I need to find some sort of relevance--if indeed such relevance exists--in my "Shame Appears" approach to the teachings of Jesus. Just about everything I have written finds it foundation in the original or near-original experiences of humanity, whether the "humanity" in question is the entire species personified in the first man Adam, or whether that "humanity" is the universalized experience-capacity that we all possess--at least in the newborn state, and then (hopefully) later on.
"Roused, Readied, Reaped" is the shell of our experience-lives, lived as they are through countless, overlapping arcs of our callings-forth to the challenges of our existences. "Aware, Away, Awry" is the marrow of our experience-lives, each pulsing within us as graspings of our circumstances and--inevitably--twistings by us of what we ought to do into what we deem proper to do.
By the phrase "deem proper to do" I mean to draw as closely as I can to what I think is the true lesson about humanity's woeful behaviors, behaviors which--if examined at all--result in a state in which "Shame Appears," and moreover result in the conclusion that shame is the foundation-stone of our perceived alienation from God. Shame, as I have written, is the precursor to sinfulness, and shame is also the result of sinfulness.
That shame would seem to be properly always the result of sin, rather than ever the precursor to sin, is a misconception (or perhaps I might say, "disorientation") that comes in the Western World in a twin denial, firstly, of the indisputable fact that the infant learns first of having done something wrong (as a prerequisite of learning right from wrong) and experiences therefore shame before guilt, and, secondly, that the priority of shame is implicit in the Eden story, with its description of "knowing good and evil" as a result of shameful behavior preceding sinful behavior--though then as ever it would behoove us limited creatures to conceive of a spectrum of shame leading into sinfulness.
That sinfulness leads to still more shame (or, more ominously, to a state of acquired shamelessness) is a rolling convolution of snowballing burdens upon each person's soul. This is the moral outworking of each person's tumbling experience-life--as would be expected without surprise for us imperfect creatures. What is all the more lamentable (and which we see all around us in humanity's jostling and inflexible contentions about "right and wrong") is the fact that our refusal to understand shame as the foundation of our experience-lives is a concomitant refusal to scrape away in simple prudence our conceits about what I foreshadowed above, that is, our conceits about what we can "deem proper to do."
Adam had the God of the universe at hand, and Adam chose instead to put his hand to imposing--in hideous imitation of God--design upon the universe. This was Adam from the start, and this is us from the start. The "tree" episode came later, and it occurs over and over for us, as we squirm ever away from falling Eden-like--or Gethsemane-like--in the dust of our creation, and we seek instead to shake off the shame of our original inadequacy and substitute for it our conceits of morality, our conceits for which we will sin ever more vigorously, and ever more shamelessly.
We choose not to understand sin, just as we choose to ignore the genesis of sin in shame. Adam was given a world to which he might give himself--a world to which he might lay claim thereby in gentleness and self-abnegation. Jesus taught us the same thing, telling us that more fields and houses and communities and relationships than we could count would fall into our possession merely at the giving-over of our lives. We need only embrace the shame of our inadequacy before the Creator God.
The sin that exacerbates our alienation from God is the sin of withholding ourselves from the panorama of the God-is-behind-the-miracle-of existence miracle. Instead the preachers want to tell us that our sin is originally one of pride, or that our sin is rooted most basically in our yielding to the temptations of world, flesh, and devil. If we remember our shame--the simple and undeniable shame of being less than God--then we can understand sin correctly. Sin at base is not pride, nor is it weakness before temptation. Sin at base is us presuming upon the design of Creation, and reckoning therefore that we can hold out our hands to the plumping, seemingly proffered benefits that align with our conceits, while simultaneously we can ignore or swat aside those elements of Creation that we reckon of less concern. Perhaps needless to say, this "ignoring or swatting aside" is exacerbated by our ample opportunities to say our means are limited, and our attentions are overburdened.
Adam did not rejoice in that he was bone of Eve's bone, or flesh of Eve's flesh. Adam did not rejoice in what he could give Eve (nor in what companionship--instead of just names--he could give his fellow creatures), Adam just rejoiced in the benevolence at hand, and disregarded shamelessly what benevolence he himself might bestow. Adam did not rejoice in the fact that all of humanity would be of one flesh. The first description of human relationships--relationships occasioned by the fact that Adam would be satisfied neither with his God nor with his God's Creation--is presented as the sundering of some bonds in favor of others. The preachers, in their insipid cant about The Institution of the Covenant of Marriage, act like it was some good thing--while yet there was neither occasion nor need for humans to think of copulations or incest or aging generations--that some persons would be preferentially related to some few others. One would think that the anti-family agitator from Nazareth had never arrived.
This is the great shame of sin, the great shame that precedes and spawns sin. We do not stand shaking our defiant fists at God, and we do not cast ourselves lustfully at the temptations of the world--at least, these descriptions are fit only for the extremes of depravation, and they are branded by the world as being all the more "shameful" precisely because the world has no use for shame as the tool and explanation that properly it is. What we do most usually when we sin, and what we do almost without exception in our first formative years, is put out our hands to receive from a world of more or less great generosity. We might become jaded, and we might reckon the world to be the less generous as our growing, adult-approaching existence is thrust upon us (quite often too soon), but we would never be able to grow to adult responsibility without having known the provisions of God's Creation.
And so the defiant fist thrust at God, or the rapacious hand grasping at ill-gotten goods or pleasures, are metaphors that--no matter how convenient they are for the preachers--do not explain the moral difficulties that entwine us characteristically in our lives. For much, too much, of our lives, we know of an existence that is passably generous to us, and for which we are passably thankful. Only when our experiences of such at worst indifferent satisfaction are threatened do we become defiant or rapacious. Deprived, however, of a healthy understanding of shame--shame as the state of the created being, shame as the indispensable, whispering caution against our seemingly sober and pious gratitude for designs that we, without warrant, attribute to God--we waste great lifetimes that otherwise we might devote to the teachings of Jesus in their true substance.
I have tried to probe these ideas in my blogs, faint and embarrassing though they are. Roused, Readied, Reaped--to be cast into persistent, overlapping cycles and arcs of experience and effort that serve as much by collapsing into futility and exhaustion as anything else. Aware, Away, Awry--to become cognizant of issues, to try to do something about them, and in the process to construct those issues incorrectly, and to address them more incorrectly still. And then Shame Appears--shame that, if it be not the first gift of God, is undeniably--upon reflection--an absolute necessity in that it reminds us that the gifting we received first from God is expressible by us in presenting ourselves as gifts to all else.
