How to Overcome Shame as a Christian — MacDonald on the Father’s Run
⏱ 15 min read
The thing the shamed soul carries — the one she has not told anyone, the one she has been carrying so long she has almost forgotten it is being carried — is rarely the shame she expects to feel. It is the second shame, the meta-shame, the small ongoing inner voice that says and even now, after all the prayers, you are still carrying it; what is wrong with you that you cannot put it down. The first shame was about the thing. The second shame is about not being free of the first shame yet. The two together have made the inner room very small. You have likely been living in that small room for longer than you have admitted. This essay is for that room. It is not going to add another voice telling you to try harder. It is going to read, slowly, with George MacDonald — the Scottish pastor who, more than any other voice in his century, understood that the Father in the story Jesus told runs — and let the older tradition do the work the inner voice has not been able to do for itself.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal is the slow daily companion for the season this article describes — for the soul whose shame has not yielded to the right number of right prayers, and who is ready, gently, to be met by the older tradition’s quieter answer. For now, read slowly. There is no hurry in what follows. (If the related ground of self-forgiveness is where the inner loop has been heaviest, how to forgive yourself as a Christian — MacDonald on mercy is the sister-piece to this one and walks the same ground from a slightly different angle; if the shame has come from inside a marriage where the man in the next room is not the one for difficult conversations, a Christian marriage book for men who don’t read marriage books is the slow companion; and if the shame has been carrying along with it a low ongoing anxiety the modern devotional has not reached, Christian devotionals on anxiety that don’t pretend it goes away is the daily reading for that ground.)
George MacDonald grew up in a Scottish Calvinism that had inherited a picture of God so severe that the soul, after sinning, was understood to be cast out from the Father’s presence until the appropriate repentance had been performed. MacDonald spent his adult life — across thousands of pages of fiction, poetry, and sermons — gently undoing that picture. Not by softening sin. Not by making the moral seriousness of the Christian life smaller. By restoring the picture of the Father that Jesus actually gave in Luke 15. The Father who sees the returning child while he is yet a great way off. The Father who runs. The Father who, in MacDonald’s reading, was never the figure standing at the end of the road with arms folded. The Father was the One whose love had been straining forward the whole time the child had been walking back. The Father moves first. The Father moves toward. The Father runs.
That is the shape underneath everything MacDonald wrote about how to overcome shame in the Christian life. The shame ends not because the soul finally produces enough self-loathing to balance the books. The shame ends because the soul, lifting its head once, catches sight of the Father — who has been running. The running undoes the shame from outside the shame’s own logic. The shame had been waiting for a judgement. The Father comes with a kiss.
The first passage: holiness is just another name for happiness
“Do all God’s children understand this? that holiness is just another name, the true name, that God gives for happiness; that it is indeed unutterable blessedness to know that God does make us holy, that our holiness is in Christ, that Christ’s Holy Spirit is within us. There is nothing so attractive as joy: have believers understood it that this is the joy of the Lord — to be holy? Or is not the idea of strain, and sacrifice, and sighing, of difficulty and distance so prominent, that the thought of being holy has hardly ever made the heart glad?”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Vol. II
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly. The sentence is long because MacDonald is taking apart an inherited reflex — the reflex that hears the word holy and stiffens, that hears being made holy and prepares for more effort, that hears sanctification and assumes the work will be done by means of strain.
Notice what MacDonald does with the vocabulary. He insists that holiness, in God’s own usage, is the true name for happiness. Not the bright surface happiness of comfort. The deeper happiness of being at home in the One you were made for. Holiness and happiness, in MacDonald’s reading, name the same condition from two different angles. The angle from God’s side is holy. The angle from the soul’s side is happy. The two are one gift.
This is the first thing he does for the shamed soul. He breaks the equation that has been running the shame for years. The equation went: I am unholy. The Father is holy. Therefore the distance. MacDonald gently dismantles the equation. The Father, in his reading, does not stand at a distance protecting His holiness from the soul’s unholiness. The Father is making the soul holy by closing the distance — by bringing the soul into Christ, by giving the Spirit, by making the holiness His gift rather than the soul’s task. The holiness is in Christ. The Spirit is within us. The making-holy is happening to the soul, not being demanded from it. The shame had been operating on a misunderstanding of where the holiness lives. The holiness lives in Christ, and the soul receives it by being brought in. The shame’s logic has been one room behind the gospel’s logic the whole time.
What does this mean for how to overcome shame as a Christian?
