TOOK YOU UP TO MIDNIGHT MASS, LEFT YOU IN THE LURCH: I realize that this whole conversation about shame might be better if I suggested an actual occasion on which I’d acted wrongly due to shame, as vs. guilt. The obvious one for me is that I don’t go to Confession out of shame. I do not recommend this. I went on Saturday and it was amazingly awesome, as (almost) always. When I don’t go, I get in this awful downward spiral of “it doesn’t matter anyway, what’s the worst thing I can do?” It’s… kind of frightening, honestly, how far past your own limits you can go before the humiliation of Confession is better than the fetid crawlspace in which you’re living.

Obviously, this is a failure of both guilt and shame! But the thing that stops me from coming back up to the surface is shame, and the thing that forces me to come back anyway is guilt.

I really, deeply don’t believe that ethics are the sum and summit of the Christian life. If I had to pick something, I think I’d pick the Eucharist: the consummation of God’s love affair with us.

And I think this rejection of ethics-uber-alles is relevant in two ways: 1) Shame is community property–the domain of ethics, the domain of humans negotiating life with humans rather than the domain of humans pouring themselves out in the humiliating, confusing, transcendent love of God; and yet 2) Deus Caritas Est is right that love of others is sturdiest when it’s based on the Eucharist. I can’t count the times I’ve finally surrendered and confessed because I had to counsel at the pregnancy center that night. Love beyond ethics strengthens ethics.

And I think that’s because the Mass, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, is the model of how to make one’s life an icon of love. “Charity” gets a bad rep for condescension. I think for the people for whom it is genuinely the Wedding Feast–the people who can live at all hours within the Mass–there’s no condescension. I would rather think about how to live that way than think about how to properly shame one another….