“You are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing. And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me.”

– Thomas Merton

It only takes one moment, one look, one harsh word to trigger shame, and that one trigger can send us into a shame spiral for days, weeks, or months. 

But, we are not our shame. I am not my shame. The shame I have stored in my body and in my heart and in my mind is not my own. It was given to me by someone else – a parent, a caregiver, a culture, a society, a mentor – someone else who never healed from their own shame and so transmitted it to me. The shame I carry with me is not my burden to bear, and it is not my fault. 

 So why don’t we believe this? Cole Arthur Riley poses the question this way: “What does evil have to gain in tricking us into believing we are anything less than glorious?” And she answers:

I would venture to guess it swallows our belonging first; after all, a person does not wish to be seen if they believe they are ugly. We hide our faces and settle down in the treacherous place of nowhere. And then it colonizes our body, knowing we will flee from it out of deep shame and embarrassment. Self-hatred moves in. It makes a mockery of our limbs, twisting and contorting them for its own means. And last, I believe, it steals our love. For who can accept love that they do not believe exists for them? Those who believe love is a scarcity are less prone to give it away freely. (9)

With shame, we all have the tendency to twist and contort ourselves, to split ourselves in two directions: superhero and scum of the earth. Superhero says, “Admire and adore me for my sacrifice, my devotion.” Scum of the earth says, “Admire and praise me for my lowliness, my obedience, my (false) humility.” Both of these options are superhuman attempts to be more than we are capable of, and they always end up making us feel less than human because in our own arrogance and vanity we ignore our limitations instead of just being who we actually are…ordinary.

In this blog series, we have attempted to offer a general landscape of fear and shame. Now that we have a bit of an anatomy of fear and shame and a deeper understanding of how this poisons us and generates toxicity within all realms of our lives – relationships, addictions, substance abuse, mental health – we must look at the root of it all…the “I” that splits and divides us in two.

The root of all fear and shame resides within the idea of a solid, permanent “self” – an “I” that exists as a coherent “me.” As Pema Chodron describes this powerful illusion, she writes:

We know that everything is impermanent; we know that everything wears out. Although we can buy this truth intellectually, emotionally we have a deep-rooted aversion to it. We want permanence; we expect permanency. Our natural tendency is to seek security; we believe we can find it. We experience impermanence at the everyday level as frustration. We use our daily activity as a shield against the fundamental ambiguity of our situation, expending tremendous energy trying to ward off impermanence and death. We don’t like it that our bodies change shape. We don’t like it that we age. (18)

“I” am a manifestation of non-self things. We think of “I” as a solid, stable “self,” but the reality is that “self” is made of non-self things, none of which are all that solid or stable. We are always changing. We are never permanent. 

When Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16), his question is intended to point out the impermanence of the self. He is emphasizing that everyone interprets this “I” differently, but the self is always changing and fluid. In fact, when Simon says to Jesus, “You are the Christ,” Jesus immediately renames Simon as Peter just to over-emphasize the point he is making about the impermanence of the self. 

The “I” that exists today will not exist tomorrow, even though we spend enormous amounts of energy attempting to convince ourselves that we are actually consistent over time – that the story of “I” is coherent and stable. 

We do this because we want to believe that we exist, and we are terrified that we do not exist…not really. We do this then because we want to feel and think that we are safe and secure and okay. ME-victorious! This mindset and end-goal is the way we solidify the “I” in our pursuit of feeling okay with ourselves. We want to believe so badly we’re okay that we will convince ourselves of anything, distract ourselves with anything, punish ourselves with anything, push ourselves to the limits to accomplish anything, sacrifice ourselves to achieve anything…anything just so I don’t have to face the possibility that I’m not as coherent and solid and secure as I think I am.

In a shame-based person, this most commonly manifests as the desire to prove oneself. I feel that I must prove that I am “right” or good,” and I am desperate to prove it in any way that I am able. I want to prove it to myself, to God, to supervisors and bosses, to friends and family, to h9.-significant others, to institutions, to social movements, to the world. I look outside myself to all of these external sources for validation, acceptance, admiration, and recognition…but this will always result in the same consequence of additional pain, suffering, fear, and shame.  

