Shame

I am struggling to understand this world we live in.  I am trying to work through the various frustrations and emotions that accompany many daily experiences, many meaningful conversations.  I am trying to make sense of it all.

I often have heard that Jesus came to free us from sin.

Sin is a word that often makes me cringe, and is a concept I have struggled with for a number of years now.  But after an enlightening, passionate, and personal conversation with a good friend of mine, I feel that I am starting to make steps towards identifying how I understand the reality of sin.  So often, I have been presented with models of sin that are highly focused on actions that people do or do not take.  I have heard that sin is separation from God, and I think that starts to move closer to it for me.  I see it like this.  Sin is whatever it is that keeps us from looking at the overwhelming reality of who we are from and in God. 

So. What is Jesus doing in the Gospels?  I think he is helping people, and challenging people, to move out of that sin and look at what the reality of their life is - namely, that they come from God, are loved by God, find life in God, and overall are pretty incredible and overwhelmingly beautiful pieces of Creation.  Sound cool? It is!  Jesus is out there for errbody - he is healing lepers not only from a physical condition, but from their deep seated and often culturally reinforced sense of shame.  He is challenging the pharisees and other rulers to look at the oppressive notion of sin that find justice in marginalizing people and obscuring the truth of that persons life.  He is touching the adulteress, forgiving, saying that she is more than her actions and her mistakes, that her beauty and light can still reign if she can let it.  He is challenging those wishing to stone her, so quick to condemn and deny their own predicament.

I think Jesus is coming to return people to their humanity.  If Jesus is what it looks like to be fully human, then, I would have to conclude, that I am not living so fully.  For me, Jesus is showing all of those people what it really means to be human - which is ultimately inseparable from God and is therefore holy and sacred.  Lepers, Pharisees, adulteresses, condemning masses, all of them are far from the truth of their human condition, of being from and of God.  The oppressed and oppressors both need to be reminded of their call to be human, and consequently, divine.

So.  What would Jesus have to say about all the shit goin down in the world today?  Well, from my secret telephone on which we frequently talk, this is what I got.  Sin is still all over the place - in other words, we have a whole lot of people who do not know where they come from and who they are.  We have a culture (and world), that chooses to continue to stigmatize experiences that people have, that continues to isolate and marginalize, rather than embrace and resurrect.  Mental health, be it depression, mental illness, suicidality - all of these things are considered taboo, too awful to talk about, to shameful to be allowed out into the light.  Drug and alcohol addiction, continuing to be seen simply as personal fault and weakness, depravity even. Systemic sin, like racism, like classicism - structures in places that continually embed a sense of "less than" and worthlessness in people.  

We all suffer from this.  The people who are oppressed are made to feel that the essence of who they are is flawed, broken, unworthy - they are made to believe that there are places within themselves, experiences they have had, where God cannot reside, where beauty and love and resurrection cannot occur.  I think Jesus would call bullshit, and I would have to agree.  Psalm 139 - there isn't anywhere we can run and hide from God - not because God is always trying to judge us and catch us, but because God is always trying to love us, even in the places we don't think it's possible.  The oppressors, though, while maybe not in a material sense, are being challenged just as much to reclaim their own humanity.  While they continue to reject and stigmatize aspects of the human experience, rejecting both themselves and God in the process, how can they claim to be full in their own humanity?  They need healing too.  We all do.  We have become so caught up in feeling ashamed, in feeling guilty, in feeling wrong, that we spend all of our energy trying to hide the source of these feelings.  We sit in these feelings as ends in themselves, rather than as pointing us to something better and more true.

Working on the Rez, among this Lakota people, it is obvious how trauma, handed down and continually reinforced throughout history, has evolved into shame, into the feeling that one's very being is wrong.  After centuries of telling a people that they are less than human, it isn't hard to imagine why that feeling would become deeply embedded.  A good friend of mine on the Rez, a brave and courageous man who inspires me every time I see him, has often said: "Alcoholism and addiction isn't the problem, it's the symptom.  It is a symptom of a spiritual disease that has infiltrated our people."  Shame.  It is a problem here on the Rez, but it is just as much a problem in the inner cities of the Bronx and the million dollar brownstones in Brooklyn - we are a people who has forgotten who we are in God, who has forgotten the deepest truth of our being.

This shame, and the systems in place to reinforce it, are the greatest tragedies I can see in our time.  It is against this I wish to fight.  I hope to make my life a shining testament to something greater.  To allowing people to move on that journey towards leaving behind all of this bullshit that clouds our vision from seeing fully and clearly what we were created for.  That is what I see Jesus having done for the people of his time, and continuing to do to inspire people of our own time to take up that heavy burden of love.  Let this veil be lifted from the eyes of this people, and let reclaim our own humanity, hand in hand, together.

Mitakuye Oyasin.