Shameless.

As spring (very) slowly emerges here in the High Country, I find myself just grinning like a crazy person—soaking in the birdsong and sunshine, and warm breeze on my face. This is truly the season of resurrection, and every year the awakening earth catches me by surprise. (And then it will probably snow again next week!)

Likewise, this last week has also seen some of my worst qualities emerge from hibernation: worry, frustration, defensiveness. Old habits of trying to please people, avoiding conflict to the detriment of what’s good and true. Circumstances have conspired to unmask me, and the false self has leapt at the opportunity. It’s been painful to find places alive in my soul that I had imagined dead or dormant.

I find myself wondering if this less-welcome emergence is related to the Lenten journey. Wondering whether fasting and prayer might actually invite the ugly parts to the surface. Why are we doing this again? The point of the season, I keep reminding myself, is to wake from the unconscious repetitions of daily life and pay attention to what is real. What’s real about God and yes, what’s real about myself.

Wakefulness, it seems, brings its own challenges. There’s a reason we prefer to sleepwalk our way through life, pretending to believe our own PR. The risk of Lent is that we might actually catch sight of sin. There, I’ve said it. We catch ourselves in the act of feeling afraid, ashamed, or resistant…and our vain attempts to shore up the facades of security, charm, and control.

And then, catching our reflection in the mirror, the inevitable crossroads: Shame or pride? Self-contempt or self-inflation? Hiding or denial? Neither are good options, know what I mean? It’s enough to make us want to be re-inserted into the Matrix. No matter how potentially transformational, unpleasant truths come as a shock. As someone has said, The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.

To conflate two passages, it is only the truth spoken in love that can set us free! We’re in desperate need of both truth and love. Yes, absolutely desperate.

I am intimately acquainted with both roads—the road of shame and the road of pride. And so are you. By personality, you are probably drawn more to one than the other, but we’re conversant with both. Surprisingly, we even discover that pride and shame are two sides of the same core dynamic, which we might call Resistance of Reality. It’s the human condition. It’s easier to avoid our brokenness than address it. Mercifully, God embraces us right at our most inglorious. (Just ask the Prodigal.)

How we long for the unconditional embrace that releases healing and restoration. Which just happens to be the gift of Lent. Or in the language we’ve been using, we’re looking for resurrection on the other side of death. This was the Prodigal’s journey, Jesus’ journey, and now it’s ours. There really is light at the end of this tunnel: a great and abiding hope for transformation. Man, what a deep relief!

Here’s what I most want to say today: When it comes to shame and pride, there is a third way. The stultifying path that leads to depression and self-medication (shame) and the pretentious path that leads to arrogance and self-justification (pride) are not our only options. A third path beckons…the beautiful and sometimes daunting path of humility. Humility initially feels a whole lot like humiliation. In fact, I don’t think it’s a mistake to define as humiliation as resisted humility.

When our falseness is revealed, God invites us precisely at that moment to yield our resistance and accept guilt without shame: to recognize that we have done something hurtful but that we are not bad, not in our essential selves. We certainly sin, and with desolating regularity, but “sinner” is not our fundamental identity, despite an abundance of pious language that seeks to brand us as such. Sin is not our truest Self. Rather, we carry the transcendent image of God, and this is our core identity. Beloved children! Not “adopted,” but blood relatives. We carry the DNA of God, which is why humility isn’t fatal.

Now we can take full responsibility for our greatest failings, knowing that the True Self of Christ-in-us is alive and well, emerging from the cocoon of death toward new life. “Therefore we do not lose heart,” Paul urges us. “Though outwardly we are wasting away (confronting our betrayals and neediness), yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day (humbling ourselves to receive fresh love and power).” Like spring flowers pushing up through the winter earth.

growing the soul

In this third week of Lent, take hope! When you catch sight of your falseness, shake off shame and choose humility. Easter is coming.

serving the world

Humility is healing, for yourself and for the world at large. Every decision you make for personal redemption affects the condition of our global community. Mystical, yes, and absolutely real.

takeaway

Be shameless.