Pondering Grace, Shame and Ethics

I am pondering something… Does shame have any place or validity in our lives?

About 20-24 years ago I was clinically depressed, a failed perfectionist, trapped in legalism and self-hatred. I was also very much “overweight” and convinced I was “ugly” and no one would ever love the real me. I experienced deep shame, I didn’t feel I belonged in this world, everything I did was “wrong.” Shame added nothing to my life, no benefit. My thoughts and feelings were spiraling out of control. I had no option but to see various therapists and take medication to turn this loving-hell shame around and crawl slowly out of my black hole. 

Simultaneously, I encountered a new messages of God’s grace that transformed my life. God loves you no matter what. No matter if you commit acts of rape and murder, or any of the things I felt shame and guilt on a daily basis about. I could quit reading my Bible and praying every day. I could quit tithing. I could quit hating myself and trying so hard to be perfect because God is love and love loves me…

Now, 20 years later, I’m struggling with the notion of total grace. Yes, I believe that God loves everyone unconditionally, and that in itself is grace. But in my 20-ish year old brain Grace meant it didn’t matter if you were racist or anti-racist. It didn’t matter if you were queer or homophobic. It didn’t matter if you were “sleeping around” or abstaining until marriage. Grace covered it all. You could be “addicted to porn” and still be a Christian. You could be Donal Trump and call yourself a Christian… because… grace.

Do you see my problem here? I took the ethics out of Christianity. I said it’s all covered by grace. Now, in my own personal life I still lived conservatively. I was abstained from most sexual activity. I married late and haven’t divorced. I went to church on Sunday, most Sundays and still do. I eventually quit reading the Bible and praying so much. I don’t give 10% but I still give. And grace taught me that since love was the goal, then homophobia didn’t really make sense, nor did sexism or racism. I was becoming all for equality or equity especially since grace seemed to put us all on equal footing: rapists and murderers alike! 

But now I want more justice than I did back then. I get really worried about the amount of sexual assault in my world and how we can teach people to love others to the extent that they no longer have this absurd innate permission to “grab ‘em by the pussy.” I want my queer (LGBTQIA+) relatives to live with the same freedoms and rights that I have as someone who lives a heterosexual life (regardless of whether I identify as straight or not. I actually want to identify as “none of your business,” “why do you care,” or “moot point.”) 

I’m reading about diet culture and how it is shame based. And I’m remembering my own “weight loss journey” in my early twenties. I have never calorie counted. I have never been on a “diet.” I did not consult a nutritionist, a dietician, but I did have a doctor tell me I needed to lose weight as treatment for back pain. I focused on exercise and lost 30 kilos / 66 pounds over 18months. Slow and steady. I read a Dr Phil book and listened to just a couple of things that stood out like “you can’t eat what you don’t buy” (I’m paraphrasing) and that my general addiction to sugar and emotional overeating needed to change. So I focused on:

1. Reducing cane sugar while increasing fruit and vegetables
2. Replacing my cookie addiction with a chocolate addiction (I’m not even joking), and the amount of chocolate I ate was a lot less than the size and number of cookies, crackers and similar baked goods (we call them “biscuits / bikkies” in Australia) than I had been consuming
3. Listening more to my fullness so I would over-eat less frequently, especially at dinner time / night time (because that’s when I assessed myself as over-indulging)
4. AND ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT, I began to accept that my body is sexual and is allowed to be sexually attractive. (One of the reasons I kept myself overweight was literally to avoid having sex, consensual or otherwise.)

Shame did not motivate me to lose weight, but some kind of… maybe “body justice” did. When you think you’re fat and ugly and therefore hate yourself, you are trapped in an attitude of “might as well eat some more because I’m not worth anything more than that.”

Shame doesn’t serve people who believe they are addicted to porn to be able to quit. If anything our secret shames and fears drive us to do these things more. But grace doesn’t actually make looking at porn healthy. Maybe it moves porn into neutral territory, like consuming food. We think/feel: I’m consuming these things, sometimes it feels really good and orgasmic, and maybe there is nothing wrong with what I’m consuming, and other times it feels unhealthy and I want to move more toward love and health. Is that what we call ethics? Justice? 

Can there be a kind of grace-based justice that motivates us to live healthier lives, not from a place of shame, but from something more loving?

I have certainly found myself much more concerned about equity for all genders, sexualities, skin-colors, ethnicities etc. But I fall into the trap of wanting to shame people who are racist, sexist, and homophobic, even though I know from experience that shame doesn’t motivate. Shame traps. 

Maybe what I am learning is that grace actually motivates us toward health. But I’m not sure why this is true. Because it still involves judging things as “healthy” or “unhealthy,” “good” or “less good,” “right,” and maybe even point-blank “wrong.” I don’t see the point feeling self-hatred over our “wrongness.” It never does anyone any good. Shame seems to go beyond a little bit of guilt that says “I’m veering the wrong direction. I have to believe that some guilt is beneficial so that we actually have empathy for the people whose lives we affect by our actions. But Shame / self-loathing not so much. 

I needed to believe that God loved me – that someone bigger and better than just me was the source of love – and then embrace that love for myself and move away from hatred and shame, in order to uncover a healthier me, including (but not limited to) healthier treatment of my body.

I have been pondering this idea for at least two years, and I don’t even know if I’m articulating it well. I really want to hear other people’s experiences and thoughts about grace and ethics. What is the basis of our ethics? Does shame (self-loathing) play any part? Does guilt (feeling sorry / regret about the consequences of your actions)? Does love, grace and equity motivate us toward just-ethics?