For some people the faith-act of praise to God for all things (Eph. 5:20; 1 Thess. 5:18) smashes head on into a mental brick wall. They’re often heard to say, “How can I praise when I don’t feel like it? It seems fake. It doesn’t do anything for me. I just can’t get into it.” But closer examination reveals other emotions behind these feelings.
Often there lies deep underneath an apparent inability to praise an actual resistance to it. This observation should not be taken in any way as a condemnation or suggestion of shame. “There is, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Rather it is simply a statement of fact. Something, unbeknownst to you, is blocking praise, like a plugged-up sink. We don’t have to feel bad about it, but simply try to find out what the block is and attempt by faith to remove it. After all, if all were well with the world, praise and gratitude to God for all His care would be a natural thing, as natural as breathing. That it isn’t suggests something unnatural is stopping the flow.
Stanley Kunitz, recognizing the cry of the world, asks in one of his poems, “How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” In this one, poignant line, Kunitz captures the tragic sorrow of mankind. Any life, given time enough (and even from the start), faces staggering losses that mount up like a feast for the Dead. The heart finds little room for reconciliation with this endless contradiction to all the hopes it once embraced.
Women persistently molested by a parent and then accused of being sluts; men, physically smashed by violent, alcoholic fathers, who now know only the language and theme of abusive power; wives whose every bone has been broken by belligerent husbands securing loyalty at the fist of terror: how shall these reconcile their hearts to their feast of losses? How shall these praise God? For what? Not to mention the “lesser evils” of abandoned children, dead-beat dads, religious abuse in the name of God, children exposed daily to verbal abuse, all following in the wake of evil as prolific as the planet’s population.
If you were abused as a child, you may be one of those to whom the idea of praise smashes into that mental brick wall, and it may be that your numbed response to the idea of praise is covering a rage against all the undeserved shame that has been heaped upon you, a rage whose potency seems so terrifying that you have encased it in elaborate controls for fear it will destroy all in its path. Those controls are so complex, so long held, that you cannot recognize the rage behind them. And it is the rage that resists the praise.
But again you don’t have to beat yourself up with this idea and tell yourself, “I shouldn’t be raging because it’s stopping me praising.” There is a time for everything under the sun, “a time to love and a time to hate”; “a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time for mourning and a time for dancing” (Eccles. 3:8, 3, 4). The important thing is that you find the proper time for rage so that you can use it and not let it use you.
It is quite possible, if you are having difficulty praising, that your time for rage is now. You may never have thought there ever was a proper time for rage. To many Christians the very idea is scandalous. To them, rage means only one thing: sin. But just as the emotion of sex does not mean only one thing (it can be experienced as lust or passion; that is, it can be expressed “in the flesh” or “in the spirit), so also the emotion of rage is not seamless. It can be known “in the flesh”, as a selfish, vindictive, carnal vengeance, or it can be known “in the spirit”, as a gut wrenching cry of fury rising from the resurrecting image of God in you that is casting off the undeserved shame from those abusive assaults upon your God-given humanity. “BE ANGRY, and sin not” (Eph. 4:26).
You will discover that giving attention to rage in yourself is a process of your emerging new Self that is dealing with mounds of false shame dumped on you by abusers who did not know how to deal with their own. You are not a passive waste cloth of living death to be discarded or walked over. It was to His followers that Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39). In Him they found a Self that had a worthy cheek to turn. And this they did until millions of them were martyred for His sake. But without Him there is no redeemed Self to suffer courageously in the body while keeping the Self intact (Matt. 10:28), only a self so diminished with shame that endless pummeling finally snuffs out its dying ember. These sad men and women slink around the earth like humanities unworthies.
It need be no more. If there is rage present at all the injustices done to it as the soul emerges by faith in Christ, that rage may be seen as a proper, not a sinful thing. How we use it determines it’s good or ill.