It means the shame has been keeping score on a ledger the Father does not keep. The Father is not measuring the distance between the soul’s unholiness and His holiness and adjusting His posture accordingly. The Father has already brought the soul, in Christ, into the holiness — and the experience of the holiness, from the soul’s side, is happiness. The shame has been treating happiness as something that will be available once the holiness is achieved. MacDonald gently reverses the order. The happiness is available now, because the holiness is given now, because the soul is in Christ now. The shame’s not yet is operating on a different timeline than the Father’s already.
For the woman who has been carrying shame for years, this is the first quiet correction. You are not waiting at the bottom of a ladder. The ladder is the wrong metaphor. You are already in Christ. The holiness is already given. The slow work is the receiving of it — and the receiving is, in MacDonald’s reading, the closest thing the soul knows to joy. The shame had been holding the joy off, because the shame believed the joy had to be earned. MacDonald is saying that the joy is the form the holiness takes in a soul that has stopped trying to earn it. The shame’s whole project has been the project of earning what was always given. The slow undoing of the shame is the slow giving-up of the project.
The second passage: the Father’s love that also means the hard things
“There is not a loss or sorrow, not a pain or care, not a temptation or trial, but Thy love also means it, and makes it, to be a help in working out the holiness of Thy people. Through each Thou drawest to Thyself, that they may taste how, in accepting Thy Will of Love, there is blessing and deliverance.”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Vol. II
Read it twice. The passage is dense, and the work it does on the shamed soul is exact.
MacDonald is saying something the modern Christian rarely lets herself believe about her own failures. Thy love also means it. The hard thing in your life — including, MacDonald would gently insist, the thing you have been ashamed of for months or years — is not standing outside the love of the Father. It is held inside it. Not because the Father authored the sin. He did not. But because the Father is large enough, and tender enough, and skilled enough at His own work, that He will use the very thing the shame has been keeping you small inside of — as one of the helps in the slow making of you into the kind of person you are meant to be.
This is the part most shamed women, in the privacy of their own self-condemnation, will not allow themselves to consider. They believe God has forgiven the thing. They cannot quite believe that He is using the thing. They picture the thing as something that has set them back, slowed the project, made the Father sad, required Him to start over with them. MacDonald is gently insisting that this picture is not what the Father is doing. The Father is folding the thing into the slow work of holiness. The thing is not the interruption of the project. The thing is, in His hands, one of the helps.
Through each Thou drawest to Thyself. Hold that line. Hold it longer than feels comfortable. The very thing the shame has been telling you pushed Him away is the very thing He is using to draw you toward Himself. The shame’s whole story — this is the thing that puts a distance between me and Him — is reversed. The Father’s story is the opposite. This is the thing through which I am drawing the child closer. The shame and the Father are reading the same event differently. The shame is reading it as evidence of separation. The Father is reading it as the doorway of drawing-toward.
If you can let this picture begin to settle, the engine of shame loses its fuel. Shame runs on the belief that the thing has done damage that must now be repaired by your continued smallness. MacDonald removes the foundation of that belief. The Father does not need your smallness to repair the damage. The Father is already at work, in love, weaving the thing into the slow drawing of you closer to Himself. The thing is not what is separating you. The thing is the doorway He is using.
This is, more than any other line MacDonald wrote, what he meant by the Father who runs. The Father is not running with a list. The Father is running because the running is His posture toward the returning child — this child, the one carrying this particular thing, the one who has been ashamed for this particular length of time. The running predates the child’s getting it right. The running is the unilateral motion of love. The shame had been picturing the Father as the One standing still. MacDonald is restoring the picture Jesus actually gave. The Father moves first. The Father moves toward. The Father runs.
(If the related work of laying down self-punishment after the failure is the inner ground that needs the slower companion, how to forgive yourself as a Christian — MacDonald on mercy walks the same Father into the inner-loop room; and the sibling article how to forgive someone who hurt you — De Sales on hard forgiveness walks the related work toward another.)
A note about the journal
If the small daily practice of letting the Father run is the work you want to walk into, the Christian Healing Journal is built around precisely this. One short page each evening, room for the honest sentence — today the shame surfaced at four in the afternoon and I almost did not bring it to Him — and a verse anchored in the Father’s posture of drawing-toward rather than pushing-away. The journal is not the cure for the shame. He is. The journal is the small daily place the soul keeps showing up to let itself be met.
The somatic that goes with shame
Pause here.
