The Curse of Shame, Fear, and Pain — Thayil Thoughts
After focusing on praying for the Globally Persecuted Saints of God and observing a time of repentance, I’m happy to get back to what I intended to be a two-part series on understanding why there seems to be this rising tide of anger throughout American society. I write “intended” because I’ve realized that unless I want people feeling like they are reading a book, I better split this article into two and make the articles a three-part endeavor. In my previous article, I tried to provide some relevant examples of what this rising tide of anger looked like and then I tried to explain from a psychological perspective how the global pandemic and our responses to it have led to people feeling stigmatized, ostracized, and then shamed to the point of having a boiling rage that many people don’t have the skills to cope with. In this article I would like to delve deeper into some of the spiritual aspects also discussed in the previous article and I’d like to look ahead to my next article in which I’d like to cover how believers can respond differently to the stressors around us while modeling to the world a better way to cope.
Towards the end of my previous article, I discussed the immediate affect sin had on human functioning. I described how both of the humans in the Creation story, experienced sin by finding themselves confronted by four new states of being or existence which are: shame, pain, fear, and anger. Most of my life I have heard people teach that the immediate and main effect of sin was spiritual death. Spiritual death is commonly understood as being separated from God. It wasn’t until 2012 when I heard this concept expanded on and explained in terms of shame, fear, and pain, by the church leader who eventually officiated my wedding. I still remember being amazed at how simple and yet profound his understanding of Genesis 3 was (as he taught it to the youth group) and after that day I ran with it and its become a cornerstone of my teaching for the last 9 years.
The idea works this way: the humans sinned and then experienced shame, fear, and pain which are depicted for us in Genesis 3 and explained at the end of my last article. It is my belief and my contention that ever since that time, every human being has been afflicted by this curse. It doesn’t matter if you are Indian, Cuban, Nigerian, Chinese, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, or Atheist. We all share this affliction and because it was not part of God’s original design for our existence and it is the result of sin: it qualifies as a curse. Every society, system of beliefs, or religion tries to offer solutions for this curse. They offer meditation, therapy, atonement by means of personal actions, or even philosophies that try to remove the burden of the individual parts of the curse. But the majority of human beings struggle to apply ideologies that give them victory over this curse and that struggle becomes the source of what causes so much hatred, division, war, and ultimately actions of death between us.
If you take a look at the image below you can see how I illustrate the way this curse functions in our soul (what I define to be both the heart and mind of people). Usually external triggers press upon shame, fear, and pain and result in the individual experiencing the emotion/state of being known as anger. For example, a person cuts you off in traffic (a very common occurrence here in Miami) and you immediately feel rage and react with honking your horn and speeding up to cut them off or even driving next to them so that you can express your anger with a particular finger. That may be due to fear but it can also be due to shame because that person essentially communicated to you that your space on the road isn’t as important as theirs. Or let’s say your child is jumping around and knees you in the groin (yep, that one has happened plenty) or pulls on your hair. Most people react with anger that’s demonstrated with forceful words and sometimes with forceful actions. These responses in turn become triggers for the individual who first triggered us and so they also respond with anger of their own.
But not all anger looks the same. Some people express their anger outwardly, while others bring it into themselves. So when I yell at my child, in my anger, for hitting me in the groin, I can see her feel shame and I can see her curl up in a ball or retreat to her room with her tablet and close the door. The internalizing of anger (if it happens enough) will eventually manifest in psychopathology which includes disorders like anxiety and depression. Some internalize and then explode with violent outbursts, and so however we look at it, we can see that this curse of shame, fear, and pain truly does bring death. Not just a separation from God either. It brings death in our marriages, our relationships with our children, with other family members, and with society at large. So it is my teaching that the curse of shame, fear, and pain is the best way of understanding what God meant when he told the first human that if he were to sin he would die (Genesis 2:17). In other words, he would become the agent of death rather than the agent of life he was created to be and we’ve been killing each other and ourselves ever since.
It is usually at this point in my classes when I move to the account of Jesus hanging on the stake to illustrate the true and only hope we have for conquering this curse and finding healing and life. A close look at Jesus’ experiences leading up to His crucifixion and His time on the cross will show us that He experiences the curse of death in every facet. The most obvious is pain. He has his beard plucked out of his face, he is repeatedly hit on his head and face to the point where he is no longer recognizable as a man (Isaiah 52:14, Matthew 27:30), and then he is nailed to a Roman cross. Shame is also something he experiences as he is repeatedly mocked, stripped naked, and ultimately hangs while people hurl insults at him for several hours (Matthew 26–27). He also experiences fear in the garden of Gethsemane and also on the cross when he cries out to God “”My God, My God, why have You abandoned Me?” (Matthew 27:46, TLV). Some may argue that He never experienced fear because fear is a “sin”. Nope, that’s just wrong. Fear is a result of the curse of sin and without His ability to experience everything about our curse, He wouldn’t have been able to fully remove the curse. In simpler words, He experiences the entirety of the curse of sin because it is the only way for the curse to be removed from us. Paul explained it this way “Messiah liberated us from Torah ‘s curse, having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’)” (Galatians 3:13). He then experiences the finale of the curse when he is declared dead and buried in a grave.
This curse of shame, fear, and pain is not only a problem for individuals. One can very plainly see it in play in the systems that society uses for everything from commerce to government. Universities use fear to drive students into turning their work on time by utilizing point deductions or grade penalties. Businesses use fear as well in trying to motivate their employees to work. There’s even a system at grocery stores that uses the fear of shame (a terrible combo use of the curse) when you are admonished for having 12 items in the express lane. Ultimately, its fullest and most devastating use is in the home when parents use pain, shame, and fear to “discipline” their children. The reality is that any system that uses that specific model to function is a system that breeds death.
The past few months of this pandemic, I have seen (and regrettably participated in) this system all over social media regarding approaches to the virus and its presence in society. People are shamed into wearing masks or taking them off. People are scared away from vaccination or scared into them. In doing so, we have created a cycle of angering each other and the killing of relationships, all in an effort to perpetuate the same curse Jesus died to remove. Systemic sin goes beyond recognizing patterns of racism or misogyny, one must see the larger work at play and that is the very curse that sin first introduced to us and how it somehow reigns in us (the Body of Messiah) despite Jesus’ removal of that curse on the cross. I contribute to that same system when I call someone a “beta male” for wearing a mask or tell them they don’t have enough faith to conquer fear about the virus (ironically using shame to induce fear so I have control). It works the same way when I believe that those who are sick now are at fault because they didn’t get vaccinated or didn’t wear masks at some event that I saw them post about on Facebook. How do we really expect to bring the light of God’s kingdom to people by using the same tactics a demon would?
There has to be a better way. There is one. That will be the subject of my next article.
Originally published at https://www.thayilthoughts.com on September 10, 2021.