It will help you to write a history of your abuse, as painful as it may be. You will need to discover how shame was constantly heaped on you when you were an innocent child. Look for those parent-child messages from your youngest days that inflicted shame (whether intentional or not) over things that were perfectly innocent (like childhood inquisitiveness and bursting energy; talking and asking questions; the “terrible two’s” when you were developing a sense of your separate Self; not wanting to share everything; having child-like views and opinions of the world; making mistakes and spilling things; the way you looked; whether you were enough of a boy or enough of a girl; playing with your genitals; the discovery of your first sexual pleasure; feelings of anger). Ask yourself whether these things you did were actually morally wrong or simply the ways of childhood that were merely inconvenient to your parents, or that triggered memories of their own shame—feelings so uncomfortable for them that they shamed you in turn.
Let your mind register, perhaps for the first time, that the shame they inflicted on you was undeserved. It was not a shame that arose from some wrong you had done. If this makes you feel anger at such injustice, feel it, as a justifiable thing.
And then that diabolical horror of shame-dumping: the physical or sexual abuse. At first it might be difficult to muster any feeling about this, except a paralyzed numbness. But write things down. Describe in detail what happened to you (yes, detail). False shame may begin to come over you, as if you were beginning to experience it all over again. You might feel flushed. Your heart may quicken a beat. You’ll want to put the pen down. You might want to run. But you are safe now. There is a growing Self in you, founded in Jesus, which cannot be harmed any more by this abuse. So you begin to write, and as the process continues, you are looking at it, rather than from within it. As you watch this helpless child being beaten or sexually abused, there is enough Self in you now to feel anger and rage rising, as parents, severely shamed themselves, pass on that shame through physical and sexual abuse. The injustice builds, the fury mounts. “How could you do this to an innocent little child!? I was a person, damn it, not a thing! This was your shame, not mine!” You might want to pace, you might want to punch a pillow, or find a place to scream. And as the process mounts you will find yourself crying out the Complaint of the Ages:
And where were You, God!? How could You let all this happen to me? Why didn’t You stop him? Are You powerless? Didn’t You care? I cannot forgive You for this! I hate what You let happen to me! I am furious with You, God! Why!? Why!? Why!? I HATE YOU!
You may be stunned by the words that come out of your mouth. You might fear you have blasphemed against the Holy Spirit. You have never raged against God before. What in the world are you doing?
But notice the change that is coming over you. There is a person present capable of being outraged by what happened. And for the first time your rage has somewhere to go. It is no longer stuck in the Shame’s Void, like a brooding, silent, pragmatic atheism. At least it is rage directed at God; at least it is rage that recognizes His responsibility for the world, even though you don’t like the way you perceive He’s going about it. So, thankfully, your rage is directed at the One Person Who can do something about it.
What may surprise you is how much like yours is the incredible realism the people of the Bible showed over their frustration with God. Where is Your power, where is Your love? (cf. Isa. 63:15). Why do You make people wander from Your ways? Why do You harden people’s hearts, so they don’t fear You? (cf. Isa. 63:17). You are like a deceptive stream (cf. Jer. 15:18). Cursed be the day I was born! (cf. Jer. 20:14). Wake up, God! Why are You asleep? Rouse yourself! Why do You forget our misery? (cf. Ps. 44:23, 24). Why is life given to those who long for death that does not come? (cf. Job 3:20, 21). Why have You made me Your target? (cf. Job 7:20). I want to argue my case with God (cf. Job 13:3). God, You have worn me out! (cf. Job 16:7). Dare anyone say these graphic complaints were not swirling with profound emotions of anger and, in some cases, considering the crises, rage? The astounding thing is that God did not blast these people with fiery judgment. Clearly He would rather have people angry with Him than ignoring Him.
What then takes place in this rage before God? When you raged at God, you began to release a burden of shame to the Lord.
“Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28 NIV).
Few realize what a heavy burden repressed rage is. It saps the strength and makes you old before your time. When you take your rage at God to God, you will discover He will carry even this. Though He will remain silent over your “why” questions and not reveal fully to you, this side of eternity, the reasons for allowing such an unspeakable feast of losses, yet by bringing your rage before God, your heart is beginning to abandon its shame and is gradually being reconciled to its horrendous feast.
