Shame and Isolation

On a Saturday afternoon with some students delivering sandwiches to hungry folks in the inner city, I saw a woman sitting alone on a bench, not joining the other worn ones who came to our car.  I carefully and slowly approached her, and from a few feet away asked her if she would like a sandwich.  She turned from the sound of my voice like a turtle crawling into its shell, and the words she spoke still echo in my heart: “I’m so ashamed.”

“Jesus met the woman at the well…” the Peter, Paul and Mary song went, and that story is retold today in thousands of churches around the world as John’s Gospel Chapter 4, verses 5-42 “…and he tells her everything she’s ever done” Noel Paul Stookey’s baritone voice informs us.  But I think the story is not about what she’s done, but what she’s done about what she’s done.

My late brother Dan lived in an alcoholic haze for the last several years of his life, and the phone would be our bridge across the 600 miles from Detroit to St. Paul.  He is part of the fabric of my life, the part that was woven during the first 20 years of my life as he preceded me through life 18 months ahead of me, blazing the trail for me, if only because I chose to follow.  When I chose rather to leave the smooth waters in his wake and go of on my own, our paths diverged significantly, and eventually we were quite different.  I lived a life of faith and hope and striving and he grew cynical and angry.  I had a job that greatly defined me and he found work to be a four-letter word.  But perhaps the biggest difference was that I lived in a family in a community while he lived alone. 

Alone with his cynicism and anger, he began to drink.  His drinking allowed him to reinforce his arguments about the foolishness of society, and our phone conversations consisted primarily of his soliloquies railing against the foolishness of pretty much everyone but himself.  I’d gently challenge his arguments; any aggressive move on my part would lead to his belittling me or hanging up.  But sometimes he would share his profound sadness, his ruined life.  He would speak of his ex-wife, his loss of the favor with which he grew up as the golden child, the   bright and hard-working one, the shortstop, the quarterback. 

One night his mood was more mellow than angry, and he said, “John, I read this story about a guy who climbed into a hole deeper than he could climb out of.”  When he did not say more despite my waiting silence, I asked him about it, but he changed the subject.  It seemed ominous to me, and in subsequent conversation I’d ask him about it, but he said little more. A few months later he’d fallen dead on the street, his heart stopped, his groceries including his nightly jug of wine.  I think he knew that he was drinking himself to death; that was his hole.  In his cynicism and anger and disillusionment, he’d isolated himself and taken on the identity of victim and loser.

Jesus did not seem to be taken aback by the woman’s having had a number of husbands, and living unmarried with one then.  He called her beyond her coming alone to the well, too ashamed to come with the other women of the town.  He called her to himself, to his forgiveness and his Father’s endlessly flowing love and providence.  Perhaps he saw that she was climbing into a hole, a bottomless abyss with a sign that said “SHAME”.  Perhaps he saw, rather, that she was beginning to spiral into accepting her identity as a loser, step by ashamed step. 

What struck me about my brother’s ominous story was the decisiveness about it, the moment of climbing IN.  I think that while many of us would not do that, many of us do gradually wear a circular path of shame and despair that becomes so deep that we cannot climb out of it, and that perhaps it becomes so deep that we cannot accept the lifelines dropped down to us in love, the lifelines of Grace, that plead with us to let go of our shame.