New Year, New You? Shame, Grace, & Showing Up
Laura Jean Truman
Day 1 of 6: Shame on New Year’s Eve (Or: Why Motive Matters More than You Think)
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
—Paul, Galatians 6:9
New Year’s is the time when we most relentlessly shame ourselves for who we are, imagine the ideal version of ourselves that we could be, and decide that rules made in isolation will make us Good, Holy, and—let’s be honest—Thin.
We live in a self-improvement culture obsessed with perfect bodies (who defines “perfect” anyway, and are they rich white people?), moving up the career ladder (what does “up” even mean?), clean eating (was our food dirty before?). Shame, guilt, and fear conspire together in a toxic cultural mash-up of demands that we give more, do better, read more widely, be more ideologically pure, have stronger bodies (or conversely love the bodies we have perfectly and without doubts), raise well-rounded and emotionally healthy brilliant children, and pursue our careers and hobbies relentlessly and without rest.
It’s not just shallow cultural demands about career success and physical beauty that gives us that ache to “be better,” though. Paul admonishes us not to become weary of doing good; Jesus demands that we pick up our cross and follow Him; and looking around at the evil in the world makes us want to do better and be better to help fix it. We know that we aren’t doing our best, and in our guilt about our failures, we roll into the New Year motivating ourselves with rules and with shame, and maybe—for some weeks—that’ll work.
But when we do self-improvement powered by shame, either we will fail and hate ourselves, or we’ll succeed at the cost of presence, centeredness, and compassion for the Other. When we motivate ourselves with shame, even if we accomplish our to-do list, we will end up hurting ourselves and our neighbor.
We’ve taught ourselves that shame is a proper tool for growth, so when we turn around to try and love our neighbor, shame is the only tool we’ll have. When we turn around to fix this tragically broken country and world, we will only know how to use shame.
Darkness can’t cast out darkness, and there’s nothing more spiritually dark than shame.
Breaking the shame cycle around doing, being, achieving, and improving isn’t just something we learn for ourselves—it’s essential that we learn another way of growing for the sake of everyone around us and our ability to love them well.
This New Year’s, however you decide to structure your resolutions, don’t be satisfied with shame as a motivator. You deserve more, and so does the world.
God, it is so hard to release shame. We’re scared that if we stop hating ourselves, we might not get better. Please give us the courage to leave behind these old tools that aren’t serving us or our neighbors, and help us to take a leap of faith into a new way of loving ourselves and the world. Amen.
Laura Jean Truman