The Gift of Shame: A Theology of Receiving

Jazz, Shame, and Being With — Essay #4

⚠️ Reader’s Note / Trauma Content Advisory

This essay includes discussion of complex trauma, PTSD, body-focused therapy, and childhood emotional neglect.

If such material may be activating, please pause or read with care.

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“The blues are not sung in order to glamorize evil; they are sung to tell the truth.”

— James Cone

Dear friends,

For most of my life, I thought I understood shame.

When parishioners came to my office carrying it, I’d reach for the theological script: confession, absolution, grace. I could lecture on the Roman Empire’s honor-shame culture, quote Paul on status and belonging, even diagram the gendered choreography of public honor and domestic modesty. I knew the data cold.

What I didn’t know was that I was Exhibit A. My whole framework ran on hidden math: more honor = less shame; more shame = less lovable. It was theology written in the language of accounting.

I am a priest. A scholar. Surely I understood.

I was wrong.

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A Note on What Follows

Five movements. One argument: shame is gift, not verdict. The structure builds—personal story becomes biblical exegesis becomes systematic theology becomes jazz ethics. Navigate directly to any section, or read straight through. Either way, pour the coffee.

- Movement I: The Illusion Cracks

- Movement II: The Laboratory of My Nervous System

- Movement III: Reading Genesis with New Eyes

- Movement IV: Rightly Ordered Shame—The Gift

- Movement V: A Jazz Theology of Shame

- Coda: The Ridgeline as Altar

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Movement I: The Illusion Cracks

Election Day, 2024

The illusion cracked on Election Day 2024. The amyloidosis diagnosis that morning would have been enough, but it arrived with a chorus of aftershocks: a body suddenly unreliable; MAGA Christianism’s triumph in the public square; my Louisiana family fracturing along that same fault line; and a marriage quietly straining under the weight of my despair. My daughter Emilie and her husband Logan—both in medical school—pressed Outlive into my hands. Peter Attia’s “centenary decathlon” gave me what every anxious priest-researcher craves: a protocol to follow, data to master, something to control.¹

Then came Chapter 17: “Work in Progress — The High Price of Ignoring Emotional Health.”²

Attia wrote, “Men are socialized to conceal their depression. Instead, it manifests as irritability, anger, or compulsive overwork.”

I froze. That was me: not depressed so much as hollowed out by hyper-productivity. Whole weeks when the lists multiplied faster than I could cross them off. It wasn’t fatigue I feared—it was the slow erosion of the one gift I’d always trusted: the non-reactive presence that had helped me soar as submariner, high-tech president, and priest.

I began tracking not just mileage but heart-rate variability and sleep regularity—the quiet metrics of grace’s embodiment, not mastery.

The Therapist Who Named the Pattern

My wife urged me to see Chris Charleton, a Fulbright scholar and star athlete whose biography, blessedly, did not promise Christian counseling.³ I’d had enough of platitudes and proof-texts, enough of empathy that confused tears with healing. Chris spoke Scripture the way my best Duke professors did—through bone and breath rather than quotation marks.

By then I had read widely on PTSD and cognitive behavioral therapy and had been diagnosed with PTSD seven years earlier.⁴ My coping style was academic: when threatened, research harder. In our first session I laid out my catalogue of traumas and the long list of books I’d read on trauma and recovery. Chris listened—really listened—then smiled.

“I see what you’re doing,” he said. “The hyper-competent research mode—that’s the problem.”

I felt exposed. He’d clocked me in forty minutes. At last I’d found my Gandalf.

Three sessions later, mid-sentence, connecting Bradshaw’s family-systems theory⁵ to honor-shame networks in Romans, he interrupted again.

“You’re doing it right now.”
“Doing what?”
“Building safety out of mastery.”

He’d unmasked me in ten words. He leaned forward. “It’s brilliant, actually. You’ve built an entire vocational identity around being the guy who can synthesize everything, hold all the complexity, carry everyone else’s emotional labor. That’s not health. That’s survival strategy.”

I nodded. Then went home and built a Zettelkasten—yes, a German cross-referencing note system, because of course I did. If you don’t know what a Zettelkasten is, congratulations: you’re probably better adjusted than I am.⁶ Two hundred atomic notes later, Chris would make me put the research down and locate Beast in my body.⁷

Turns out you can’t Zettelkasten your way out of shame.

But you can start to trace its movement—the way it interrupts joy, the way it protects connection even as it hurts. That realization would rewrite everything: my reading of Genesis, my theology of incarnation, my understanding of politics and priesthood alike.

Affect Is Not Emotion

What was this thing that could hijack my joy? That could fill my life with thousands of acquaintances but leave me with so few close friends? What was shame, really?

Chris pointed me toward John Bradshaw’s work on toxic shame,⁸ and from there I found Donald Nathanson—the interpreter of Silvan Tomkins who finally made affect theory readable. Nathanson gave me language for what my body already knew.

Here’s the headline: affects are not emotions. And they’re not optional. They’re pre-cognitive reflexes—biological firmware that fires before the brain has time to tell a story. Before words. Before willpower.

Tomkins identified nine of them, hard-wired at birth: interest–excitement, enjoyment–joy, surprise–startle, distress–anguish, anger–rage, fear–terror, disgust, dissmell, and shame–humiliation.⁹ Nathanson calls them “biologically primitive, brief facial-visceral responses—innate signals of connection and rupture.” They’re urgent, contagious, analogical, and generalizable—alarms your body sets for you that ripple through the system long before the thinking brain shows up.

Fear fires when you sense danger. Disgust fires when you meet poison. Anger fires when something blocks your path. Stimulus → affect → action. Simple. The body moves before the mind can edit.

But shame is different.

It’s the only affect whose job is to interrupt the others—especially the good ones, interest and joy. It doesn’t protect you from danger; it protects you from disconnection.

Picture it: an infant meets her caregiver’s eyes, face alive with interest and delight—their mutual gaze a kind of duet, two nervous systems improvising in time. This synchronized dance of gaze, voice, and gesture is what developmental psychologists call attunement—the dynamic mutual regulation where one nervous system steadies and shapes another. Think of a jazz sextet tuning before the set: every instrument adjusting to the piano’s A440 (the standard reference pitch), the bass player tweaking his tuning pegs, the horn players warming their embouchures and listening for that sweet spot where their pitch locks into the ensemble. Even mid-chart, a good trombone player will adjust his slide position if he hears himself drifting sharp or flat—not because someone told him to, but because his ear caught the dissonance before his brain could name it. That’s attunement: constant, unconscious calibration to stay in sync.

Then the rhythm stumbles. The caregiver’s expression falters—too tired, too distant, too full of other music. In that instant, the infant’s body registers the break: the joy that had been flowing outward suddenly stops. Shame fires—interrupting interest and joy to signal that attunement has been disrupted. The infant’s eyes drop, head turns aside, shoulders soften—the physical sequence Nathanson calls the first shame gesture. It’s the body’s way of saying, Something just broke between us. A beat later, the infant acts: a cry, a reach, an urgent attempt to draw the other back into rhythm. That’s shame doing exactly what it’s designed to do—not punishing joy, but protecting communion by calling both partners to reconnect.

