Honour and Shame and COVID-19 Realities - Part 2

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this little series on honour-shame and COVID-19 find it here.

In this post today, I want to look at an unusual situation of the reaction of an Emergency Doctor in Australia, who tested positive for COVID-19 and was placed in a quarantine hotel for health workers for 7 days.

She said:

'A fresh sense of shame at ending up here was all I could muster. Healthcare worker infections have been such a focus for colleagues and the media and now suddenly, here I am….

But in my abrupt isolation, my own illness, I was suddenly scared in a way I wasn't while caught up in the constant fight to save others' lives. 

Not because I feared I would not survive COVID-19, but because I am petrified that in the success of our fight, we may well lose the very essence of our reason to live.

Why should she feel ‘shame’?

Because since the time the first shame entered the world in the Garden of Eden, isolation, and separation, and shame, are all infused with the same ‘DNA’. 

As human beings we were not meant to be separated from God or from each other. Nothing was supposed the come between us and our Creator and us as humanity together. When it does, it feels wrong, it feels bad, it feels painful. While it might seem strange that someone feels shame for being in quarantine, it is the same essential condition as being separated out, being unacceptable to ‘normal’ humanity, being rejected, and not being ‘enough’ or ‘up to standard’  (not healthy enough) to be included in community life. It feels like a form of unpleasant consequences/punishment for being ‘deficient’ (not healthy enough). It runs parallel to the sense of being ‘unclean’ and contaminated, so that others want to stay away from you and you are kept away from others.

A sense of shame, often unable to be clearly put into words, runs deep--very deep--in our psyche, and in our sense of identity, of belonging, of inclusion, and of acceptance. Even when we can’t explain it, we feel it.

To ignore this reality, or simply suppress it is a recipe for problems. 

The answer to it however, is not just to turn everything that is shameful into something noble, as the world is trying to do. 

As Christians we need to learn to recognise it, acknowledge it, and address it biblically. 

As Christians we should be the first, not the last to recognise it. We should also be the first not the last to be speaking about it and addressing it…because its only the gospel that frees a person to face their shame and find relief from it. It is only the gospel that frees us to name what is shameful, as shameful in God’s eyes, but at the same time offer freedom from it in Christ - not an absence of shaming from people according to the world’s definitions of what is and is not shameful, but a new ability in Christ to dis-arm the shame and strip it of its power. In Christ the shaming of the world no longer counts as permanently debilitating or destroying, and the shame that does count (the shame of sin) is already accounted for and covered, in Christ.