Yesterday Dave touched some on the idea of shame. He quoted William Blake who said "Shame is pride's cloak." I wrote the quote down and have been thinking a little on it. Thinking a little on how the places I am most prideful may be the places where shame finds it's cozy home.
Then today I picked up the book our girls' group is going through, The Gifts of Imperfection, and the whole chapter was about shame.
So I don't think I have a lot of really refined thoughts, more some quotes that I found powerful from the chapter...
Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
Shame keeps worthiness away by convincing us that owning our stories will lead to people thinking less of us.
...we're also afraid that if we tell our stories, the weight of a single experience will collapse upon us. There is a real fear that we can be buried or defined by an experience that, in reality, is only a sliver of who we are.
Shame is a crazy identity that I think finds a home in all our lives in some way or another; sometimes it is a matter of identifying where it has made it's home; sometimes it is a matter of stepping out of this identity of shame and into the identity of I am fully known AND fully loved by God and his identity is what defines me.
Like all things of the spirit, easier said than done.
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