Dignity

The new kid on the block shamed me, totally humiliated me. It was bad enough that the rest of us had lived and played there for years before this newcomer showed up. He was very athletic and good-looking and all the girls let him join the street gang free of the normal cost of at least one year in school together. None of the boys had the nerve to challenge his instant status. But, I did find some way of irritating him. His response was to call me down in front of all the people I’d known since second grade. I wouldn’t fight a kid I knew I couldn’t whip. I turned away from the laughing crowd and rode my bike home, totally shamed.

Shame is the robbing of someone’s dignity. That distinguishes it from discipline, an effort to instruct another person, or punishment, which is discipline to the extreme involving the withdrawal of some privilege or even the infliction of some form of pain. Shame involves the sheer stripping down of someone’s being for reasons that having nothing to do with hope. Parents who have had no good example in their own lives often result to shaming their children by thinking, falsely, that they are disciplining them. Shame is emotional torture to anyone on the receiving end.

Years ago, I observed a sad example of shame as discipline gone awry in another family. While playing with my sons on a local playground, another child was playing on a swing set nearby. The child did something that angered his mother. The mother shouted at the child, “Stupid!” As I watched, the boy changed his behavior for the moment. My heart broke for him, and for his mother. If that was or continued to be the standard way that mom chose to discipline her child, almost certainly, he grew up bearing a deep sense of emotional shame. The most important person in his world had stripped him of the simple dignity of being a person of inestimable wealth in her eyes. The sun in his spiritual universe had announced to him that he was out of orbit with the gravitational center of all that mattered. He was a shameful presence instead.

That may sound like an overreaction. But, in my experience, nearly every form of adult misbehavior is rooted in some form of unanswered shame from the past. Sin begets sin, shame begets shame. In its rawest, most unadulterated form, the gospel of Jesus is the only answer to shame. Sin may cause eternal death. Before eternal death, shame causes soul-mauling, heart-breaking, mind-numbing torture.

Feeling tortured, but keeping it to myself, I rode my bike back home. It was a summer day. Everyone sat outside back when there were only three black and white TV programs to watch inside. I pulled my knees up under my chin as a I parked myself on the front left fender of dad’s 1957 Ford two-door Fairlane. Dad knew something was wrong. He pulled himself up on the fender with me. No words were exchanged. In a moment, he slipped his arm around my shoulders and I began to cry. He never asked me what happened. He just wanted me to know that, in his eyes, I was of inestimable worth and no one, not even the block bully could change that. Through his beefy hands connected to my right shoulder, physical, emotional and spiritual refueled the empty tanks in my heart and soul with dignity and hope. My father was my friend; I knew I was loved. What else mattered.

The only remedy for shame is the presence in our lives of at least one other person who becomes the presence of Christ, the one who bore our shame on the cross, for us in moments of shame. The first person who ever did that for me was my dad. How about you?