Shame lives in the body more than the modern Christian usually lets herself notice. There is a particular held quality the shamed body carries — a small ongoing forward curl of the shoulders, a slight tucking of the chin, a quiet inwardness in the chest that has been hiding without conscious intent. The body has been making itself smaller in response to a story the mind has been telling itself for years. The body is not the problem. The body has been faithful to the story. The slow undoing of the shame is, in part, the slow letting of the body know that the story has changed.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet on the floor. Let the hands rest in your lap, palms up — open, not clenched. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop by a fraction, and let the chest rise very slightly — not by trying to expand it, but by ceasing the small ongoing curl that has been pulling it inward. Take a second slow inhale. On the exhale, let one phrase rest in the chest: the Father is running. Take a third slow inhale, slower than the others. On the exhale, let the chin lift by a small fraction — not by force, but by the easing of whatever small downward tilt has been the body’s way of carrying the shame.
Stay with the open palms and the slightly lifted chin for sixty seconds, by a clock if you need to. Then continue reading. The single minute is the practice. The body that has been small for years will not unfold under argument. The body unfolds, slowly, under the picture of a Father who runs. That picture has to be sat with, in the chest, until the chest knows it is true at the level of the body, not only at the level of the page.
The third passage: the rest of a faith that trusts Thee for all
“In the rest of a faith that trusts Thee for all, in the power of a surrender that would have no will but Thine, in a love that would lose itself to be wholly Thine, Blessed Jesus, we do abide in Thee.”
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons Vol. II
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the small sentence MacDonald would have you carry into the week. It is the practical posture of overcoming shame, named in three movements.
The rest of a faith that trusts Thee for all. The first movement is rest — not striving. Faith, in MacDonald, is not the production of more certainty about your own worthiness. It is the slow trust that He has the whole thing, including the thing the shame has been re-running. The rest is the small daily lowering of the part of you that has been trying to manage the thing on its own behalf. You can stop managing it. He has it.
The power of a surrender that would have no will but Thine. The second movement is surrender — including the surrender of the small ongoing self-punishment the shame has been administering. The will that wants to keep punishing the self is also a will, and MacDonald is gently asking you to surrender that will too, to the One whose will toward you has been mercy from the beginning. You are not asked to manufacture peace with yourself. You are asked to lay down the punishment.
A love that would lose itself to be wholly Thine. The third movement is love — and the love is the part that finally undoes the shame, because the soul that has begun, even in small ways, to love the Father back is the soul that can no longer sustain the energy of self-condemnation. The condemnation has been a substitute for love — a small ongoing way of paying attention to the self, by means of smallness, instead of paying attention to the Father, by means of love. The shift from self-condemnation to love-of-the-Father is the shift MacDonald is describing. The condemnation does not need to be argued out of you. It needs to be replaced.
This is what the slow overcoming of shame finally is, in MacDonald’s account. Not a moment of granting yourself a pardon. Not the production of a new feeling of being clear. The slow daily replacement of the energy of self-smallness with the energy of love-of-the-Father — until one morning, months from now, you notice that the thing has surfaced and the old loop did not start, because the love that lost itself to be wholly His has finally crowded out the part of you that was keeping the shame going.
There is one more line of MacDonald’s worth carrying alongside this. From Diary of an Old Soul:
“Thou who inspirest prayer, then bend’st thine ear; It, crying with love’s grand respect to hear!”
— George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul
The line names the small mechanism the shamed soul rarely notices. The very prayer the shamed soul has been trying to muster — the prayer she has felt unworthy to bring — was inspired by Him in the first place. The Father has been the One putting the longing-to-pray into the heart that has been ashamed of even wanting to pray. The whole movement is His. The soul’s whole part is to let the movement complete itself by speaking what He has already inspired. The shame had been blocking the speaking. MacDonald is gently pointing out that the speaking was His idea before it was yours.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from MacDonald into this week, take the one from the second passage. Through each Thou drawest to Thyself. Carry it on a small piece of paper. Put it inside your journal. The thing the shame has been telling you pushed Him away is the very thing He is using to draw you toward Himself. The Father is running. The doorway has been there the whole time. The shame’s old story is one room behind the Father’s actual posture, and the slow daily walk into the room He has been holding open will be, over months, the way the shame quietly stops having a place to live.
Your sister-articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster are how to overcome bitterness — Murray on the root that defiles and how to forgive someone who hurt you — De Sales on hard forgiveness. Read the three together if you can; they were written across different centuries but they are speaking, in their different vocabularies, about the same Father who runs.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short page that lets the thing be brought without performance, and a verse anchored in the Father’s posture of drawing-toward — the small daily home for the soul slowly learning how to overcome shame by being met, again, by the One who has been running the whole time.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries MacDonald’s slow vocabulary — holiness as the true name for happiness, the love that also means the hard things, the rest of a faith that trusts Thee for all — into a daily companion built for the woman whose shame has been carried in private for too long, and who is ready, at last, to lift her head and see the Father running.
