I've got to come to grips with a certain concept that undergirds this blog's emphasis on "shame." There is being right before God, and then there is not being right before God. While of course our hopes for "being right" before God hinge on the proffered phenomenon of salvation, it is essential that we begin with a settled notion of our moral state beforehand.
Our individual moral states are part and parcel of our thought lives, even as we must admit the possibility that a "thought life" can consist not merely of intellectual content, but in practicality can consist of a less definite openness, both to learning new things, and to being willing to let arise to consciousness things that have yet to register with us.
Fundamentally, our less-than-perfect moral states are functions of us being mere created things--or at least we must consider the situation to be so. So also is the case for all created things. All created things are less-than-perfect moral beings, and--paradoxically though it might seem to us in spates of self-castigation--all created things are less than absolutely evil (if we reckon in prudence that nothing is absolute but God.) If pass or fail be the applicable conceptuality, then of course we fail absolutely the test, but in this case it is we ourselves who have provided the conceptuality, or have decided to implement it in this or that context. The final judgment is God's.
I say all this because I think it is detrimental to our states of moral apprehension to understand ourselves as degraded, even degraded to the lowest possible state of which we can conceive, against some imagined background of what we might call absolute evil. In such a case we can rate ourselves as being hideously evil, but we have allowed to ourselves a conceptuality of participation within a context of at least relative dimensions. If we are almost as bad as the absolutely evil, we can be ashamed of our failings, but we can assail ourselves at the same time as being apt to wallow in shame when we ought at least to contrast ourselves against the absolutely evil by taking such righteous stands as we might.
There is no absolutely evil--else there would be a balanced counterpart to the absolutely good. God is the absolutely good, with peer neither in dimension nor quality. Neither is there value in rating Satan, that creature of God, as absolutely evil. An absolutely evil Satan (as though it were any of our business to ponder the qualities of Satan according to our conceits) is a conceptualized Satan who is only by a strained artifice conceivable as the father of those who ally themselves to him. That God in an ineffable miracle of grace might call us his children is of course beyond understanding, but it ought scarcely to seem to us that we can become Satan's children (even if only metaphorically) by only a sort of anti-miracle. We as created beings become the children of the created Satan by the grimiest commonalities--commonalities of us to each other and also of us to Satan.
Indeed, an absolutely evil Satan understood as a person is as detrimental to an understanding of Jesus' teachings as is the modern "liberal" understanding of Satan as merely as force of evil, or a description of evil itself. In neither instance does the notion of a fellow creature stalking us with eternal implications really hold. Eve is not tempted by a disembodied force--she is joined in creaturely conspiracy and creaturely motivation. Conversely, the Satan of Genesis or of Job cannot be understood but as a creature who desires vindication. When Jesus castigates Peter with "Get thee behind me, Satan" and "thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men," Jesus is assigning Peter's conceits to the realm of the creaturely and (in the ultimate pass or fail duality) to a realm in which all creatures might vie perversely for the title of the most evil.
I mention all this because "shame," as I alluded to above, can be taken often to be some sort of element of self-assessment easily overdone. In a universal realm in which evil is understood to be absolute, a human being of low moral state can resort as easily to a determined stance to live up to being created in the image of God, or to a determined stance of expiating guilt through being angry, though "sinning not," at the injustices in the world, as to arrive at a determination that shame ought to be the ever-present undergirding of a creature's moral self-assessment. If, however, one (even if only in a moment of wrenching self-assessment, as would befit Peter) might be the one among all God's creatures who is the most evil, shame is the last and most undeniable thread connecting one to any hope that exists.
Shame is without dimension and without direction, and that Jesus speaks to creatures who must embrace shame is the most logical reason why Jesus would assign dimensionless tasks and directionless paths.
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