Making More Room For Grace

I finished, "Shame & Grace: Healing the Shame We Don't Deserve" by Lewis Smedes. Since I haven't been writing about the book chapter by chapter I'll just try to highlight what I've learned about Grace with some of the highlights, including checklists that he gives, and of course, including application to my own struggles.

Lewis Smedes dedicates two sections to this massive subject of Grace, starting with the beginning stages of "beginning our healing." He critiques the "conventional responses" that are typically proffered to people like me who struggle with the way we think about ourselves (p. 105):

1. Lowering our ideals to the level of our abilities to meet them.
2. Making ourselves acceptable enough to satisfy the ideals we already have.
3. Persuading ourselves that we are just fine the way we are.

He critiques these statements because in his view they "don't go deep enough". The reason for this is that these statements tend to cause us to run away from our ideals or settle for something less than what we could be like some sort of self-denial. There is more which I will leave to you, the reader to find, in the book.

One of the most important points in this book is that "the experience of being accepted is the beginning of healing for the feeling of being unacceptable" (p. 107).
Herein lies one of the revelations to my tendency to think that people will abandon me if I make one mistake or do one thing wrong. I see a whole lot of this in my life from my relationship with Sinae to colleagues that I work with where there is an expectation that if people have any sense at all, they will leave me alone and not want to have anything to do with me. That seems to be the reality I have grown up in, somehow.

The next chapter is called, "With Our Shadows." Here is where Smedes reminds the reader that not all shame is bad shame and continues to underscore the motif of acceptance, talking about how God "accepts us totally as the spiritual stew we are" (p. 117). Furthermore, Grace takes care of the thing shame fears the most: rejection.

And he closes with two lessons:
1. A person will never come to the point of no longer needing grace.
2. A person will never become so poor in spirit that there is no place at the table called Grace (p. 118).

The next chapter is, "Singing 'Amazing Grace' Without Feeling Like a Wretch". Smedes points out that grace can come graciously or ungraciously. When it arrives in the former it heals and when it arrives in the latter it shames (p. 119). Perhaps the most important lesson Smedes teaches us is the difference between deserving something (merit) and worthiness (being) where he seems to parallel this difference with Shame and Grace. If we think that we deserve grace, then there is reason to think we have done something to deserve it which means that we could also do something not to deserve grace. But if we are worthy of grace that means that at the core of our being lies something valuable enough that Grace can redeem us. Smedes offers the story of The Prodigal Son as an application of this lesson where the lost son doesn't "deserve" to be called the father's son but he is worthy of being called the father's son because in fact the boy is the father's son. The interesting thing about Smedes' interpretation is that he refers to the son's worldly action as his false self and the worthiness to be the father's son as his true self.

As far as the chapter title is concerned, puts it well when he says, "I feel a worth inside of me that tells me I am a better person than the wretch whom only grace could save" (p. 123).

The sixteenth chapter is called, "Places to Find Traces of Grace". Smedes points out here that there is a difference between friendly people and genuine friends. This reminded me of my life in Korea where I know a lot of people I could have lunch with but I am not sure how many of those people I could actually tell my darkest secrets to without them running away. Smedes gives me good advice when he says, "If you wonder where God's grace can be found, find yourself a critical friend" (p. 126). This is no news to me, though I have underlined "...find yourself a critical friend."

This chapter helped me to see past all of the shameful moments in my childhood, to look to the good times in my childhood, in spite of all the painful memories. The person who came to mind the most was my mom who exemplifies the epitome of unconditional love who has been the constant in the face of a lot of changing circumstances.

The seventeenth chapter is called, "Coming to Terms with Our Shamers." Smedes gives some sound advice on working through this process of ridding ourselves of shame, which he makes clear is not a matter to take place overnight. He even speaks to the dilemma of forgiving and forgetting where he warns against the latter. "If we think we have forgotten, we have probably only stuffed the memory beneath our consciousness to fester there as the poisonous source of assorted other pains" (p. 136).

Prior to his checklist, he reminds me that (1) Forgiving is difficult, (2) The first and often only person healed by forgiveness is me, the one doing the forgiving and (3) I need to understand what I do when I really forgive someone (p. 136).

Here's the list:

1. Blame the shamer.
2. Surrender my right to get even.
3. Revise my caricature of the person who shamed me: "...as we move with the forgiving flow, we gradually change our monster back into the weak and faulty human being he is (or was), not all that different from ourselves" (ibid.).
4. Revise my feelings.
5. Accept the person who made me feel unacceptable.

That was the list for forgiveness as a personal drama. Now here is some advice Smedes gives to people like me, which may be applicable to others reading this blog.

