Shame

Shame, a recurring word in Pope Francis' speeches. It generally refers to collective shame: shame on the massacres at sea, the tragedy of migrants, the inability to put an end to the war, shame on sexual abuse in the Church. But there is also a private, intimate shame, the shame of the conscience that reproaches itself for sins: a feeling for which we must be grateful, he once said, because it means that we do not accept evil. That shame is «a secret invitation of the soul that needs the Lord to overcome evil» The drama is rather «when you are no longer ashamed of anything» As happens in our time of compulsive display of what was once the intimacy, fulfillment of the prophecy of Saint Paul in the second letter to his friend Timothy (3,2): «Difficult times will come when men will be lovers of themselves».

Yes, because at the root of the absence of shame there is the "disease of self-deification", said Saint Maximus the Confessor, the specialist par excellence of this congenital pathological affection, which is very difficult to cure. Born in a Golan village in the 6th century, Maximus had to deal with the heresies of his time, which like all heresies attempted to reduce the face of Christ and consequently also the face of man. No! Maximus has his tongue torn out and his right hand cut off to affirm the freedom promised by God to man. With his love for him without measure, Christ came to bring man participation in his divine humanity. He allowed himself to be hung on the cross to show us the way to freedom from everything that paralyzes us and which Massimo summarizes in the word philautìa: the immoderate love of oneself that locks one in the prison of egocentrism.

From filautìa, says Massimo, a flood of feelings are generated which are only states of mind frustrated by a missed pleasure: envy, hatred, resentment, slander, denunciation, sadness, discouragement, cowardice, complaint, fanaticism, shame. Yes, shame: but this time not the shame of a guilty conscience! Rather, the shame of dissatisfaction with the image we want to give of ourselves. The shame of not being up to the level of the only human "god" that we would like to be.

On the contrary, “love knows no shame. This is why he is unable to give himself a rule or order to his members. It is natural for love not to be ashamed and to forget its own measure", says Isaac the Syrian, the sweetest, most humble and tender of all the ancient ascetics, born in the seventh century in a village in present-day Qatar. Jesus was not ashamed of being insulted, humiliated, tortured, killed to offer us his freedom as King. This is what we must do. If the chaos of the world and of technology wants to take you outside, resist, go inside yourself, decipher the feelings you feel, cut what holds you prisoner, die for the things you want to live for. Kill the philautìa, because this is the perfection of life, dying a voluntary death every day.

Flamiania Morandi

NP Novembre 2023