That same signal matures in adults: the flush that stops a man mid-sentence when his words wound the room. Nathanson calls it nature’s social correction—the affect that saves us from isolation. On the savannah, he reminds us, those without friends starved first. Shame kept the tribe together; it still does.

Nathanson’s genius was naming this: shame is the affect of communion—not communion’s feeling, but its guardian. Fear alerts us to predators, disgust to poison. Shame signals broken relationship. It’s the body’s smoke alarm for love: attunement disrupted, repair required.

That’s why shame demands awareness. A gazelle can feel fear without knowing it’s a gazelle. But shame requires a self who knows it’s being seen. It’s the most social of all the affects, because it only exists in the presence of another.

Which means shame isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the feature that proves design. To feel shame is to be capable of being-with—built for communion, equipped to recognize when it falters. When the rhythm of connection breaks, shame signals: Return toward repair.

Emotions, by contrast, are stories we tell about affects after the fact—affect plus memory plus meaning. Here’s the crucial difference: affects are reflexes, not responses. When you touch a hot stove, your hand jerks back before you think “that’s hot.” The pain signal fired, your arm moved, and only then did your brain catch up with the narrative: “I burned myself on the stove because I wasn’t paying attention.” The reflex happened in the spinal cord; the story happened in the cortex. Affects work the same way. The shame affect fires in two-tenths of a second—face flush, eyes drop, shoulders curl—before the thinking brain can construct an explanation. The emotion is what we build afterward: “I feel guilty about cheating on my diet” is really just the brain’s essay on a two-second flash of shame, spliced with memory and a cultural script about self-control. The affect fired first. The story came later.

What I Thought Shame Meant

For years I thought shame said, I am defective. A moral verdict. A permanent stain on the honor ledger. I was fluent in that theology of deficits.

Guilt says, I did something bad.

Embarrassment says, I look foolish.

But shame, I believed, said, I am bad.

Nathanson turned that whole structure upside down. Shame doesn’t declare identity; it announces disconnection. Something went wrong in the field between us. Repair it.

That’s why my honor-shame framework failed me. I’d treated shame as the opposite of honor, a measure of worth. But shame isn’t about worth; it’s about relationship. It’s not an ontological downgrade; it’s an invitation. A biological summons back toward communion.

Which means—here’s the theological kicker—if shame is hard-wired, it’s part of creation’s goodness. The capacity for shame isn’t proof of the Fall; it’s proof of design. It’s the nervous system’s way of echoing Genesis: It’s not good for the human to be alone. Shame isn’t punishment. It’s the first call to be-with.

When Chris told me I’d been living in chronic shame activation—that my hyper-competence was a strategy to manage that alarm—I thought I understood. I could cite Nathanson, cross-reference Bradshaw, build the system.

But knowing is not feeling. My brain could explain the music, but my body had never danced to it.

Let me show you what I mean. Before I found Nathanson, before I had language for affects—I was already in the laboratory.

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Movement II: The Laboratory of My Nervous System

Wegmans Parking Lot

I parked my dark grey Honda Ridgeline outside Wegmans after a blood draw, light-headed from fasting. The Ridgeline smelled of coffee—leftover from the morning drive—and the sharp antiseptic from the hospital lab. I balanced my iPad on the steering wheel and kept reading John Bradshaw on liberating the inner child.

His description of the infant’s need for mirroring—someone to look back, smile, and say You are—hit like a pulse through my chest. Then memory opened. I was the fourth son. My mother had hoped for a girl. Bradshaw suggests that a parent’s unspoken wish—I wish you were someone else—seeps into the infant’s world like weather. Parents rarely intend it; fatigue and grief leak through touch, and infants, with their radar for attention, absorb it all. The image stayed with me: the infant as a tiny reservoir for emotions too heavy for grown bodies to carry.

When I came, my parents hired a maid, Marie, to manage what they could not face. She was a Black woman from across the tracks in Baton Rouge, a world divided by heat, labor, and hierarchy. My brothers told me later she became my primary caregiver. She had a son of her own, Gary, born just before me, whom she left each morning to come hold me. I picture her now—hands smelling of starch and talc, rocking a white infant while her own child waited at home. What did she feel as she looked into my face? Tenderness? Resentment? Sorrow? Whatever she felt, I received it through her arms. Love mixed with loss—that was my first language.

Bradshaw says the infant doesn’t yet distinguish self from other; the caregiver’s emotion becomes the infant’s world. When that emotion carries unacknowledged sorrow or divided attention, the infant’s body reads it as rupture—not as information about the caregiver but as disconnection itself. This is what Nathanson means by shame as the affect of communion—the biological alarm that sounds when mutual gaze cannot fully land.

The tragedy is not that Marie failed me. The tragedy is that I learned communion from someone whose own communion had been broken by the world that hired her.

It’s not that my parents didn’t love me. They did. But their generation had been taught that children were to be seen and not heard. Dr. Spock’s mid-century gospel of parenting—his 1946 Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care—offered rules but not relationship: schedules, feeding charts, theories about independence that quietly discouraged tenderness. They followed what their world believed was good parenting: order, civility, discipline. Within that framework they were conscientious, even admirable.

Yet it left little room for curiosity. They were not animated by a desire to see the world as I saw it or to be surprised by my mind. They were content to let others meet my needs. My father’s faith, shaped by a stoic gospel of duty and honor, prized provision over presence. I imitated him perfectly; the same creed that made him admirable made me absent. My mother’s conversations were about family logistics, not imagination. They were good, dutiful people who believed duty and love were the same thing. And yet the result was a quiet absence—love as obligation, tenderness delegated the way other families delegate chores. It left me longing for recognition of who I was, not merely that I was.

Bradshaw’s words and the hum of parked cars blended until I felt the old ache rising—a hunger for validation, for the sentence I delight in you. I closed the iPad, tilted my truck seat back, and dozed off. It was not sleep so much as regression; my body folding into the memory of being two months old and alone.

Therapeutic Integration and Body Memory

That kitchen stayed with me—the sensory grammar of lament as praise, the blues as first theology. Later, in therapy, Chris Charleton would call this the zero-to-two-month wound.¹⁰ He believes my body still carries traces of those weeks—the skin and subcortical circuits that learned before language what distance feels like. That is why, in adult life, the faintest hint of disconnection can flood me with panic. Neuroscience calls it implicit memory; theology calls it original exile. The infant who could not find a steady face still lives inside me, scanning for one.

Charleton calls this abandonment terror—the amygdala firing without words. Sitting there in my truck, I realized that my lifelong vigilance—the need to fix, to prove, to anticipate every possible rupture—is the grown man’s version of the infant’s cry.

