The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
(Psalm 23)
In our current series ABBA, FATHER we are exploring how the modern theory of attachment styles might speak to our relationship with God. It is important to recognize that quite often it is not the acts of faith - prayer, worship, scripture reading, and so on - that are the problem; sometimes our relationship to the things of faith has been skewed by how we understand love. Attachment theory is meant to give us language for relationship expectations that we imprinted upon in the first year or two of life that tend to become a pattern in adulthood if we don’t recognize and repair. We learn this language not to simply become a victim of personal history and blame our parents for how we’ve been screwed up, but to forge a clearer path towards health. We can develop new patterns of attachment that help us grow and move forward in our stories.
Last week we explored Avoidant Attachment. This week we will discuss Shame-Filled Attachment, what it look like in relationship to God, and how we can repair. You can listen to the sermon podcast here.
We can develop shame-filled attachment when our caregivers, who should be the antidote to fear, become the source of fear. In the early years of developing attachment theory, this third category was called “disorganized”, because it appeared to entail a toggling back-and-forth between anxious and avoidant styles. However, in recent years it has been understood that the deeper motivation for disorganized attachment comes from a place of profound fear. For the child who develops this style parents may have been more than dismissive or inconsistent - they were harsh. The child has a desire for closeness when afraid, but the parent is also a source of fear. Little mis-steps risk criticism and judgment, or most tragically of all, violence. This produces in the child a deep sense of shame, a feeling of being unwanted because at the core they believe something is deeply broken in them that drives others away. There is a constant background noize of self-condemnation here, and a fear that being found out will cause others to reject them because they are disgusting and defective. Where anxiously attached people cling to relationship and avoidant people shut down dark emotions to maintain closeness, shame-filled people presume they are inherently unlovable and might not expect closeness at all. This may come through in their body language - they are physically closed-off and distant, avoiding eye contact and hovering around the edges of community.
It is important to notice here that while we may gravitate towards one particular attachment style over another, all of us deal with anxiety, avoidance, and shame to some degree. This is the human condition. So while the story above may not be our own, we can still lean in and examine our patterns to identify shame that may be holding us back in relation to God.
When we’re shamefully attached to God, we may accept that God loves us because God has to, but we don’t believe God like us very much. There is a prevalent religious attitude that plagues too many in the Christian household that insists God, being so holy, cannot tolerate our sinful nature. It is assumed therefore that God despises us, is repelled by us, and the solution to our awfulness is that Christ imputes a thing called righteousness to us, like a cloak that covers over our humanity, so when God looks at us God only sees Jesus. It stands to reason that anything that make us “us” must be done away with, so only Jesus shows. If God sees us primarily as wretched sinners, the goal of the spiritual life is to feel as bad about ourselves as possible and to self-flagellate in order to be worthy of God. If God cannot be close to us, then at least we can agree with God we are not worth being close to anyway.
The wonderful spiritual writer and priest Henri Nouwen once wrote, “self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life, because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us Beloved.” When we struggle with a shame-filled attachment to God we hear Paul say, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me” (Gal. 2:20) or we hear John the Baptist declare, “he must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30) and we throw the baby out with the bathwater. We assume that who we are at the core is no good to God.
This spirituality can be found at the core of the American experiment. The Puritans were early religious immigrants to the New World, a group of English reformers dissatisfied with the Church of England who sought to further remove themselves from any tradition they deemed too similar to Catholicism. Colonies in the Americas gave them a chance to establish communities based on their strict piety and Calvinist theology. One of their greatest preachers of the time was the theologian Jonathan Edwards, whose most famous sermon, Sinner in the Hands of a Loving God, became a cornerstone for the Great Awakening in 1741. Consider this excerpt from his sermon in the context of shame-filled spirituality:
“The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”
What does it look like to found a whole new movement of the church with a message like this? How does it shape our perspective of God? How does it inform our perspective on other people, especially at the foundation of a new country, with a new government and justice system? Edwards’ messages led to a revival of religious life in the American colonies, but at what cost?
This is why it is vital we push past 16th and 17th century assumptions about the character of God and reacquaint ourselves with the Abba Jesus envisioned. Before continuing, read the story of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15:11-23.
Abba does not merely tolerate us poor sinners; Abba loves us as His beloved children, despite what we’ve done. For me, there are certain capstone passages that become lenses through which we can read the rest of scripture. Jesus’ parable here is one of those. It contains a myriad of insights into the heart of the Father, and the story of us wayward children. Allow me to highlight just a few of the revelations we can gain that pertain to our conversation around shame.
The younger son asks for his inheritance early, which is to say to the father, “I wish you were already dead so I could take advantage of your wealth.” He goes it alone, seeking to find himself, define himself, in the world beyond the borders of his familial home and his culture of origin. What begins as an adventure of self-discovery filled with new pleasures very quickly devolves into tragedy. The young man runs out of funds, and in order to survive takes a job herding pigs, which to the Jewish audience would signify he simply couldn’t get any lower on the ladder of human success. At this point the son concocts a plan to return to his father’s house, but shame creeps in and tells him stories about who he is because of what he has done. “I am no longer worthy to be a son,” he concludes, “so maybe I can just work hard for the bare necessities of life back home.” The devilishness of shame is that it not only clouds the son to who he is at the core, it also taints his opinion of his father’s heart. He assumes his father will judge him for being so entitled and wasteful, that he’ll have to earn a lowly place in the household.
