Each Face of the Inversion

After Jesus speaks to the "Daughters of Jerusalem" in Luke 23, he is led along with the two "malefactors" to Calvary and crucified.  It is at this point that Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  It is possible to contend that Jesus means this "forgive them" statement as applicable only to the soldiers under orders (though the text is quick to include the presence of "the people" and the "rulers," with their loud derision of Jesus), although the grim overall theme of the Roman soldiers in the Gospels shows them willing to embellish their mere task of crucifixion with elaborate and unnecessary cruelty.  Moreover, this very chapter of Luke has the centurion's concluding admission about Jesus ("Certainly this was a righteous man") to be taken along with the statement that the centurion "glorified God."  Certainly, if the "forgive them" utterance of Jesus was meant exclusively about the soldiers, it was within the means of the Lukan Gospel to explain that limited application as well.

There is an important underlying theme included in, and bracketed by, the space between "forgive them, for they know not what they do" and "Certainly this was a righteous man."  This is the theme of the crucial difference between guilt and shame, a difference not merely of definition, but of efficacy in determining the fate of us all--which is where this blog is going.  The difference between guilt and shame is the difference between proper and improper understanding of the plight of humanity since the instant of Creation.  Choose a "guilt" notion, and the story of existence goes one way.  Choose a "shame" notion, and the story goes another way.  It would be tempting to say that those two "ways" are opposites, but that directional duality would scarcely be the equal of the import of the distinction.

The distinction between guilt and shame is a distinction of totalities of moral existence.  It would seem unquestionable that guilt and shame must be attendant upon one another, but that notion of their closeness exists only because--in contravention of the ostensible focus of religion upon the troubled relationship of the human to the divine--religion tends instead to conjure entire universes of irrelevancies.  There is the heart that cries out in guilt, and there is the heart that cries out in shame--and there is a gigantic, warped world that cries out in neither, or--worse yet--pronounces loudly upon any number of religious ideas that are both unnecessary and harmful.  I will leave to the reader, or at least to the further development of this blog, to discern whether it is an emphasis on "guilt" that leads to more deleterious acts on the part of humanity, or an emphasis on "shame."

More important than discrete deleterious acts (or, worse yet, rationalization-frameworks institutionalizing such acts) is the estrangement of humanity in our most basic and simple aspects from the potential immediacy of the Creator.  We can reach out to God, but we can reach out in guilt, or we can reach out in shame--and in either event we must consider such attempted contacts as all-encompassing.  All else of our existence must fall away.  We must give up our lives, but when we reach out in guilt, we carry with ourselves our self-ratified appreciations--grim though they be--of the nature and severity of our transgressions.  When we reach out in shame, we drop all else but shame.

Guilt and shame are oppositional inversions--one against the other--in our existences, and the experience-realm of each face of the inversion is an experience-realm of totality.  The inversion is the totality.