I cried in that parking lot. Not the dignified tears of a priest processing grief, but the body-wracking sobs of someone whose two-month-old self finally found permission to weep.

It was the sobbing, hurting child from The Factory Never Stops, still laboring to earn safety through perfection. Every word I’ve written, every project, every argument for justice—each one a reach toward the gaze that never steadied on me.

Charleton and a physical therapist began to notice what words could not: the way my shoulders pitched unevenly, how my breath shortened when someone spoke to me from my left side, how my pulse steadied if a calm hand rested on my arm while we talked. They were reading the scripture written in my posture. The body, it turns out, keeps the score because it remembers what the mind cannot narrate.¹¹

Charleton would later explain what happened: my body had been telling the story for forty years. Heart rate. Breath. The way my shoulders torqued left when someone spoke too close. The body was keeping the minutes of a meeting my mind never attended. When he and the PT worked on my thoracic fascia, a sound escaped my throat I didn’t recognize—half sigh, half moan—the audible release of memory. They smiled, unstartled.

“There it is,” he said. “That’s what two months old sounds like when it finally gets to finish its sentence.”

I could feel my mother’s weariness moving through my breath—her unspoken wish finishing its sentence through my ribs. The body remembers what the family never said, and Christ remembers with it. In Susan Eastman’s language, memory is always participatory; what lives unspoken in one becomes the air another must breathe.¹²

That wound became a strategy. The infant who couldn’t secure steady attention learned to survive by performing steadiness—to become, in miniature, his own source of regulation. The body mistook vigilance for virtue, excellence for safety. What Paul would later call “pressing on toward what is excellent” (Phil 4:8–9) was meant as a practice of communion, a rhythm of shared joy; I turned it into insulation—a creed of self-sufficiency masquerading as devotion.¹³

I pursued excellence as a way to ensure I’d never need to draw near at all. The goal wasn’t excellence; the goal was never needing anyone close enough to risk that gaze faltering again. Douglas Campbell and Sam Wells might say I converted participation into performance, mistaking the Trinitarian grammar of with for the solitary grammar of for.¹⁴ Charleton named this my anti-dependence, a refusal to be vulnerable. Instead of the normal developmental path—dependence maturing into independence, then into the mutual interdependence of friendship—I took a detour that could never reach that destination. I became fiercely anti-dependent. Only recently would I see that the gospel’s excellence is not mastery but music: the disciplined ease of belonging that lets the ensemble keep time together.

Donald Nathanson—the psychiatrist who made affect theory readable—gave me the first vocabulary that didn’t require me to repent of having a body. Shame, he insists, is not pathology but affect—the body’s alarm firing before theology can turn it into original sin. In his framework, my anti-dependence was Attack-Other disguised as vocation—using intellectual performance to avoid the vulnerability of needing connection.

Nathanson maps four universal responses to unbearable shame—what he calls the Compass of Shame. Withdrawal: hiding, isolation, pulling inward. Attack-Self: turning the signal inward into self-contempt or depression. Avoidance: numbing through distraction, addiction, compulsive behaviors. Attack-Other: weaponizing shame as rage directed outward, making others feel the exposure you can’t tolerate. These aren’t pathological affects—they’re defensive maneuvers against shame the nervous system can’t metabolize.

The “Data” persona Chris identified—that emotionally detached, hyper-rational rogue controlling child I explored in Essay 2? That’s Attack-Other disguised as prophetic zeal—intellectual performance to avoid vulnerability.

Yet even in that naming, there was mercy. If love’s first face was divided, perhaps God’s face has never turned away. Perhaps grace is the gaze that remains when every human look falters—the steady rhythm beneath all our broken time signatures.

This is what Samuel Wells means by being-with: God’s primary posture toward creation is presence, not intervention. “Being-with” names the pattern of incarnation—God not solving problems from outside but entering fully into our condition, staying present through suffering, making divine life available precisely in the places where control fails. It’s companionship not rescue, communion not transaction. Everything in this essay follows from that framework.¹⁵

Wells’s theology gave me permission to stop fixing. He insists that the heart of the gospel is not substitution but solidarity—Christ not as rescuer from flesh but companion within it. God-with-us means exactly that: not above, not against, but with.

For someone like me, whose earliest experience of love was divided attention, that sentence is more than doctrine; it is medicine. It means the presence I craved was never withdrawn; I had simply never learned how to receive it. That recognition would follow me the next week—in the sea at Cancún, in the fog of San Francisco—all of it whispering the same truth: You were never meant to earn what was already given.

Marie and the Blues

I often think now of Marie in our kitchen. At six-foot-one, dressed in her white uniform, she filled our house with both strength and mercy. While my mother finished her degree at LSU, Marie kept our home breathing—red beans and rice simmering on the stove, the air thick with garlic and love. And she sang. Her voice rolled through the kitchen window and down the hallway, the sound of someone who understood that lament could keep a home alive. She never called it theology, but that’s what it was: the Word made music in a woman’s body that refused to stop singing.

What Marie offered was reception—the only thing that actually metabolizes shame instead of weaponizing it. When I’d break something or forget an instruction, she’d see my face flush, watch me start to hide or make excuses. She never shamed me for feeling shame. She’d just be there. Being-with. No fix-it energy, no “you shouldn’t feel that way,” no theological platitudes about God’s love making everything better. Just presence. Decades later, I’d discover Donald Nathanson’s research showing shame as pre-cognitive affect, Charles Limb’s work on improvisation and flow states, Sam Wells’ incarnational theology of Being-with. But Marie taught me all of it first, in a language my body understood before my mind had vocabulary. Her songs were her theological grammar. The kitchen was her cathedral. And shame wasn’t the enemy to be eliminated but the invitation back into communion.

I did not yet know it, but her voice was the first sermon I ever heard on grace.

Finding the Grammar

Therapy began to give language to what my body already knew. Chris Charleton helped me see that the wound I met in the Wegmans parking lot wasn’t moral or intellectual—it was physiological. Even when I don’t consciously feel panic, something in me still registers the threat of disconnection. My “Data” persona—the hypercompetent, hyper-independent part—muted that terror by refusing dependence on anyone. Yet beneath his control, the amygdala still fires, replaying what my infant body once experienced as annihilation. In Charleton’s words, “Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do—it’s just working with the wrong century of data.”

The task now is to update that data: to teach the body that the threat has passed, that love no longer requires vigilance. John Bradshaw gave me the doorway. He taught that shame is not guilt but a rupture in attachment—the felt sense that connection itself has failed. That insight rearranged everything. It redefined sin, holiness, and even vocation. If shame is rupture, then what we call salvation must name reunion—not a fix, not deliverance from peril, but participation in the divine life itself. In Wells’s grammar, salvation is being-with—grace enacted as presence rather than as rescue. Bradshaw’s psychology had quietly prepared the soil for that theology.