Of all the insights this story offers, my favorite might be how the father responds to his son. The boy is on the road, rehearsing his self-rejecting speech, when to his surprise he notices his dad sprinting out to meet him before he can eve get close to the house. The son recites his line about being unworthy, about deserving what he gets, and begging for crumbs. Shockingly, the father does not respond to the shame, at least not directly. Instead, he presses straight through the shame with a hug and a kiss, a new wardrobe and a party. Through his actions, the father is saying to the son, “I have no time for doling out worthiness or unworthiness; you are my beloved child, and you are home.”
This powerful story, which I have read most my life, continues to speak new things to me every time I sit with it. In contrast to the above message of imputed righteousness with the actions of the father here, I realize the robe and the ring are not attempts of the father to cover over the son’s disgusting nature with something more pleasing to him. No, the robe and the ring are proof of who the father sees the son to be. To overstate, the father celebrates the son because the father likes who the son is, regardless of what he has done. Does this not resonate more with what we perceive to be the highest examples of parental love?
God’s primary orientation to us is not that we are sinners that need punished, but hurting children needing welcomed home so we might find healing. “Sinning” is something we do when we forget who we are, not the core of who we are. To me, the Edwardian position would be akin to entering the cancer ward at your local hospital and pointing your finger in the faces of the patients, saying, “I can’t believe you, look how disgusting you are! You are a wretch!” No, when someone is gravely ill, we do not condemn them; we bring them to the Great Physician to be healed. When we are sick with sin, we don’t need someone to condemn us; we need someone to embrace us and heal us.
I want to offer you an antidote to the above quotation from Jonathan Edwards, and I will reach past his era in history to a slightly earlier voice. Brother Lawrence (1614-1691) was a French monk who entered the ministry after his tenure in the military during the Thirty Years War. By most standards of excellence, brother Lawrence was rather ordinary. He had no specialized skills to offer the priory, so his monastic life was spent in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning. In between his daily duties, he would stretch out on the floor and simply adore God. After his death, a collection of interviews with those who knew him and letters he wrote to friends was compiled into a little book called Practicing the Presence of God; it has become one of the most widely-read books in Christianity. As you read this excerpt, consider how Abba ministers to Lawrence’s shame, which perhaps was not so different than the self-condemnation Edwards struggled with:
"Yet, I think it is appropriate to tell you how I perceive myself before God, whom I behold as my King. I consider myself as the most wretched of men. I am full of faults, flaws, and weaknesses, and have committed all sorts of crimes against his King. Touched with a sensible regret I confess all my wickedness to Him. I ask His forgiveness. I abandon myself in His hands that He may do what He pleases with me.
My King is full of mercy and goodness. Far from chastising me, He embraces me with love. He makes me eat at His table. He serves me with His own hands and gives me the key to His treasures. He converses and delights Himself with me incessantly, in a thousand and a thousand ways. And He treats me in all respects as His favorite. In this way I consider myself continually in His holy presence.”
Shame tends to redouble our struggles, because we pull away and wallow, speaking over ourselves the worst things imaginable. Any attempts to crawl out of it can result in deepening the wound, because we are trying to fix ourselves. To return home, confess our sins to Abba, is to open ourselves to experience kindness and grace. As Paul tells us, kindness leads to repentance, coming home to God and our true selves. Hearing God speak over us the words our hearts desperately need.
How can we repair shame-filled attachment? One way is through Visio Divina, which means “divine seeing”. Like Lectio Divina, it is a way of slowing down and focusing our attention on an image that can open us to experiencing God’s delight. The challenge is to resist the temptation to left-brained analysis which breaks information down into it’s respective parts; rather, we engage the right side of our brain so we can let something wash over us.
PRACTICE:
Get yourself in a relaxed posture, becoming aware of your breath and any tightness in your body. Allow yourself some time to slow everything down, and then set a timer for two minutes. Use this painting of The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt (1669) to hold your gaze. What are you drawn to in the image? What is highlighted to you? Allow revelation to come gently.
Next, close your eyes and put yourself in the sandals of the Prodigal Son. Take a minute or two on each of the following questions, envisioning the scene playing out before you:
Imagine you are walking up to the Father’s house. He runs out and meets you at the front gate. What are you feeling when you see him on the horizon?
What is the first thing you would say to God?
What is the look on Abba’s face? What is the first thing He does?
What is the first thing Abba says to you? what does your heart yearn to hear?
How does that make you feel?
What do you do next?
Then, slowly read these scriptures. Allow them to bless the deepest yearnings of your heart:
“You are my child, in whom I am well-pleased. You are always with me, and everything I have is yours. Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me. See what great love I have lavished on you, that you should be called my children! And that is what you are! The reason the world does not know you is that it did not know me. And so you know and rely on the love I have for you.
I am love. Whoever lives in love lives in me, and me in you. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in my love.
Out of my glorious riches I will strengthen you with power through my Spirit in your inner being, so that my son may dwell in your hearts through faith. And you, being rooted and established in love, will have power, together with all my holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is my love; you will know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of me.”
(Luke 15:31; Isaiah 49:16; 1 John 3:1; 1 John 4:16-20; Ephesians 3:16-19)