Shame tells us that we are “never good enough.” We are never good at all. So it never really matters what we do or how much we do. We always get stuck back in the same place This occurs because shame tells us that we are unlovable, we are unworthy, we have no worth-value within us, we are deeply flawed, we are incompetent, we are not productive enough, we are not successful enough, we are not spiritual enough. These are all the lies of shame and fear, and our attempt to escape these feelings is the merit-based game of proving that “I” am okay.

Where does this get us?

Our drive to ward off impermanence and to convince ourselves of the delusion of a solid self brings us directly into the pervasive belief in individualism – or, the belief that we are all separate individuals who are mostly disconnected from each other. It is, in short, the delusional belief that we are all independent rather than the reality, which is that we are all radically inter-dependent. This is particularly difficult within a Western context because of our strong emphasis on individualism, which is a fantastically unhealthy ideology that is very destructive. 

Here’s what I mean. 

Individualism is an ideology of fear and shame that keeps us always working to prove ourselves in some way: to prove we are in control, to prove we are right, to prove we are good, to prove we are worthy, to prove we are lovable, to prove we matter, to prove we deserve esteem, to prove we are safe. Individualism is always a game about proving and deserving, which are two incredibly aggressive approaches to our lives and ourselves because this is a reward/punishment game, a win/lose game of dualism.

This creates disconnection and isolation. It creates fragmentation and confusion, and this is how we live. 

We all consciously or unconsciously tend to live within this constant state of fear, disconnection, and confusion. However, instead of realizing we are living in fear, we call this game “spirituality”…but it is really just the bureaucracy of ego helping us “achieve” some “higher version” of reality, religion, spirituality, virtue, comfort, etc. This is spiritual materialism (15). This spiritual materialism and all of our ideas about “spirituality” and “religion” is where we go to hide, but we do not think it is hiding. We do not think it is hiding or escaping or avoiding because we have convinced ourselves that this is the only game in town. 

We collect all these wonderful spiritual sayings, teachings, worldviews, special clothes, special foods, special smells into our spiritual shopping carts, and then, we display our collection for everyone to see. We buy Tibetan singing bowls or special rosaries or prayer beads. We begin collecting artifacts and icons. We burn incense. We move out of our safety zones. We move from the country to the city to be “right in the middle of life.” We move from the city to the country to be “closer to nature and real life.” We take different jobs. We move to different states or countries. We go on pilgrimages. We do these things and collect all of these things for our spiritual display cases while remaining exactly the same, unchanged, un-transformed…because we haven’t let anything go, not really. We haven’t realized that wherever we go, there we are. There is NO ESCAPE. We have just accepted a new set of illusions. A new set of masks. A new disguise…a spiritual disguise.

So this spiritual materialism is what we believe is meaningful spirituality, but this is actually the game of spirituality the ego-self is playing using its ancient strategy of proving and “achieving.” This is not true spirituality, deep mindfulness or healthy religion. Rather, it is an isolated game of merit we are playing with ourselves, with others, and with the gods. We are back to proving our worth-value, and the ego-self uses anything it can to prove itself in its own game – its own personal salvation program. The problem with spiritual materialism is that it is simply what we have always done and what we always do. It is just the merit-based game of proving in a different disguise what we think is acceptable – spirituality. 

The way we play this game is through the bureaucracy of ego, which is to say the language of bureaucracy. This type of language – of communication – is always a language of domination and alienation. It is never a language of life. It is never a language of freedom, because it denies choice. In doing this, it allows us the ability to deny any responsibility for our choices or the consequences of those choices because the choices are no longer our own. 

This is the reason we make an agreement with bureaucracy…because it protects us, it makes our lives easier. We give up our freedom of choice and bureaucracy allows us to deny all responsibility. This is precisely what the bureaucracy of ego means, and this is also why the ego loves bureaucracy, because it is the calculated perfection of blame – “It’s not my fault,” “I was just doing what I was told.” This is the bureaucracy that supports individualism and spiritual materialism. It is always the language of “I,” and the language of “I” is always dehumanizing. 

