Cross in sand
Photo courtesy of Jim Burklo
Love is attention.
Temptation is what leads to losing attention.
Sin is inattention.
But the instant that you recognize you have lost attention, you are paying attention again.
And also in that instant, you are forgiven for having lost attention. The inattention is erased, the sin is gone. As if it never had been.
So there’s no need to let shame stick to you.
No reason for shame to cloud your vision, making it harder to see what’s real.
No reason to believe your shame’s hallucinations.
What kind of shame is eating at you from within? What deep embarrassment haunts you?
Let’s look at it, see it for what it is – and on doing so, we catch it, release it, and let it float away.
Who's Jim Burklo?
When we pay attention, we activate not only our perceptive abilities – we also more fully activate our imaginations. When we see clearly what is, without preconceptions or prejudices or opinions that make our vision murky, then we have the right raw material we need to imagine different courses of action, and imagine their outcomes. So much sin is the result of a failure of imagination. If we’re paying close attention to our urges, if we’re fully unleashing our imaginative capacities and paying attention to the possible outcomes of our actions, we will go the distance and imagine the possible messy consequences of acting out on our urges. If we aren’t paying attention to where our minds and bodies are going, and our imaginations are short-circuited as a result, then we stumble into trouble.
In Christianity we have the tradition of prayers of confession and absolution. As a pastor, I don’t include them in our worship because I think Christianity needs a break from all that. We got too focused on sin and punishment, and spent too much time begging a supernatural being to forgive us.
But there’s a more humane and dare I say divine way to deal with our failings and our need for reconciliation. That’s to pay attention to what we’re thinking and feeling. To pay attention to the way we are treating other people, and how the way they treat us affects us. To pay attention to our urges and compulsions, and become loving observers of those urges rather than just the subjects of them. To pay equal opportunity attention to all experiences, dropping judgment about them so that we can see them clearly enough to enable us to make better choices about how to respond to them. To pay attention to our feelings of shame, and thus change our relationship to that shame, so that we can release it and both do differently and feel differently.
It’s worth a good long hard look within to see how powerful grip that shame holds on our lives. We are social beings: we depend on our relationships with others to survive. So if we think others think ill of us for what we’ve done, or failed to do, we imagine what they are thinking and emotionally punish ourselves on their behalf. Which does nobody any good. Shame is so hard for us to sit with, so hard to face, that we shove it into the background of our lives. From which it haunts us day and night, twisting our perceptions and circumscribing our horizons.
Shame's usefulness is limited. We think we deserve it, so we hang on to it, but it just gets in the way. We think if we’re ashamed enough, we won’t do whatever thing we did that made us ashamed. But there’s a better way to motivate ourselves to do the right thing.
So instead of being ashamed, let’s just be conscious. Conscious with the eyes of God, who is pure unconditional love that makes shame evaporate on contact. Conscious enough to see clearly what actions harm and what actions help, what actions hurt and what actions heal. Conscious enough to trust that doing the right thing is attractive enough to inspire us to do it….