Donald Nathanson provided the compass. His mapping of the four shame responses—withdrawal, attack-self, attack-other, and avoidance—was like watching my emotional choreography in slow motion. Charleton’s clinical vocabulary converged, almost poetically, with the theological one I learned from Sam Wells. Charleton spoke of co-regulation—the way one nervous system steadies another through attuned presence. Wells calls that being-with. Both describe the same miracle: safety transmitted through nearness. In one language it’s polyvagal; in the other it’s incarnational. Either way, it’s the antidote to shame.

Over months of therapy and prayer, I began to understand that spiritual formation is not moral improvement but nervous-system retraining. Communities of character do the work, certainly, but the work consists of enabling the Spirit to hum grace into our ear so often that we embody the tune.¹⁶ The practices of faith—confession, breath prayer, silence, Eucharist—are ways of re-entraining the body to feel safe in connection. They are liturgies of regulation. When the heart rate slows, when the breath deepens, when the eyes lift to meet another’s gaze, theology becomes embodied truth. Grace is no longer a concept; it’s a rhythm.

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Movement III: Reading Genesis with New Eyes

Before we open the old story again, let me say this out loud. I’m not turning Genesis into neuroscience, or the other way around. I’m reading a poem about being human, side-by-side with what the body has been trying to tell us all along. Genesis speaks in images, not instruments; its truth isn’t about circuitry but communion. Sometimes the lab and the Scripture hum the same tune, and when they do, I just want us to hear it.

I wrote One World, One Word: A Theology of Knowing Together knowing full well that bringing neuroscience to Genesis was going to get me accused of baptizing Darwin. Consider that essay my theological alibi.¹⁷ It defended the unity of faith and science, arguing that reality itself must be read through an integrated epistemology—one that honors both empirical knowing and the affective life through which we experience communion. Only within that framework can I now say with confidence that any faithful reading of Genesis 2–3 must take account of an affective anthropology. Without it, we misread both the text and ourselves.

Israel learned to pray its shame instead of hiding it: “Let me not be put to shame.” That line shows up everywhere—from the Psalms to Isaiah—as if the people kept writing it until it finally felt true. Shame becomes prayer there, a cry for the gaze that never turns away. Genesis gives us the grammar; the Psalms give us the melody.¹⁸

Now, to work.

I opened my Bible to Genesis 2, but this time I brought Nathanson with me—the psychiatrist who decoded shame’s biological grammar. It felt strange at first. But then again, I’ve brought historical critics, literary theorists, honor-shame anthropologists. Why not affect theory? What I found surprised me.

The Theological Earthquake

Stories like Atrahasis and Enuma Elish also tried to tell where we came from. Genesis joins that ancient conversation but changes the key: the gods of those stories create out of rivalry and exhaustion; this God creates out of delight. Vulnerability isn’t danger here—it’s design. The shame that follows is our misreading of that delight.¹⁹

What follows isn’t a lab report; it’s theology set to poetry—a story that keeps happening in every human life.

If shame is gift—a biological capacity for recognizing disrupted communion—then we need to rethink everything the tradition has taught us about the Fall.

The standard story goes like this: humanity was created perfect, without shame. Sin entered through disobedience. Shame entered as punishment—the first human emotion born from guilt, the first sign of corruption, the mark of our exile from Eden.

But that story doesn’t work if shame is innate affect.

This reading doesn’t claim exclusive authority over the text—Genesis has carried multiple valid interpretations across centuries—but it offers resources the tradition has largely overlooked.

Affects aren’t learned; they’re firmware. If shame is one of Tomkins’s nine innate affects—if it fires in infants before moral reasoning develops—then shame was present in humanity before any possibility of sin.

Which means Genesis 2’s “naked and unashamed” doesn’t mean Adam and Eve lacked the capacity for shame. It means the shame affect wasn’t triggering because attunement was perfect.

Shame isn’t accidental—it’s part of how God designs us for communion. The body’s signal serves God’s architecture of love.²⁰

This reframes Genesis 3 entirely.²¹ When the text says “they knew they were naked and were ashamed,” it’s not describing shame entering human experience for the first time. It’s describing the shame affect triggering for the first time—because attunement had been disrupted for the first time.

Genesis 2: The Attunement Before Words

“And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:25)

For years I read this as innocence—paradise as the place where shame didn’t exist, a moral purity that sin destroyed.

But that reading makes shame itself the problem, as though the capacity for shame were corruption, as though feeling shame marked you as fallen.

Nathanson’s framework suggests something different. “Not ashamed” doesn’t mean lacking the capacity for shame; it means the shame affect wasn’t triggering.

The Hebrew word that gets translated “ashamed” doesn’t mean guilty—it means unsteady, thrown off balance before another. And that other word we call “crafty,” about the serpent? It can also mean “alert.” The writer is playing with irony: awareness without attunement always births shame. ²¹

The Hebrew bôsh—”they were not ashamed, not humiliated, not exposed in the sense that triggers withdrawal”—implies the capacity was present but resting.²² Think of it like pain receptors. You have them even when you’re not in pain. They’re not activated when nothing’s wrong, but their presence isn’t pathology—it’s design. Pain protects you by signaling injury. Shame protects you by signaling disrupted communion.

Naked and unashamed describes a state where the smoke alarm isn’t going off because there’s no fire—not because the smoke alarm doesn’t exist.

The text describes perfect attunement: mutual gaze meeting mutual gaze, attention fully landing, no disruption. The conditions under which the shame affect has no need to signal because communion is complete.

Picture it through attachment theory: the infant whose bid for connection is met fully, whose gaze is returned steadily, whose need for mirroring finds an undivided face. The shame affect doesn’t trigger—not because the capacity is absent, but because the signal is unnecessary. Attunement is unbroken.

This is what the text means by nakedness: not physical exposure but relational transparency—being fully known and fully received. Hiding isn’t needed because communion doesn’t fail.

If I’m right, Genesis 2:25 portrays rightly ordered shame at rest: present but untriggered, available but unneeded—the biological capacity for recognizing disruption when no disruption exists.

Genesis 3: When Shame Speaks

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.” (Genesis 3:7)

Tradition reads this as shame entering human experience—the first feeling born from guilt, punishment for disobedience. But look carefully. Their eyes were opened—not that they gained new equipment, but that they saw differently. They knew they were naked—not that they suddenly had bodies, but that exposure now registered as exposure. Vulnerability now felt vulnerable. The mutual gaze once safe was suddenly fraught.

The shame affect fired. Not as punishment but as signal—the biological alarm: Attunement disrupted. Communion broken. Connection threatened.

Notice what triggers it: not the eating itself but what the eating represents. They had reached for the role of Judge—claiming the power to define good and evil, to determine for themselves what counts as authentic humanity. In doing so First Man and First Woman seized the prerogative that belongs to their Creator alone, the right to name reality. Theologically, this is the turn from dependence to autonomy, the creature presuming to curate its own righteousness. They broke the rhythm of being-with and replaced it with the lonely rhythm of being-in-control.

