In the beginning, there was shame…?

Whoa whoa whoa…

hold up, wait a minute, that’s not how it goes, johnny; it’s, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were unashamed…”

I just want to pause here and say that this verse comes RIGHT AFTER Adam drops the first ever RnB track in human history.

Before things were corrupted, there they were, husband and wife, in each other’s presence and the presence of God. This verse is simple, brief, and many times I’ve kept reading not knowing what all I was missing.

I have spent a significant amount of time counseling couples, individuals who are trying to untie themselves from complicated situations or people in their lives. They may not understand, some of the messes they’ve been living in are messes that were left for them from previous parents, grandparents, or well-intentioned caretakers. I think we are complicated beings

I don’t want to get into a conversation about attachment quite yet, though; attachment plays an incredible role in how we show up in our relationships.

I want to focus in on the first emotion ever mentioned. It’s an emotion that some of us are aware of. Some of us know the feeling very well, but unfortunately, don’t have the language to communicate it. Shame is a negative emotion; we are uncomfortable in it, it’s a feeling that shows up and expresses itself in different ways. Shame is something people struggle to identify in their lives, and it’s difficult to communicate I think as there is so much vulnerability present when we sense shame.

Oddly, Curt Thompson in his book The Soul of Shame, observed that the first recorded emotion is a description of its absence, interesting, right?

“And they were naked and unashamed… “

The spirit could have had Moses pen something different, more upbeat, more positive; they were naked, and were happy. They were naked, and excited not to have any clothes on, so much fresh, cool air!

They were naked and loving it!

God wants the reader to focus….they were naked, they were entirely bare before God, they were exposed in how God created them, they were completely seen in front of God, and wholly seen by the other person; they were naked together.

A few observations of the text -

In Hebrew, you have an interesting construction: it reads, “two of them naked, the man and his wife, unashamed…”

Let’s transliterate and paraphrase this some, “both exposed, the oneness, and they didn’t feel the need to hide from each other or God; in that moment they felt and experienced being seen, loved, and wholly accepted with how God created them to be…”

A world without the felt sense to hide. That means Adam and Eve gazed on the rising of the sun and the sun set over warm ocean shores…….

Together… without running away from each other’s gaze. Imagine that with me, looking into someone’s eyes and not having to look away, it’s that feeling. It’s when we desire to set our eyes on someone who desires to set their eyes on us. Something broke, we exchanged a perfect connection, a pure and loving sense of safety, and a life of expressing love outwardly for a life that is consistently on the edge of rupture.

Most of us know what happened in Genesis 3, at the pinnacle of connection, our first parents were presented with deception and chose to go against God’s command to follow Him and His ways. Sin, a falling off and away from God, enters the world through mankind, and a once “absence of shame” is no longer the case. After the fall of humanity, the text never states, “and so shame entered the world…”

No, it does not. However, after God addresses mankind’s rebellion with the consequence of a curse, the next story writes itself in a way that echoes the presence of a previous absence. Let’s take a quick look at the story that follows:

Can and Abel, the first recorded family, they are brothers. Both of them bring something to God as an offering. Cain brings fruit from the ground, and Abel brings the firstborn of his flock. The text never lets the reader know why God had respect for Abel’s offering but did not have respect for Cain’s. However, even when God did not have “regard” or “respect” for Cain’s offering, God comes to Cain and asks him why his “face has fallen”. God continues to let Cain know that if Cain does well, he will still be accepted. God is not unaccepting of Cain; the issue was the offering. Keep in mind, pre-fall, there was an absence of shame; post-fall, we can assume shame is likely present, but we don’t have to guess; we can read it in the text. Cain’s face had fallen, which means that he was disheartened, discouraged, and struggling to feel accepted before God.

Shame has many faces, many expressions, and in this story, it showed itself as an anger so deathly it could kill. After Cain kills Abel in his anger, the consequence is that the ground now curses Cain. God lets Cain know he will be on the run from now on, but God still protects him by giving him a sign for people to know Cain has been promised the security of life by God. It’s interesting to know that even though Cain gave in to his sin, God still gave him his life.

“Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

I want to define what we know about shame from three different specialists, and I hope it provides people with more language they might need to understand themselves, others, and, most importantly, God.

Three Specialists, Three Definitions 👨🏽‍🏫

Author and Research professor, Brene Brown, defines “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.”

Curt Thompson, Psychiatrist and renowned author/speaker, defined shame in a few different ways in his book, The Soul of Shame. In brief, he defines shame as the feeling of inadequacy, that there’s something wrong “with me”; I am bad; or I don’t matter. Another feature of shame’s presentations is that of hiding. Whether it is the involution into the silence of our own minds or the literal turning away from someone with a downcast facial expression with eyes lowered, shame leads us to cloak ourselves with invisibility to prevent further intensification of the emotion. For Thompson, Shame is not only a felt sense of negative emotion and thought, but also behavior that seeks to hide from someone’s gaze.

Philosopher and Professor at Talbot School of Theology, Greg Ten Elshof, stated that the experience of shame always involves the sense of diminished social standing – the experience of losing significance in the company of respected others, whether actual or imagined. Additionally, he stated the feeling of diminished social consequence will be less acutely experienced if we can find our way free of the real or imagined gaze of the other - if we can find the sweet relief of isolation. Further, there is a felt sense, a downtick in social standing, or a person now with slightly lesser consequences. In his uniquely intriguing and well-written book, For Shame, Ten Elshof described his own experiences of shame as feeling wrongly situated in the world, as though his very presence was a source of pain, discomfort, and embarrassment.

I sense a theme here 🤔

They speak, “I’m not enough, I think I’m not as valued in your eyes as much anymore, something is wrong with me, I’m the bad in people’s lives, I don’t want people to see me…”

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Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

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The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?”

Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground and from your face, I shall be hidden.”

Cain’s consequence was that the ground had cursed him because it took the blood of his brother he killed in his shame and anger.

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But let’s look at this cautiously; is Cain forced away from God’s presence?

Nope. Not at all.

The verb here in Hebrew communicates a reflexive choice. Meaning, that because Cain is cursed from the face of the ground, he believes his only choice is to hide his face from God’s.

He made a choice, and when I put myself in his shoes, if I had killed a family member because of my shame and anger, because I didn't feel accepted by creator God, if I felt like I was cursed from the ground, I could believe and think the only way to live is to be out of sight from the people I admire and respect the most. 💔

In the beginning, there was goodness. There was an absence of shame, a tendency to run towards and not away, to be completely bare and wholly believe in total acceptance.

Among other things, I believe Moses was helping readers see something; it shows the impact of our emotions and their mishandling when they are unattended to.

I want this story to end here with a few questions:

Do we know what shame looks like in our lives?

Are we aware enough to know how shame is showing up in our lives?

Do we know how often we behave or act in shame with the people we care about the most?

-j