Photo by Nagesh Jayaraman

By Diana Gee

No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame. -Ps 25:3

You will increase my honor and comfort me once more. –Ps 71:21

Shame. That dreaded sense of embarrassment mixed with disgust and self-loathing. Brene Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” The popularity of her work seems to indicate that shame is ubiquitous and not restricted to a certain culture or group of people.

Though experienced by all, shame isn’t something we like to talk about especially in Asian communities of faith. Even as I write this I have difficulty expressing my thoughts and experiences of shame and how they have impacted me. I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t give much thought to it, or if it’s because I have yet to fully process my shame. But I can say that it has taken much work to renounce shame and to be (mostly) free from its voice.

Shame has found me in all areas of my life, because I always felt I was different for not following the norms of family, church, and society: I don’t speak Cantonese fluently, I didn’t get married out of university, I gave up my engineering career, I became a pastor. In North American society, individualism and uniqueness is lauded and celebrated. In the Asian church, they can feel isolating. There is no honor given to women who are celibate, childless, and career/calling-focused. Those differences have made it difficult for me to feel like I belong…anywhere. The majority of the time, I can accept that sense of un-belonging as rather natural. This world is not my home. We are all aliens and sojourners. And yet there is that voice that lingers that says: you don’t belong here because you are wrong, you are ill-fitted.

I know this post is supposed to be about honor, but as an Asian woman I cannot talk about honor without also talking about shame. Because shame keeps us from receiving honor given by our Creator and Sovereign King. While shame tells us we are not worthy of love and belonging, honor tells us the complete opposite. Honor says: you are worthy, you are deserving of love and admiration, you are one of us.

Much effort has gone into rejecting the narrative of shame and receiving honor from God, though how I perceive that honor is still in the works. Once I was able to unlink my sense of shame from my sense of guilt, I could hear the message of the gospel more clearly. The doctrine of total depravity was and is necessary in speaking truth to power, but tends to negate the compassion of a God who understands innocent suffering. Grace is undeserved but not all pain is deserved. Christ who endured shame and bore our shame on the cross enables us to feel the welcome and honor of God. It is tempting to treat human admiration, attention and affection as honor from God, but I know that I cannot trust in those markers. Jesus never did.

Instead, I have found that the more I acknowledge my brokenness and inclination for sin, the less I need to hide behind masks of perfection. And the more I see the dignity in others and the sacredness of life, the less I can deny my own inherent sense of worth. And so, the more I can look inward and pay attention to the guilt and glory within, the more I can look upward, unashamedly before my Maker.

Diana Gee is ordained as the Associate Pastor of Faith Community Christian Church in Vancouver, Canada. She is a second-generation, Chinese Canadian, born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She is trained as a structural engineer (B.Sc. in Civil Engineering, University of Alberta) and has worked in consulting for six years. She completed her master’s degree at Regent College (M.Div.) in 2011 and will be starting doctoral studies this fall at Fuller in Spiritual Direction.