And their bodies knew it before their minds did.

Face drops. Eyes avert. Shoulders curve inward—the classic shame response. Not because they violated a rule, but because they disrupted the only relationship that made them them.

The Fig Leaves as Repair Attempt

Here’s what I’d never seen before: the fig leaves aren’t merely covering guilt. They’re an attempt to restore attunement.

Shame signals disruption and calls toward repair—that’s its function. When my infant body couldn’t find a steady face, the shame affect triggered and I cried: Come back. See me. Repair what’s broken.

The fig leaves are the adult version of that cry, but with a devastating irony. Instead of trusting the Creator’s gaze, First Man and First Woman regulate their own visibility, deciding what may be seen and what must be hidden. It is the first human technology of control. It is my Data reflex in its primordial form—the defensive substitution of mastery for vulnerability, control for transparency. In trying to manage the risk of being known, they enact the original illusion that safety can be achieved without surrender. They grasp for secure attachment on grounds they can control, turning the reach for communion into the project of self-protection.

They’re not only hiding—they’re reaching and managing at once. Trying to make themselves presentable, acceptable, worthy of the gaze that just broke. Trying to repair what shame is signaling: connection lost, attunement failed.

Notice that both of them hide. The story keeps perfect symmetry at the point of rupture—no hierarchy, just two faces turning away together. Only later, after communion collapses, does hierarchy enter the room. Broken relationship always starts before power does.

The tragedy isn’t that the shame affect triggered. The tragedy is what they did with it.

Healthy shame would have turned them back toward the voice calling their names. It would have heard the disruption and moved toward repair. But something had already gone wrong—shame was already becoming disordered, fusing with identity, mutating from signal (connection disrupted) to verdict (you are the disruption).

So instead of returning to the voice, they hid.

Genesis has dirt under its nails. When communion breaks, even the ground feels it. “Cursed is the adamah because of you…” The ache we name shame runs through soil and sweat. Maybe rightly-ordered shame is also the signal that says: go back to the field, tend it gently, stop trying to own what was meant to be received.²³

“Where Are You?”

“But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” (Genesis 3:9)

This is the question shame is meant to facilitate. God isn’t seeking information—omniscience doesn’t require coordinates. God is offering what shame signals toward: the possibility of being found, of restoration, of communion repaired. Where are you? is the invitation rightly ordered shame should help us hear—the call back into attunement, into mutual gaze, into the being-with that defines God’s posture toward creation.

But shame had already turned disordered. So they heard invitation as threat.

“I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” (Genesis 3:10)

Afraid. Naked. Hid. Nathanson’s withdrawal script—one of the four defensive poles on the Compass of Shame. The affect that should have called them toward repair now drives them into hiding.

And then comes the next question, one chapter later: “Where is your brother?” Misheard shame hardens into violence. The face we couldn’t meet becomes the life we refuse to keep. Healing that stops at self-awareness is only halfway home.²⁴

Christ and What I’m Learning

My wife would say I’m still trying to think my way into this. She’s probably right. But here’s what’s becoming clear to me, sitting in the Ridgeline with Genesis open on my iPad:

Jesus didn’t come to fix my shame. That’s the old story—the one where I’m broken and need repair, where incarnation is divine intervention into my disaster.

Wells keeps reminding us to attend our whole story: God chose incarnation before there was any Fall to fix—not as response to human failure but as overflow of divine communion. Being-with is what God eternally is.

Which means when the shame affect triggers in my chest—when I feel that familiar tightening, that sense of exposure—it’s not signaling that I need divine rescue. It’s signaling that I’ve drifted from the story I’m made for: the story where communion is real, attunement matters, autonomy is the illusion.

Genesis 3 reveals not a world God must repair, but a humanity living the wrong story—the story where we imagine we can be without God and survive it.

Sin, in Wells’s grammar, is precisely this: being intentionally without God. Not a legal transgression requiring payment, but inhabiting the wrong narrative. It’s the teenager who says “I’ve got this” and storms off when help is offered. It’s the executive who builds an empire on the conviction that dependency is weakness. It’s the priest—and here I’m looking in the mirror—who pursued excellence not as a way of drawing near but as a way to ensure he’d never need to. Sin is the story where we’re the protagonists, where communion is optional equipment, where autonomy is achievement rather than exile.

The shame affect firing in Genesis 3 was telling the truth: attunement disrupted, communion broken—not from God’s side but from ours. The biological signal was accurate: connection lost, something deeply wrong.

The tragedy isn’t that shame entered human experience; the tragedy is that humanity misheard the signal as verdict rather than call.

The cross doesn’t fix this; the cross reveals what was always true. God’s face doesn’t turn away—not because we needed God not to turn away (though we did), but because turning away has never been God’s nature. The mutual gaze that constitutes Trinity doesn’t break when met with human refusal.

Christ on the cross—bearing full exposure, experiencing complete disconnection from humanity’s side—shows that God remains with us even in the most separating, alienating, annihilating circumstances. Not conquering death, not defeating sin, not reversing the Fall—but being-with us through it all.

The Genesis alarm finds its canonical resolution only when another garden listens rightly—Gethsemane’s blush replacing Eden’s flight. The resurrection doesn’t announce “repair is now possible.” It announces: “God’s purpose has never changed.” The invitation to communion was never withdrawn. Your shame was signaling accurately—attunement matters, connection is real—but you misheard the signal as verdict instead of call.

That first question—”Where are you?”—keeps echoing through the Bible. The prophets repeat it as “Return to me.” Jesus turns it personal: “Mary.” “Peter.” “Friend.” The alarm of Eden becomes a call, still ringing: you’re seen, and the invitation still stands.

In resurrection, the music modulates: the blush of Friday becomes the radiance of Sunday morning, creation’s melody transposed into new creation’s key.

The Pattern I’m Learning

When I sit in the Ridgeline now, breathing four counts in and six counts out, I’m not practicing repair of something broken. I’m practicing recognition of what’s always been true: God’s being-with precedes my awareness of it.

When the shame affect triggers—and it still does—I’m learning to hear it not as evidence of cosmic rupture requiring divine intervention but as the biological signal doing what it’s designed to do: alert me when I’m living the wrong story, when I’ve drifted into the false narrative of autonomy, when I’ve forgotten I’m made for communion.

Shame doesn’t need fixing. I need re-storying. The affect is working perfectly—signaling disrupted attunement, calling me back toward the truth. What needs changing is my capacity to hear the signal as invitation rather than verdict, to recognize God’s “Where are you?” as the voice that has been calling all along.

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Movement IV: Rightly Ordered Shame—The Gift

What I felt in my body, theology now had to name.

The story that began in the nervous system needed to find its place in the doctrine of creation.

Understanding shame as biological affect rather than moral verdict changed everything about my therapy. But it left me with a theological problem I couldn’t ignore.