1. Try understanding first.
2. Separate what I can put up with from what I need to forgive.
3. Don't be hasty.
4. Don't wait too long.
5. Be concrete: Forgive people for what they do, not for who they are.
6. Don't wait for my shamer to repent: "...in the worst of ironies, we give the person who shamed us the power to prevent us from healing the very shame he caused" (p. 139).
7. Do not forgive out of a sense of duty.
8. Begin by pretending if you need to.
9. Settle for silent forgiving if I must.

On the last one, I think of one of my relatives, whom I've been out of touch with by his choice and I have been contemplating contacting him again. But I think that Smedes' advice is good to me to wait for a more opportune moment to talk to him about our broken relationship and now doesn't seem to be that time.

Smedes once again closes with a profound thought that is stating the obvious that isn't so obvious to me: "When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us" (141).

The next chapter is called, "Accepting Ourselves." To underscore the importance of this, Smedes says that, "To experience acceptance is the beginning of our healing; to accept ourselves is a signal that we are getting healthy" (144).

Here again, it will probably suffice to list what Smedes suggests about accepting ourselves with a recommendation to the reader of this blog to follow up by reading the book or commenting on this blog.

1. First we need to see that accepting ourselves is not the same as forgiving ourselves: The difference between these is the same as that of guilt and shame, the former being for things we do and the latter for recognizing who we are.

2. We own our raw material: Here again, this is worth commenting on because I tend to complain to myself and the rest of the world that my family and I are not perfect and Smedes gently reminds me to accept my life and my circumstances for what they are and to move on with my life.

3. We acknowledge our depths: Smedes talks here about how Grace can be a means for mean to own up to my "own darksome" (p. 147). Examples he gives of such darkness are, "...a desire to strangle your father, a dark wish that one's mother-in-law would die, an urge to knock the boss's block off, a yen for forbidden sexual adventure, a longing to run away from the people we feel responsible for, or a yearning to die" (pp. 147-8). The important thing here is for me to be honest with myself about my true feelings.

4. We own our pride. Smedes point here is that there is a sense in which a shame-prone person, or any person for that matter, can feel a healthy sense of pride which is very different from the pride that the Bible speaks of leading a person to sin.

Smedes makes his objective clear in this chapter when he says, "...only that as we gain the freedom to accept ourselves, we can be reasonably sure that we are healed of shame" (p. 151).

The second to last chapter in this book is called, "Living life lightly." The point of this chapter is clear, that with a loss of shame one can live a lighter life. This is applicable to me in that if I can have a greater sense of my own acceptability that I can be more generous in the ways I think about other people without judging them so quickly through the shame-driven lens that I judge myself by.
Smedes divides this chapter into three sections, talking about "Living lightly with our unhealthy shame", "living lightly with our healthy shame", "living lightly with our true selves", "living lightly with our imperfection", and "living lightly with our critics". A good principle to follow is found in Smedes example of when he made a decision to change his job so that he could address his writing projects to people outside of academia and his colleagues thought he was making a mistake. "What you think of what I am doing matters some to me. But not much. I will not be shamed by your criticism" (p. 157).

The logical conclusion of the previous chapter is "The return of joy", the name of the final chapter of Smedes' book. According to Smedes, "...the feeling called joy is the ultimate alternative to the feeling of shame" (p. 159). Smedes gives six myths about joy that seem appropriate to repeat here for the reader's enjoyment and to remind me of the difference between myth and fact.

1. Myth: If you want joy, you have to earn it.
Fact: If you have to earn joy, you will never get it.

2. Myth: When the chips are down, we get what we pay for.
Fact: When the chips are down, we get what we cannot pay for.

3. Myth: For joy to come, something unusual needs to happen.
Fact: The most unusual things happen in the usual things that usually happen.

4. Myth: Virtue is its own reward.
Fact: Only joy is its own reward.

5. Myth: If something is wrong, it is my job to fix it.
Fact: Only God has the whole world in his hands.

6. Myth: We feel joy when our world is working right.
Fact: Our world never works right.

In the "Postscript: A Faith for the Lighter Life" Smedes offers a creed for people like me who are shame-bound.

I believe that the only self I need to measure up to is the self my Maker meant me to be.

I believe that I am accepted by the grace of God without regard to my deserving.

I believe that I am accepted along with my shadows and the mix of good and bad I breed in them.

I believe that I am worthy to be accepted.

I believe that grace has set me free to accept myself totally, and without conditions, though I do not approve of everything I accept.

I believe that nothing I deserve to be ashamed of will ever make me unacceptable to God.

I believe that I can forgive anyone who has ever infected me with shame I do not deserve.

I believe that I may forgive myself for anything that I have ever done to shame myself or another person.

I am gratefully proud of being who I am and what I shall be.

I believe that the grace of God heals the shame I do not deserve and heals the shame I do.

I believe that grace is the best thing in the world (pp. 167-8).

I'm not there yet, but I think if I post these on my bathroom mirror they will be a reminder to me of the mission I out to receive, a call to rid myself of the shame that keeps me from being what God created me to be.