Sermon quotes on SHame
Brené Brown
I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful – it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.
I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.
I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.
Found at https://brenebrown.com/blog/2013/01/14/shame-v-guilt/
Brené Brown
Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.
Brené Brown
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.
Daring Greatly
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl?
Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Illustrated)
Blake Edwards (For Contrast)
Shame is an unhappy emotion invented by pietists in order to exploit the human race.
Hellen Keller
Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.
John Milton
Where shame is, there is also fear.
Gregory of Nyssa
Our godlike beauty is hidden beneath curtains of shame.
C.S. Lewis
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
A Grief Observed, Faber & Faber
Charles Spurgeon
I believe that as often as I transgress, God is more ready to forgive me than I am ready to offend.
June Price Tangney
One of the most hopeful and gratifying conclusions to come out of our 12 years of research on shame and guilt is that that notion of morality is wrong. Dead wrong. You don’t have to feel really bad to be a good person. In fact, if anything, the data suggest to the contrary. In the realm of moral emotions, more is not necessarily better. Moderately painful feelings of guilt about specific behaviors motivate people to behave in a moral, caring, socially responsible manner. In contrast, intensely painful feelings of shame do not appear to steer people in a constructive, moral direction. Such intense moral pain about the self cuts to our core, exacting a heavy “penance ” perhaps. But rather than motivating reparative action, shame often motivates denial, defensive anger and aggression.
Simon Tugwell
And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves to be (which we assume to be unacceptable and unlovable) behind some kind of appearance which we hope will be more pleasing. We hide behind pretty faces which we put on for the benefit of our public. And in time we may even come to forget that we are hiding, and think that our assumed pretty face is what we really look like.
The Beatitudes: Soundings in Christian Tradition (Templegate Publishers, 1980).
Curt Thompson
Despite all we know about shame, containing it, let alone disposing of it, is a bit like grasping for mercury: the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes . . . It is ubiquitous, seeping into every nook and cranny of life. It is pernicious, infesting not just our thoughts but our sensations, images, feelings and, of course, ultimately our behavior. It just doesn’t seem to go away.
The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves, InterVarsity Press.
Mark Twain
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
Following the Equator (1897)
John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
Bech: A Book
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