If shame is innate—hard-wired into human biology before birth, firing in infants before language or moral reasoning—then it can’t be the result of sin. It can’t be punishment for the Fall. It can’t be evidence of corruption entering God’s good creation.

Which means shame must be part of what God creates when making us in the divine image.

This is not a small claim. It rearranges the furniture of systematic theology.

Let’s be clear: when I talk about attunement or nervous systems, I’m talking about the echo, not the source. What happens in our bodies is a faint analogy of what happens eternally inside the life of God—Father, Son, and Spirit keeping time with one another.

Shame is evolution’s gift to finite creatures who need connection to survive—and finitude itself is no accident.²⁵ The Spirit doesn’t bypass our creatureliness; the Spirit works through it, redirecting shame’s alarm from mere tribal belonging toward communion with God, with neighbor, and with the land that sustains us both. The affect that once kept us alive on the savannah now calls us home to the Trinity.

The Protective Functions

Before I could accept shame as gift, I needed to understand what rightly ordered shame actually does—the affect itself, not our stories about it—how it protects us when functioning as designed.

Nathanson’s work showed me three essential functions I’d been missing:

First, shame protects social bonds.

Picture a toddler reaching too aggressively for another child’s toy. The other child pulls away. The toddler’s face drops, eyes avert, body contracts. That’s the shame affect signaling: Something you just did threatened connection. Adjust.

Without shame, we’d have no internal brake on behavior that damages relationship. We’d be socially destructive, unable to read the feedback that tells us we’ve gone too far. Shame is what makes us capable of empathy—the felt sense that our actions affect others, that connection is fragile and requires care.

Bradshaw calls this healthy shame: the affect that teaches we are finite, limited, dependent creatures who need others and can harm others. ¹¹ It’s the biological foundation of humility.

Second, shame protects against grandiosity.

Every culture has its cautionary tales of overreach—the executive who mistakes dominance for leadership, the preacher who begins to believe his own publicity, the activist who forgets the people for the cause. I know that impulse. Give me a mission large enough, and I can disappear inside my own importance. That’s what shamelessness looks like: the loss of the inner signal that whispers, You’re taking up all the oxygen in the room.

Rightly ordered shame is the quiet check that restores proportion. It interrupts the swelling sense of indispensability and says, Stop. Look around. You’re part of a body, not the whole. Theologically, it’s the affective brake on the oldest temptation: You will be like God. Shame is the creature’s embodied reminder that we flourish only in communion—with limits, with others, with God.

Third, shame signals when repair is needed.

This is shame’s primary function: relational GPS. When the signal triggers, it’s not condemnation—it’s information. Shame says, Connection disrupted. Attunement broken. Return needed.

Imagine catching the look on a friend’s face as your words land too sharply. The small ache in your chest isn’t guilt; it’s the affective alarm saying, Reach back, restore the rhythm. Healthy shame points you toward reconnection. Toxic shame, by contrast, turns the same signal inward until it becomes isolation.

Nathanson’s Compass maps what happens when shame becomes unbearable: we withdraw, attack ourselves, avoid, or attack others. But those are defensive improvisations against shame we can’t tolerate, not shame’s proper music. Shame functioning as designed says: You’ve drifted from the ensemble. Listen for the downbeat. Return to the groove. The band is still playing. You’re still welcome.

Distinguishing Rightly Ordered from Disordered Shame

This is what I mean by rightly ordered shame: the affect doing its job—signaling disruption, calling toward repair, protecting communion by alerting us when we’ve drifted from connection.

Disordered shame happens when trauma rewrites that signal. What Bradshaw calls toxic shame is the moment the message gets garbled. Barth once said that evil is like das Nichtige—”nothingness,” a rejected possibility that still tries to cast its shadow across creation.²⁶ Disordered shame feels like that: a parasite living off something good, twisting the creature’s cue for communion into self-condemnation. Grace doesn’t erase the nothingness; it simply refuses to let the shadow have the last word.

Gethsemane shows the Son’s vicarious listening-with—remaining present to the Father when every creaturely nerve wants to run. In that garden we don’t learn how God “fixed” us; we learn that God never ceased being God-with-us. Jesus keeps communion in time when we lose the beat, holding open the relationship in which our own listening is re-formed.²⁷

The original signal says, Something has gone wrong between us; reach back. Under trauma, the same sensation gets misheard as I am what’s wrong. The calibration mechanism becomes a verdict mechanism—like a car’s check-engine light meant to point to a small problem but jammed permanently on, casting everything you do in an amber glow of defect. The light that once helped you repair now only condemns the engine itself. That’s disordered shame: the affect that once protected communion now polices worth.

In Augustinian terms, trauma disorders the love implicit in shame. The affect God gave to guard communion is bent back upon the self; the firmware is hijacked. Nathanson’s recalibration signal and Bradshaw’s healthy shame—the momentary awareness that something between us needs repair—gets rewritten by trauma’s catechism into a verdict: You are the problem. In theological language, this distortion is disordered shame—the affective form of cupiditas, love curved inward on itself (Augustine’s term for disordered desire that seeks only its own satisfaction), the gift of humility mutating into the curse of self-contempt.

Rightly ordered shame, by contrast, is the affective expression of caritas—love that reaches outward toward God and neighbor, love that keeps communion in proportion, reminding us that we are creatures who flourish only in relationship with God, one another, and the land that is always fellowship’s context. It’s transient, relational, and restorative. Disordered shame is chronic, isolating, and destructive.

But the capacity itself? The gift turns out to be precisely what forty years of theology taught me to avoid: shame tells the truth. Not a truth. The truth about what kind of creatures we are—dependent, exposed, and somehow still invited to the table. That’s grace embedded in biology. That’s God building into our nervous systems the alarm that says: You were made for more than this. Return to me. Return to each other. The communion you’re missing is still possible.

Hermeneutics of Attunement

Meaning collapses when trust does. Every interpretation needs a shared world—a triangle of speaker, listener, and reality. When that triangle breaks, the body notices first: heat, flush, eyes falling away. We lose the shared world that makes meaning possible. ¹³

Think of it this way: you’re telling a story at dinner and your spouse’s face goes neutral. Is that boredom? Disagreement? Indigestion? Without trust—without a shared history of meaning-making—you can’t interpret the signal. The face becomes unreadable, a closed text. But if you trust the relationship, you can stay curious: “You got quiet—what are you thinking?” The same neutral expression becomes an opening rather than a verdict. That’s interpretive charity—the willingness to read the ambiguous sign generously, to believe the best interpretation until proven otherwise.²⁸

Couples-therapy scenes prove this every day: one partner turns away for a second—just exhaustion, not rejection—and the other reads abandonment.²⁹ The nervous system registers disconnection; the story writes itself: I’m unloved. Repair begins when someone slows the moment, reaches back, and re-reads the glance: You looked away because you were tired, not disgusted. Charity of interpretation restores connection.³⁰

This is not merely psychological technique—it is the Spirit’s work. Therapy calls it ‘repair.’ Neuroscience calls it ‘co-regulation.’ Fine. Call it what you want. I call it the Spirit refusing to let the misread glance destroy what the tired glance meant to preserve. Grace is not God explaining the confusion. Grace is God staying in the room while we learn to read again. That is grace at work in real time—the Spirit restoring interpretive charity before the mind can theologize it. Cognitive insight follows bodily safety; revelation follows incarnation.³¹

The Spirit stands within every interpretive triangle—God, self, other—training us to read reality as Christ does. This conversion is the mind of Christ taking form in us—the epistemology of cruciform love, the gaze of Jesus teaching our perception to see truly. Grace is not data correction; it is hermeneutic conversion. To see the tired look as tenderness, the silence as space, the cross as presence—that is salvation re-described as perception healed.