Bureaucracy robs us of our dignity and replaces it with shame within a rigged game of “proving” that we will never win. As Riley so eloquently writes, “Our societies and communities have a way of grinding up and serving out dignity in portions based on our own human ideals and idols. In the history of the white Western world, you can trace a perversion of dignity in the name of usefulness. You are no longer the image of God, you are currency” (11). We are the ones who always lose something in this game.

We are reduced to commodities of idolatry rather than knowing, and remembering, the reality that we are all sanctuaries of the Divine Spirit. We are the ones who suffer because we forget that we are sacred.

The Gospel of Fear and Shame is very precisely a gospel of bureaucracy because bureaucracy is its language, its medium, that communicates a message of dehumanization and commodification, of avoiding personal responsibility, of avoiding choice, a message of achieving and ambition, a message of taking what we want…and, in the end, it is a message about territories because it is a message about individualism. You have a territory and I have a territory, and you need to stay out of my territory or I might come into your territory aggressively and take what I want. 

We, of course, come up with many ways to justify this aggression without taking responsibility. We might say to ourselves and others, “It’s not personal. It’s just business.” And the truth is that this is absolutely correct most of the time for most of us. Whether we are speaking about the business of finance, the business of managing family, the business of managing our work lives, or the business of religion, it is not personal, it’s just transactional business. It is not personal because it is individualized and privatized…dehumanized. 

Even our prayers and meditations become transactional…not personal…just conducting the business of procuring whatever might satisfy the needs, wants, and desires of the “I,” even at the expense and exploitation of others…and of God. It is just business, the business of disconnected entities existing in isolation. It’s almost as if the ways we have resorted to poorly communicating with each other and with God rest upon this one phrase, “A third party will handle the transaction.” This is very bureaucratic language because it means I have no choice in the matter. I simply must conduct the business of the ego-self, the “I,” but it’s not my fault. I’m just doing what I’m told. It’s just business. The message, overall, is very possessive and aggressive. It is always the message of ME-victorious.

The consequence of this message of the Gospel of Fear and Shame is about taking what I want so you can’t have it so I can prove that I am better than you…because I am secretly afraid that I am not better than you and that I am, in fact, no good at all.

As Thomas Merton writes, “You are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing. And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me” (48).

The distance between you and me…this distance is what makes me an individual versus a person. An individual is an isolated, alienated being who creates more and more distance around themselves and, therefore, more and more loses the ability to communicate with others or to engage in communion with anyone, including their own self. All that is left is for them to facilitate business transactions, but this is not communication. It’s bureaucracy. 

The issue is that we are not taught to become fully alive, fully human beings in relation with other human beings. Instead, our religious teachings and practices are all privatized. We cultivate a privatized piety that we nurture carefully and groom and then present to the world because we are fed consistent messages of individualism, which is only ever privatization and alienation, but this individualism is always touted as the goal, the pinnacle of human existence. Yet, individualism is actually counter to all messages of healthy religious teaching.

Healthy religions are actually trying to teach us to become fully whole persons, NOT individuals. 

The miracle of the Gospel of Freedom is whole persons living with other whole persons in community. It is completely counter-cultural. It does not feel safe or secure. It feels vulnerable and scary. It requires that we admit we are not superheroes, scum, or our shame. There is no hiding. We are who we are. Gifted and limited and everything in between. And that’s okay.

For me, this idea is exemplified in the story of Zacchaeus. Some of you know the story of Zacchaeus. Some of you have sung the song about this man, probably in Sunday School or at Vacation Bible School. For some of us this story is nostalgic and reminds us of a rather pedestrian little song that goes, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.” 

Why was this song written? What does it tell us about this story? Not much, in my opinion, but I do think it reveals something significant. I think it reveals our tendency to distance ourselves from the most disruptive and disturbing texts in the Bible by being very dismissive of them. For example, we turn the incredibly provocative and disturbing story of Noah into a children’s story about the “arky arky,” and we turn Zacchaeus into a “wee little man”…because we cannot face the reality of these texts. They are too unsettling, too unnerving. 

Why is Zacchaeus so unnerving? Well, it’s one of the more explicit texts where Jesus subversively says, “Everyone is always accepted unconditionally. This merit-based system that you have come up with for determining who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ is not the game I’m playing. The idea of deserve and punish is not working. Zacchaeus gets it. Do you?” Zacchaeus is the same outcast story as the Samaritan story. What we forget about these stories is that the outcast is the hero of the story…not us. 

