The Gift of Shame: Rediscovering Dignity in a Culture of Concupiscence
From Road to Purity
(The following was originally written for by Kaleb Hammond)
One of the most painful aspects of porn addiction is shame. It’s why we hide our addiction, try to excuse or justify it and even attempt to scandalize others by tempting them to share in it with us, as though doing it with others will somehow take away our shame. In this way, shame feels a lot like guilt: we know deep down that there is something wrong with porn, no matter what pleasurable feelings it may give us in the moment, but when shame accuses and convicts us of our wrongdoing, we would rather do away with shame than with its true cause.
It’s easier to push down or ignore a negative feeling than it is to deal with the sin that causes it – to admit that what we feel is good for us is actually bad and harms our relationship with God, with our loved ones and with ourselves. But, like guilt, shame is a gift from God, a reminder of our dignity as human persons made in His image and created for the perfect happiness of unity with Him, not for slavery to the confused desires of the body which only serve to distract us from what we are really made for. The remedy for a gunshot wound is not to put a plaster over it and take painkillers: we have to remove the bullet causing the pain so that the wound can truly heal.
This is the message of Pope St. John Paul II in his famous work on the theology of the body. Shame, he says, was the response of Adam and Eve, our primordial parents, to original sin, which, by distorting their humanity through pride and selfishness, turned them against God and one another. Concupiscence, the disordering of our natural desires, is the most persistent and intensely personal consequence of original sin, leading us to forget that God made us in His image – not only individually, where through our spiritual soul we are far above the animals in our capacity to know and love God, but also collectively, where through interpersonal communion we image the eternal and infinite love of the three divine Persons of the Trinity.
This communal image of God in man, the Holy Father said, is the “spousal meaning of the body”[1] – the body is a sacrament of the person, expressing our subjectivity and our need for loving relationship with God and others as a sacramental sign, just as the sacramental signs of bread and wine in the Eucharist express the abiding presence and divine love of Christ for each of us. From the beginning, Adam and Eve knew this meaning of the body and lived it in their marital fidelity, giving themselves to one another freely as gifts in marriage, the “primordial sacrament”[2] representing God’s love and desire for union with man.
Since concupiscence was introduced into human nature, however, the spousal meaning of the body, its deeply personal and interpersonal character, has been corrupted through selfishness. Now, instead of giving ourselves in the freedom of the gift to one another within the properly marital expression of total commitment given to us by God, we use one another, depersonalizing and objectifying others and ourselves. In doing so, we conceal the image of God in us, both individually by enslaving our spiritual freedom and dignity to bodily passions, and collectively by seeing other persons as mere objects to satiate our desires and to be cast aside when we’re through with them. Accordingly, through concupiscence, the body is no longer a sacrament of the person, nor is sexuality a sacrament of the marital union between Christ and His Church which human marriage is meant to signify. Instead, it is just an instrument for my gratification, and I am only a slave to its lusts. As the Holy Father explains:
‘Concupiscence’ removes the intentional dimension of the reciprocal existence of man and woman from the personal perspectives ‘of communion,’ which are proper to their perennial and reciprocal attraction, reducing this attraction and, so to speak, driving it toward utilitarian dimensions, in whose sphere of influence one human being ‘makes use’ of another human being, ‘using her’ only to satisfy his own ‘urges.’[3]