The body remembers, but the church teaches it what those memories mean.³² Your nervous system keeps meticulous records—every wound, every rupture, every moment when connection failed. The problem is that your body, left to itself, interprets every signal as verdict. The shame affect fires and your nervous system reads it as I am what’s wrong, when the signal is actually saying something has gone wrong between us. That’s what the church does: it teaches your body to read the signals differently. The vagus nerve registers safety in the room before theology can explain why—that ancient bundle connecting brain, heart, breath, and gut knows you’re held before your mind can formulate the doctrine.³³

The church isn’t a doctrine delivery system. It’s the place where bodies practice staying put. Week after week, you show up. Someone irritates you—perhaps over coffee hour logistics or the theology of the new hymnal—and you learn the discipline of not leaving. Someone’s pain sits heavily in the room, and instead of deflecting to more comfortable topics, you stay present. Your nervous system gradually learns: I can stay here. I don’t have to run. This won’t destroy me. That’s patience—not grim endurance but the body’s slow education in bearing the weight of real communion without fleeing.

Forbearing Humility

Forbearance is love’s endurance of imperfection; humility is its rhythm section. To blush is to recognize dependence; to stay present through the blush is to practice love. Every healthy congregation rehearses this every week: bumping into one another’s limits, pausing, smiling, beginning again. The shame affect keeps communion honest—recognizing when we’ve disrupted relationship and calling us back toward repair. Belonging still matters, repair is still possible, the ensemble hasn’t stopped playing.³⁴

Incarnational Anthropology

This reframing aligns perfectly with Sam Wells’s incarnational theology, though Wells doesn’t use the language of affect theory.

Wells insists that the gospel is not about God rescuing us from embodiment but about God entering fully into it.³⁵ God-with-us means exactly that: not above, not against, but with. Incarnation reveals that physicality, limitation, dependence—all of it—is good, created, the very context where communion happens.

If shame is the biological capacity for recognizing communion’s disruption, then shame is part of what it means to be created for relationship. We’re not made for autonomy or self-sufficiency. We’re made for mutual attention, mutual delight, being-with.

Shame is the affect that signals: we were made for this.

When attunement breaks—when the face we need turns away, when our bid for connection goes unmet—shame triggers to tell us: This isn’t right. This isn’t what we’re made for. Return is needed.

That’s why Nathanson can say shame is the affect of communion—not because it feels like communion (it doesn’t), but because it only makes sense in creatures built for communion. You can’t experience disrupted attunement if you weren’t made for attunement in the first place.

Wells would say: we’re made for being-with. Shame is what tells us when being-with has failed.

The image of God, after all, is fully lit only in the image of Christ—the One who listens perfectly and keeps the ensemble in rhythm.

The Eucharistic Pattern

This brings me to Wells’s most profound insight: the Eucharist as the pattern of all Christian existence.

Sam Wells teaches that the Eucharist is the pattern of all Christian life—the table where we learn God’s way of being-with: receiving what’s given, offering it back, and finding communion in the exchange. Jeremy Begbie hears the same rhythm in music, where every return is repetition with difference, grace sounding again through renewed time.³⁶

Shame, rightly ordered, is what signals when this rhythm breaks. When I’m all offering and no receiving—when I’m performing competence, fixing everyone’s problems, carrying everyone’s pain—shame should signal: You’ve stopped receiving. You’ve broken the pattern. You need what you’re trying to give.

When I’m all reception and no offering—when I’m demanding attention, requiring others to carry me, refusing to give—shame should signal: You’ve stopped offering. You’ve broken the pattern. Give what you’ve received.

Shame protects the Eucharistic rhythm. It’s the biological signal that keeps us from collapsing into either self-sufficient isolation or parasitic dependence.

The tradition got it backwards. Shame isn’t evidence of the Fall. Shame is evidence of design—of being created for the mutual exchange that defines both Trinity and Table.

Israel would call this wisdom. Sabbath against hurry, gleaning against greed, Jubilee against despair. These are body-training practices for a people learning to receive again. My breath work is a warm-up exercise; Sabbath is the craft.

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Movement V: A Jazz Theology of Shame

But how do we practice this? How do communities learn to hear shame’s signal together, to create the attunement that makes rightly ordered shame possible?

That’s where the music comes in.

Marie’s Blues as First Language

Before I was a priest or a scholar, I was a jazz musician—a decent trombonist and keyboard player, good enough for All-State, good enough to know the difference between noise and groove. Later, at the Naval Academy, I sang in the Glee Club and learned that harmony isn’t something you achieve alone; it’s what happens when breath and attention synchronize. Long before I studied theology, I learned what communion feels like when sound becomes shared presence.

But all of that came later. The real beginning was Marie. Marie’s blues still hum under everything I write, which means the spiritual practices I’m trying to turn into habits are basically my attempt to get back to my childhood kitchen—breath, stillness, presence, all of it an elaborate adult detour to recover what she knew at six-foot-one in a white uniform: that lament and praise are the same song in different keys.³⁷

Before I could name God, she was already singing lament as praise—her voice climbing and falling through a twelve-bar catechism of ache and endurance. I learned theology in that kitchen: salvation as syncopation, truth as tone. The blues progression feels natural to me not because I mastered it later, but because it mastered me first. When I finally called myself a jazz musician, I was simply speaking my native tongue.

What I would later understand: lament and praise are the same song in different keys—theology’s rough draft written in a minor key.³⁸ Its genius is not explanation but endurance: staying with the dissonance until grace resolves it. That is why jazz became my grammar. Every solo is an act of faithful memory: the body remembering how to belong again.

Rightly Ordered Shame—The Ensemble

If theology is meant to help us live differently, it needs better metaphors than courtrooms and transactions. When I went searching for a language of shame that didn’t sound like diagnosis or debt management—something that could hold both the gift and the disorder, the signal and the static, the rhythm and the rupture—it was almost inevitable that I’d end up back in music. I found it in jazz. Not because jazz is therapy—though it can be. And not because I needed a clever metaphor. But because jazz does with sound what incarnation does with flesh: it makes communion audible.