Zacchaeus was a shame-based person, and as we know, shame-based people are always in hiding, in secret, in the shadows. As far as we can tell from the story, he did everything his ego-self told him to do so he could prove he was worthy of love. Highly gifted in finance, he was a chief tax collector. He was not just a regular tax collector like the other stories in Luke. He was a chief tax collector. Again, he was gifted, highly skilled in finance. He was at the top of the merit-based food chain of achievement and success. He was a well-known businessman in the community. He was an expert in the language of bureaucracy and in the business of “I.”

However, especially in the gospel of Luke, tax collectors were known for exploiting their own people, probably in secret…in the shadows. To be clear, we are talking about an already exploited Jewish community under Roman occupation and domination being further exploited financially by the Roman Empire, and this financial exploitation is often being done by Jewish leaders within the Jewish community. These tax collectors, then, were seen by many within the Jewish community to be the lowest of the low, the sinner of sinners. Perhaps Zacchaeus did participate in this exploitation, pursuing his own self-interests at the expense of others. Perhaps he was living a life that admired the space between you and me as he gained more and more while his neighbors had less and less.

He was wealthy. He measured his success by this wealth, what he possessed. He pursued ambition and achievement. He was an individual. But, clearly, he was not entirely happy. 

Apparently, this life of wealth and possessions was not all he thought it would be. In fact, it seems that it brought him a lot of fear and shame, isolation and disconnection. The Luke text tells us that Zacchaeus was known very well by his community as a “notorious sinner.” That’s quite a reputation…so this means he was not living according to Torah. He was not adhering to the teachings of his tradition. He was only a fake, a phony, a hypocrite…he only appeared to be a son of Abraham. He was, then, as his community labeled him, a sinner.

I’m sure he was aware that his community did not enjoy being exploited for his own profit and benefit. He was not admired the way he expected to be by the people he was exploiting. He was not fulfilled in the way he thought he was supposed to feel. Perhaps he hid all of these feelings from others and from himself. Perhaps he kept all of his fear and shame locked and hidden away so he didn’t have to deal with it. Until one day…he heard Jesus was coming to his town. He knew this man by his teachings and interpretations of Torah, and he apparently was very eager to meet the rabbi behind these teachings. 

And, so…quite abruptly it seems…he came out of hiding, and went straight up into a tree to “see” Jesus and so Jesus could see him. In fact, everyone saw him…and he didn’t seem to care. Miraculously, this shame-based person suddenly wanted to be seen. No more hiding. Jesus had a healing message to share, and Zacchaeus desperately wanted healing. He wanted wholeness. He was done with ambition and achievement and exploitation. He was tired of his ego-self games. So he opened himself up to the world, to Jesus’s teachings, to healing…and he was accepted unconditionally. 

Zacchaeus…the most unlikely of heroes…is a hero of shame-based people, because one day he just opened up into courageous vulnerability. Perhaps he had been working on it for a long time, but one day, he stepped out into the light of bravery and let go of his fear and his shame. He wanted to see and to be seen, and he stopped living a life of possessiveness.

He told all of his secrets about his hidden exploitations of others. As he did so, his possessions lost their hold on him, and as the story goes, he gave away most of what he had. He began to earnestly practice generosity and compassion. In the process of giving it all away, he seems to have found himself…as Jesus says, “This man too is a true son of Abraham. For I have come to seek and save those who are lost.” No longer a pretender in hiding, Rabbi Jesus names him a true son of Abraham. 

Those of us who are lost in fear and shame begin to find ourselves, just as Zacchaeus did, when we come out of hiding and into the love and compassion of our own courage, God’s acceptance, and our community’s embrace of connection and belonging. 

We are all accepted unconditionally. Zacchaeus is a synecdoche for us all. We are Zacchaeus. He is us. We are all admiring the distance between you and me because we are scared and ashamed to various degrees, but we are all also desperately seeking ways to come out of hiding and collapse the distance between you and me. 

Zacchaeus…just like all of us…was gifted. He was limited, and he was everything in between. And that was okay.