, (including religious ideology), and consumerism:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. 

Healthy shame is necessary as it can nudge us into the tribe we are born into, teaching us to “make nice” in the interest of group coherence.  We then respect rules of decorum, civility, respect for each other, and even agreed upon ruses that have an important function in making the tribe cohere.  But toxic shame often steps in and these necessary “rules” are forced upon children, sometimes with subtle and often not so subtle brutality so that the whole tribe is force-marched toward some unknown end, driven only by the force of habit etched deeply in the old brain.

Toxic shame breeds a tribe/nation of automatons who are readily manipulated by the power structure which controls the reins of the economy and government. And in the modern world, particularly in present day America, we find ourselves enthralled by a demagogue who in less than two weeks could further squash dissent and allow him to continue his assault on traditional American values, including those that we like to describe as “Judeo-Christian.”  People who are shamed into submission lack the capacity for critical thought; critical thinking would evoke in their heart the experience that Rick Perry suffered in 2011 during a debate, an excruciating spasm of self-awareness, when he realized he had made an ass of himself and had to utter the famous word, “Oops.”  It is very hard to admit “oops” when you are shame-bound as you just cannot admit having made a mistake.  (Now how Rick Perry did it, I don’t have an explanation.  But it did speak well of him!)  We make asses of ourselves, much more often than we are willing to admit, and when it happens it is redemptive if we can say…perhaps, merely…”oops.”  Oh, if Trump could just learn this simple word!

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

 

Grace vs. “Creedal Religion”

Leave a reply

A POEM BY MAURA EICHNER

A bird in the hand
is not to be desired.
In writing, nothing
is too much trouble.
Culture is nourished, not
by fact, but by myth.
Continually think of those
who were truly great
who in their lives fought
for life, who wore
at their hearts, the fire’s
center. Feel the meanings
the words hide. Make routine
a stimulus. Remember
it can cease. Forge
hosannahs from doubt.
Hammer on doors with the heart.
All occasions invite God’s
mercies and all times
are his seasons.

Someone in my past noted so casually, “Our name is just a sound we learned to respond to.”  But that is an intrinsic feature of language, words are just sounds that we learn to associate with subjective experiences we are having.  “God” is one of these words, part of the verbal soup into which we are born and in which we swim and which eventually accrues meaning.  So often this word “God” is associated with a harsh, punitive notion who offers love only after slavish devotion and penitence, and rarely with one who offers unconditional love and grace.  The guilt and shame that is so intrinsic to the nature of human existence is so profound that it is hard to accept the simple grace of God when it is so much easier to accept the bondage of a guilt-ridden slavish devotion to creedal religion.

 

Self-awareness and Bullying

1 Reply

In my last post, I shared thoughts about bullying and self-consciousness or “self” awareness.  A couple years ago when I was on Facebook an upper classman when I was in Jr. High at my small Arkansas high school shared his shame and regret about bullying a helpless, self-conscious, insecure lad in his class. This gentleman had been a star athlete himself, later to have a tryout with the Arkansas Razorbacks; he was handsome, intelligent, and headed to success in his life.  On Facebook he shared about his effort to reach out to this man he had bullied to apologize but had received no response.  This gentleman had found awareness and now sincerely rued his cruel behavior to this “nerdy” and perhaps handicapped classmate.

Self “awareness” is something we mature into, slowly becoming aware of the “presence” of other people in our world and becoming sensitive to their reality.  There are times, however, when this maturity never comes and, furthermore, there are times when people are ensconced in a social milieu where this “self” awareness is discouraged.  The best example I find of this occurred in the New Testament with the crucifixion of Jesus, as explained by Fr. Richard Rohr who interpreted the famous words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” as, “Father, forgive them for they are not aware (or conscious) of what they do.”

These men did not awaken that morning, convene down at Starbucks, and suddenly decide, “Hey, let’s be mean and nasty, violent and brutal, and put that guy to death who does not see this world as we do.”  They had many meetings at that coffee shop in planning their deed and came to the firm conclusion that they were going to do the right thing, the “lord’s will,” if you please. They were firm in their convictions and many of them I’m sure were morally upright men, probably in a respectable position down at the local church….or, “synagogue” in that day.  They were probably members of the school board, members of the Lions Club, active in what used to be called, “benevolent societies,” and faithfully they bought Girl Scout cookies each spring.  And I’m sure that there were young, unmarried men in the mix also, those who avowed that they didn’t, “smoke, drink, chew…or go with the girls they do.”  But it is possible for good men to do bad things when they are driven merely by ideology, steeped with preconceived ideas about their world and the deep-seated conviction that they objectively understand the world.  When men and women are addicted to their ideas, regardless of how “noble” those ideas may be, they lack “awareness” and are capable of great evil in what they deem as service to the good.  T.S. Eliot summarized this problem, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm, which once we took for exercise of virtue.”

