I spent the holiday with my wifes family upstate.

Her clan sprawls into a room, surging and bustling with sheer mass. There are so many of themcousins, aunts & uncles, siblings, grandparentsthat it is easy to lose a sense of the individual. My eyes blur together and her family becomes a juggernaut single celled organism lurching about, first this way and then that. The sound too is something quite wonderful. Like a rowdy convention full of would-be-auctioners, laughing and exchanging stories and glories. It is, actually, wonderful to be a part of. I come from a smaller, more timid group. We all seem to possess the ability to zone in on a few people in the room then excavate the quality of relationship. My mild mannered tribe searches for a singular victim in any crowd of people, whom we draw into orbit, lavish attention and time upon. Hushed tones and breathy chuckles dominate our exchanges. This is how we do business. It was simply a matter of time before I ambled over to my mark. The matriarch of the family, 90 years oldfull of life, grace, and endless stories. Yes, here is where I could sit and spend my momentsgive my hushed tones to. Our conversation jumped all over the map, but we alighted on a very interesting bit of social history, that only someone who has lived can reference (of course, when I say lived I mean not only having gleaned a score card of years, but also having registered the notes of meaning, the stories that make sense of it all). She described the changes that the 60s brought. She was already in her forties by then, able to observe slightly independent of the latest streams of fad. I asked her what, in her opinion, shifted the most. Her answer was interestingand one that I resonated with. This incredibly wise woman said something along the lines of this: we stopped feeling shame to be a good thing, and that is very sad for all of us. Stop here to allow the impact of this thought to hit you. Notice the dirtiness of the word shame. How you register guilt as something different than shameeven guilt is a notch up on the hierarchy of damaging emotions. Reference Roman Catholic Shame, the abhorence of the body, and of sexuality. Watch your pulse quicken

as you imagine a maternal type point a knobby finger at you and say You should be ashamed. Recall the hours of therapy it took to undue your unique sense of shameand how your counselor encouraged you to shout inanely, I release all of my shame! Now, can you think of one instance, in your adult life, where you have thought of shame as a good thing? If you are anything like methen no. It is a filthy word. A word that sees badness and wrongness and therefore creates them in its wake. Shame, in my generationand evidently since the 60s, has been a word to beashamed of. It is curious isnt it? How culture can shift in such a way as to leave an island where before there was a massive continent. Shame used to mean a certain knowing. Knowing how your actions either matched or were discongruent with the common good. Something could be a shame if it was tragic, or out of place. But there is another aspect to it. It meant having a sense of decency, or at least privacy. It meant not hanging your dirty laundry on your facebook status, for all 500 of your so-called friends to see. Shame was the regulating emotion that said, This is too far.reign it in. Today, there is no such governor. A well known British journalist wrote about discovering her fourteen year old daughters self-taken pornographic videos. As if this wasnt bad enough, she soon found that there had a been a leak. Incredibly graphic and disturbing images of her child were now floating out on the internet. Her daughter was now the object of ridicule at school, labeling, and lust. It was a tragic set of realities for her, which caused the journalist to exclaim, Doesnt she have any shame!?!?! Because shame, sometimes, just means restraint. And here is another word that has cultural implications we dont enjoy. Restraint. To hold back. To refrain. To hesitate before you leap off a cliff. To wait, a split second, before you TWEET out your latest status, before you press record on your camera, before you send the image to your hormone emoting boyfriend. I cant but help but think that restraint, in our culture, may be just what we need in the public discourse. Hot heads who say everything

on their mind. Reactionaries dangling on the latest pendulum swing. The colliding of graphic and pornographic personal anecdotes. Restraint. Shame. Its not hard to see the values that led up to this. We exist in a PostFreudian society. His mythic worldview underlies much of our common collective sense. The human identity, he argued, is composed of a social personalitythe ego, which does the right thing, says what you want it to say, and essentially acts as mask, a persona Several layers down however you findthe id the instincts. The base. The most core level of your soul. Freud, in his Victorian era, argued that the Id needs suppressing, to some extent. However, his heirs disagreed. Drawing on an impulse that has been in effect since the days of the noble savage (where we mythologize primitives as perfect), they praised ridding ourselves of the Ego and getting back to our most essential, most authentic, most basic self. Uncover. Excavate. Ditch the trappings of civilization that are, restraining. Of course, this is probably what all the bra-burning was about. Shame, became about covering the thing that needed to be releasedthat the world needs to know about. Curiously, today, all the things that Freud and his heirs said we were repressing are now just an afternoon line up on MTV. No ones repressing any more. Lets not kid ourselves. Freuds vision of the human and society is a worldview. It is not reality. Im not saying it doesnt have merit. Every worldview does. Im just saying, its not ground floor. Its a construction site. Dont think that your vision of shame as negative is right or righteousits simply a product. Theres a curious story at the beginning of the Old Testament about Noah and his children after the flood. The mariner has now become a vineyard owner, and it seems has tasted too much of his own vintage. Drunk, there he is, in the words of the text, uncovered. Naked. Exposed. Just like we like to see people today. I

dont mean pornographically (though that too). I mean, politically, socially, spiritually. Let us see people as they are. Of course, this assumes something doesnt it? It assumes that whats under it all is the realityand not just another construct. In Noahs case, his nakedness is also just another product. Its not reality. Hes under the influence. Noah with clothes may be a production of stitching and economy, but his nakedness is a product of his vine gone out of control. Ham, one of his children, finds his father. And does what most of us are willing to do these days. He laughs. He points. He tells others. Today he might have simply posted it on a social media outlet. For that matter, today, he might not have had to. Getting schnaukered is no sin for us. Its just an outlet (another post-freudian beliefen vino veritas, in wine is truththe Id, the soul, needs an out, needs an excuse to come up and see the light of day.) At any rate, Ham draws attention to the exposed situation. However, his other two brothers do something rather remarkable. They preserve their fathers dignity. Backs to him, they inch towards the sceneso as not to even see him uncovered. Then they place a garment on him. He is given back his dignity. And when he comes to, he blesses them, and Ham is cursed. In our rush to be authentic personally, to demand disclosure relationally, to need exposure sociallywe have stripped one another of dignity. It is easy to listen to the salacious story about so-and-so, nod our heads, and then affirm, Thats the reality. Im not convinced it is. Just as Noahs uncovered self was a product, so too are our own nakednesses. Its not the real thing, its just another thing, maybe even the worst thinga shadow, which we all share. Lets acknowledge that shadows exist, that we each have a limitless capacity to tend towards darkness (just as we have a limitless capacity to shine in the light) and then allow for dignity, for goodness. Best to give someone the thing that brings them a level of composureof dignity Let a person draw themselves up and be the kind of person theyd be proud to bethey ought be, their best self,

their highest good. If there is something necessary today it is to know that underneath it all is not a good or a bad essence, one or the other (sin nature vs. divine nature), but rather a set of choices, how we build our lives. Shame is a dirty word today. Im sure theres been much harm done in the repression of victimization, sexuality, sensations, etcBut theres also been a loss of civility. A cultural line that has been erased. An overall sense of goodnessthe common goodthat is being ignored. We need a sense of shame sometimes to hit us, to stop us from the statement that is hurtful, harmful, or rude. Shame to prevent us from coming out with it, when what we should really be doing is sitting on it until we change our mind. Shame to hold us when we need to know that something just isnt okbecause it degrades us or others. Shame is an informant, telling us that we are better than this, stronger, richer, and neednt stoop this low. Things like restraint, and yes even shame, may be exactly what we need more of today. They become trusted tools (though certainly not the only ones) we use to build towards our highest and best. Today, try having some shame.