IT'S A SHAME

OR IS IT?

(Above: Exposed by Harry Bliss.)

The last line of my previous column about Penelope Cruz asserted that she escorted me away from shame. I have been thinking about that assertion the last few days. It was a nice last line but did she really? And why did I need an escort?

It is said that guilt is about something you do and shame is about who you are. I have always thought of guilt as wasted energy and is by definition about living in the past instead of each moment that begins the future. Indeed, when I acknowledge Ganesha in my morning litany - I prefer that term to prayers which tethers me to a certain sort of acknowledgement - I ask that “this breath be my first one.” But as a closing to the litany I turn to the natural world and all that is super within it and ask that my life be about “the balance and not the battle.” Turning to Ganesha and the world that is not under the natural one - that has always troubled me as a condescending mixture of fear and geography - but is the unseen sinew of the seen world all about us, is itself about seeking that balance in such a litany that includes my acknowledgement of a God who uses They and Them as Their pronouns as well as reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Serenity one. I also have added Bastet, the Egyptian goddess who manifested as a cat, in order to discuss Finn and Matty.

I plan to walk the Camino for two months next year in April and May. I will be writing these columns from there and taking you along with me. The first time I walked it, I had a deeply spiritual experience that had a surprising result: I ceased being a Christian. Maybe I should say I ceased identifying as one. I became more of a theist. I separated the “a” from “atheist” and began to live in that small, vast, mysterious place between th "a” and the “t” and began to see myself in unseen ways. But to admit this - to let others know I no longer considered myself a Christian - was more difficult than I imagined because of cultural reasons finally more than religious ones. It was harder than letting others know I am gay or HIV positive. I guess I felt ashamed of owning not clinging to the construct that had created shame itself as a foundational concept. Maybe the “a” I took from “atheist” is the one that I still used to spell “shame.” Shame was clinging to me even if it meant being ashamed of letting it go - or trying to. I think its need for human companionship confounds it as much as we are confounded by how to navigate its entitled presence.

“Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then,” said William Faulkner, “you’re not being honest.” When I was a little orphan in our shared Mississippi, my first memory of being ashamed was during a second grade class party. Those parties were usually tied to a holiday and a chosen few mothers would be asked to provide the food and join the party. When it was my turn to be one of the students whose mothers put together such a party, I looked around at all the mothers of the other kids. They looked so young and beautiful to me. They looked glamorous in their youthful fashions. And then there was my gray-haired grandmother who was raising me wearing one of the dresses she had sewn for herself. I have a distinct memory of feeling ashamed that I didn’t have the same kind of “mother” as the rest of the class and then feeling ashamed of feeling ashamed of my grandmother whose sacrificial love saved my life. My initial feeling of shame was already letting me know of its sly double-nature, this charmer who is not charming. Or maybe it was misplaced sorrow for my dead mama as I tried to navigate its own sense of entitlement in my life, but I remember as I tried to eat a cookie and drink the Kool-Aid understanding that shame had pulled up a chair next to me at that party, the unseen guest in my seen life.

I was also ashamed as a child of being poor and the aesthetics of my grandparents’ home. My little brother and sister would have friends over but I can’t remember ever inviting anyone to come visit. I have had shame about money all my life. - or the lack of it. But I’ve always managed to have an aesthetically pleasing place to live. Part of the latter is because of the shame I felt at having anybody over to our house when I was a boy. My next walk on the Camino is a part of a larger change in my life when I become a pilgrim for the next few years. Before I set off, however, I am dispossessing my life of art and furniture, the things in which I have placed such pride. Another William - William Blake - said that “shame is pride’s cloak.” I am also donating closets full of clothing to charity. I am uncloaking myself in order to embark on a different kind of life.

I have shame about about being a drug addict and stumbling at times in my recovery and my stutter that still surfaces and anytime I am late. I had shame this week when I wrote that Penelope Cruz escorted me away from shame when she really hadn’t. Alas a writer sometimes puts more store in a good sentence than the truth. Relying on an escort anyway to rescue you from shame is a false premise just as that sentence sacrificed honesty for the harmless heft of pith. As I begin my pilgrimage in a few months, I am sure shame will try some days to be my escort along the way. But I will insist of its unseen presence that it be seen. Insisting that the unseen be seen is not a rejection but in some way a deeper acceptance. And there’s no shame in that.