Is Sin Still a Relevant Term in Our Culture?

1 Reply

I have some taint of the Trumpian arrogance in me so that it is hard to say, “I made a mistake.”  Yes, my “memory bank” failed me in yesterday’s post and the “relevant” poetry blurb at the very end was not the one I had in mind, a problem which I have now corrected.  I’m making this “confession” though facetiously just so any of you who are interested can return to yesterday’s post and sample a bit of the wisdom of Stanley Kunitz. However, admitting being mistaken is a very human flaw and I’m in recovery now from having been mired in that morass of self-loathing and infantile arrogance most of my life.  Richard Nixon when he resigned in 1973 did not really admit doing any wrong, declaring famously at one point in the debacle, “I’m not a crook.”  But when the impeachment proceeding reached a certain point of intensity, he did resign and with great humiliation walked to that waiting helicopter with his wife and continued his flight into political ignominy.  He was in great pain, greatly shamed and humiliated by what his words and behavior had led to, but under the pressure of the political structure that he was part of and respected to some degree, he accepted disgrace and meekly resigned, a tacit admission of wrong-doing.  Nixon had some inner sense of self-control that allowed him to not resort to the violent impulse that would explode in many people when they are shamed like he was.

There is something to say for a religious culture in which “confessing sins” is part of life.  Even though this “sin” matter goes deeply beneath the surface…and from time to time circumstances lead us to exploring the matter more intently, discovering that the real sin lies in the “thoughts and intents of the heart—it is helpful to have the surface level of the issue commonplace enough that we can readily admit shortcomings.  But occasionally people appear in our culture who have steeled their heart about even a cursory acknowledgement of sin or fault and they will brazenly refuse to admit wrong on even the most trivial matter.  And if one of these people happen to stumble into a position of power, they can wreak havoc on all who are within their sphere of influence.

******************************************************************

Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

“People of the Lie”

4 Replies

In the mid 1980’s a psychiatrist, Scott M. Peck published a couple of books that made a big splash in self-help and personal growth circles.  The first was, “The Road Less Traveled” and the second was “People of the Lie.”  The latter was about the subject of evil and I personally think that he probably got carried away to label some of the people in his book as “evil.” I think he was guilty of the error of many clinicians, the tendency to wield the diagnostic label too readily.  Yes, I do think there are evil people in the world but then there are the rest of us who are constitutionally wired to be “people of the lie” in that we present a face to the community that is not reflective of what lies beneath the surface.  As Goethe noted, “The heart has its beastly little treasures” but most of us are so scared of the “beastly” that we hide behind a sanitized persona.  C’est moi!

But Donald Trump is an unabashed liar.  I hesitate to call him “evil” but I do think he has that capacity if my nation, apparently a “nation of sheep” will empower him.  He cannot tell the truth even on the simplest level; for, if the “truth” impugns his tenuous sense of self-worth, he merely resorts to brazen lies. There are so many examples such as declaring that the National Football League had conspired with Hillary Clinton re the schedule of the debates.  The next day the NFL denied any communication with him on this manner and Trump merely refused to address the issue.  In the last debate, Clinton reminded him of an egregious offense when he mimicked and mocked a disabled reporter, to which Trump leaned in an intoned, “Wrong!”   He simply cannot admit fault.  I see him as a terribly wounded two-year old whose “malignant narcissism” makes him constitutionally incapable of admitting any wrong.  In fact, in so many instances when he could have easily offered an euphemistic response like, “I misspoke” or “I regret putting it that way” he will merely double down because of a  characterological in ability to simply say, “I was wrong.”  Now, it is no coincidence that early in his campaign he stated that he had never asked God for forgiveness, an observation which evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress conveniently overlook.  I have a hunch they have this same “characterological” problem.

I must admit that the evangelical faith of my youth would not have allowed me to admit, “I too am a ‘people of the lie.’”  Yes, I, too, have a shame-base and have spent most of my life adamantly refusing to acknowledge what Carl Jung called the shadow.  I was a mere “actor” which is the word in the New Testament, for “hypocrite.”  No, that does not mean I was a horrible person or a Donald Trump, it merely means that I had not found the courage, the “Grace”, to acknowledge that I was a flawed individual who was not as noble as I had presented myself to be or as I had thought myself to be.  I had been presented with a “packaged” religion and I had not reached the point of maturity and courage to “open the package” and allow what in my spiritual tradition is called, “The Spirit of God” to begin to flow.  Once I had begun to right myself after the horrible pain of disillusionment, a “still small voice” whispered to me, “Welcome to the human race!”  For, it is human nature to be some version of Peck’s “People of the Lie” but, I admit, that is putting it a bit harshly.  Perhaps I should just put it in the words of T.S. Eliot, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”