How does this happen? There is, first, a profoundly relieving sigh in being able to be truly honest with God; in being able to tell Him how you really felt. You have come out of the denial of your rage, a denial that presupposed the shame was really yours. As you stood up to God in your rage, your Self was emerging, the very Self that God was resurrecting in you. You struggled with God and prevailed (Gen. 32:28). Second, you sense that somehow the power of your rage has diminished in the presence of God. He’s not raging back at you, and thus feeding more shame and rage into you. There is a stillness in the presence of God, a stillness after the storm of your rage, which gradually leads you to accept, and stop denying, what happened to you. And in that quietude you sense some of the burden of rage and shame lifting (cf. Ps. 46:10).
For the fact is, as offensive as this may sound to you at the moment, there is something even more damaging than the abuse that was inflicted upon you, and that is your unresolved rage that has followed it through all the years, poisoning your soul. Now you are facing it with God. And now God is absorbing the sorrow, the pain, the burden of it:
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:29, 30 NIV).
Gradually, the meaning of the Cross sheds light on your abuse and the rage from the feelings of shame. Now you begin to see the death of God’s Son as even more than His sacrifice for the sins of the world and His victory over the forces of evil. God in Christ took the heaped up shame and rage of the world upon Himself. Mankind, unable to endure its own existence, unable (in its own hatred of Self brought upon it by Adam’s sin rolling its shame from one generation to another in abuse) to tolerate the thought of a loving God, turned upon Him in white anger. “He came to His own, and His own people would not accept Him” (John 1:11 REB). The world hated Him (John 15:18) and “plotted to take His life” (John 11:53 NIV).
And at the Cross, God, through Jesus, did not resist this paroxysm of the world’s fury, but handed Himself over to it (Acts 2:23 NIV), because He knew that humanity could not bear up under the destructive force of its own repressed shame and rage. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”; “it was our afflictions he was bearing, our pain he endured” (Isa. 53:4 KJV, REB). “He was despised and rejected by men” “oppressed and afflicted” and “cut off from the world of the living” (Isa. 53:3, 7 NIV; Isa. 53:8 REB) by men who, in the cynicism of their pain, had lost all belief that there could be One truly Good Man abiding in the earth.
The heart and soul of Jesus were crushed (Isa. 53:10 NIV). God the Father, was surely infinitely grieved, as He moved aside to let His Son take the world’s rage over its shame upon Him. The earth’s victims of abuse now became the victimizers of Christ Who in Himself, as our Shame-bearer, carried our rage because it had no where else to go except to implode within the hearts of men and destroy them. Instead it imploded with the heart of Jesus. Crying, “My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), He breathed His last.
And so God meets your rage with His redemptive stillness. “I know. I understand. I have borne it all. I am a victim of shame and abuse. And I carried it to Death, to its End. It is not your shame now, nor your parents’ shame, but Mine.”
The screaming “Why” of your suffering begins to abate. In expressing your rage against God and the cruelties of life you have come to believe in a God Who carried it to the Death, though He did not deserve it. The Gospel unfolds with deeper meaning still. You are not alone. He enters your abuse and feels it all. He replaces the “Why” question with a “Who” answer. The “Who” is Christ Who takes your shame. Your rage has found its place. You surrender it to Him allowing Him to bear it all.
Gradually you see your abusers in a different light. They were shamed too by ones who preceded them, ad infinitum back to Adam. And so Christ, the Second Adam, bore the weight of their shame too.
Perhaps you hear yourself saying, “I don’t really hate you, Heavenly Father. Because of the shame that was dumped on me I hated myself, and I had nowhere to take my Self-hatred but to hate You, too. And You bore it for me, and I’m thankful that You didn’t dump it back on to me. You have given me back my Self.”
And thus your heart, relieved of rage by being relieved of shame, reconciles to its feast of losses…It is set free to Praise.