Bulletin 11.16.25

Oh, we are marching
We are fighters without a cause
'Cause it's easier to be in the crowd
Than cry alone, crying out loud
You got to feel the pain, you got to see the suffering
Got to heed the cause
Oh, it's so heavy
Oh, mama, don't you know it's so heavy?
Lord, it's so heavy
I've got to let a little, let a little go

– Derek Trucks, “It’s So Heavy” (track 7 on the 2013 album, Made Up My Mind by Tedeschi Trucks Band)

Oh yes, I’m well acquainted with the emotion of shame.
But the only thing productive/appropriate/corrective about falling on my face in shame, is that there is a mercy that can scoop me up. It’s not hopeless, you see? There’s a mend-ability. There’s an antidote to shame; there’s a balm for its burn. There’s a bewildering love that banishes shame from within me – there’s a rescue route from its toxic spiral.

The moment that shame is acknowledged, its presence verbalised, its power felt – is the very moment it needs to be neutralised. It cannot fester, it cannot be afforded the loudest, nor the last, say.

And so, to Jacob Elordi’s interesting wish – that ‘people could experience shame a little heavier’, and to Zadie Smith’s fascinating thesis that ‘shame is a kind of productive thing to create change’ - I hear you. I see what you’re getting at. But I can only ever wish people to experience the heaviness of shame if it means that they are more sensitive to the feeling of it being undeservedly lifted off them. That’s where change happens. That’s the medicine.

– Belle Tindall, “We Need a Sense of Shame - But Need Mercy Even More (Shame may be necessary, but only if it can be defeated)” on Seen & Unseen (online magazine; https://www.seenandunseen.com)