Charles Limb’s research on jazz improvisation shows that when musicians improvise together, the brain’s judging, planning center quiets and the circuitry for social connection lights up.³⁹ The mind moves from control to communion. Jazz players don’t perform at each other; they play with each other. The trombone’s line depends on the bass walking the changes, the piano comping underneath, the drums keeping time. The solo only works because everyone else is listening, responding, breathing together.

This is Nathanson’s shame as the affect of communion. In jazz, shame is the moment you sense you’ve lost the ensemble. Picture it: you come in half a measure early. Before you can explain what happened, your body knows. Face flushes. Chest tightens. Eyes drop. That’s the shame affect—not punishment, but signal: You’ve lost the groove. Listen harder. Find the downbeat. Return to the band.

And here’s the miracle: the band doesn’t abandon you. The piano adjusts. The bass holds steady. The drums wait. They create space for you to find your way back. The ensemble keeps playing with you, even when you’ve dropped the beat.

That’s rightly ordered shame—the affect that protects communion by signaling disruption and calling you back toward synchrony. Wells would recognize it instantly: the Eucharistic rhythm of offering and reception, call and response. Shame registers: You’ve stopped listening. The table is still set. Come back to the song.

Disordered Shame—The Solo That Won’t End

But when the signal is misheard, the music collapses. Imagine again: you miss the downbeat, the shame affect triggers, face flushes. But instead of hearing the cue—find the groove, the band is with you—you hear, You’ve ruined everything. You don’t belong on this stage. You freeze—withdrawal. Or you blast louder, covering the mistake—attack-other disguised as confidence. Either way, you stop listening.

The affect meant to restore communion becomes the justification for exile. This is disordered shame: the firmware hijacked by trauma, the signal rewritten. The calibration that should guide you back now condemns you. You move from being-with to being-in-control, from improvisation to performance. It’s Eden replayed: grasping for mastery instead of trusting the ensemble, judging the music instead of joining it. Autonomy masquerading as virtuosity. The dropped beat that never recovers.

The Improvisation That Requires Trust

Jazz only works inside trust. If you fear that one wrong note will get you expelled, you’ll never improvise; you’ll cling to the chart, play safe, avoid risk. But if you trust that the band will stay with you—that they’ll adjust when you stumble, hold the groove while you find your footing—then you can breathe. You can risk silence. You can fall and return.

That’s what Wells means by God’s being-with. God doesn’t prevent the missed note; God stays in the groove. Incarnation isn’t divine intervention to fix bad playing; it’s God saying, I’m still in the band. The rhythm section never stopped. Rightly ordered shame, heard through trust, becomes the cue that communion is still possible. Disordered shame, heard through fear, becomes the lie that the song is over.

Embodied Practice and Longevity

Recently, I unrolled a yoga mat for the first time in years—the one I went to because, in a moment of weakness, I promised my wife I would do all those longevity things I learned from Peter Attia. I expected Lululemon Buddhism. What I found was a room full of strangers quietly outperforming most churches I’ve served: being-with without requiring anyone to sign a statement of faith first. The instructor’s quiet words about breath, posture, and gravity translated, without knowing it, the gospel of incarnation: the body keeps the score, but it can also learn a new song. Each stretch felt like repentance; each exhale, absolution. For an hour, I practiced belonging without performance.

Offstage, my own practice—breath work, slow runs, stretching—follows the same score. These are not self-care hobbies; they are the long obedience of embodiment. The body keeps the score, and God keeps the body. Each posture, each exhale, re-trains the ancient circuitry that once mistook attention for threat. Longevity is not beating death but learning to inhabit time without panic. The stretching of fascia is the stretching of faith.

These civic sacraments are what Hauerwas calls communities of character in miniature: spaces where grace is not explained but enacted, where the Spirit tunes hearts and limbs into harmony. Such practices are not self-improvement techniques but embodied doxology—the nervous system learning again to say Amen.

The Music of Remembrance

The music of remembrance still moves through the life my wife and I share. When I served as rector of St. Thomas’ Church here in Rochester, one of the legacies I left was the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed—All Souls’ Day. The church would fall quiet, lights low, candles kindled as each name of the dead was spoken aloud. I don’t know whether they keep the custom now, but I like to think that somewhere nearby another parish is doing the same in its own beloved way—the living and the dead breathing together in the dark.⁴⁰

My wife’s circle of remembrance takes place every few weeks, whenever the losses have gathered. Her oncology team meets in a small room, names each patient who has died since the last gathering, remembers a story or two, speaks gratitude, and then they breathe together before turning back to the work of healing. No creed, no sermon—just medicine learning its way into prayer.⁴¹

And each fall, at the Naval Academy, my classmates read our own roll of the dead; the bell rings once for every shipmate who has fallen, the tone settling into the chest like prayer.⁴²

These are the ensembles that keep us in time—the parish I once served, the clinic where my wife serves, the community that shaped my youth. Light, breath, and sound hold the same slow rhythm of belonging; love keeps time while we learn again how to play.⁴³

The bandstand is laboratory and liturgy at once. When we count off, we enact the same miracle Wells describes as being-with: presence that doesn’t fix, only stays. The drummer sets a pulse steady enough to bear risk; the bass walks a line of trust; the horn searches for home. Each musician carries private histories—trauma, shame, longing—but the groove gathers them into one living organism. Polyvagal theory could diagram it; theology calls it communion.

Improvisation is not chaos but conversation. Every missed note invites reinterpretation, not punishment. Grace sounds exactly like that: the ensemble listening the wrong note back into belonging.⁴⁴

Shame Reheard

In jazz, shame is not exile but cue. The wince after a wrong note, the tightening of chest and throat—those aren’t failures; they are invitations. The body blushes to remind us that belonging still matters.⁴⁵ The question is how we interpret the signal. The healthy ensemble answers, Stay; keep listening. Rightly ordered shame is the affect that keeps communion honest.⁴⁶

Culturally we’re living the disordered version. American Christianity, left and right, sounds like a jam session where everyone solos and no one listens. Each camp claims to guard the melody—one defending tradition, the other defending justice—but both drown out the ensemble. Each has usurped the divine role of Judge, deciding what counts as authentic faith. This is musical judgment-usurpation: each player sets the tempo, declares the key, and calls it freedom. The right proclaims certainty; the left performs purity. Both confuse performance for participation. Both refuse the vulnerability real improvisation requires—the willingness to be shaped by what the others are playing. This is what shamelessness looks like at cultural scale: not liberation from shame, but deafness to its signal. The affect that should protect communion is ignored until the groove collapses.

Of course, every metaphor strains. Jazz can’t redeem the church; it can only remind us what listening sounds like when love keeps time.

Incarnation as Eternal Groove

God’s music has never stopped. The Incarnation is not a divine entrance to fix the tune but the revelation that the groove was always there. The Word made flesh simply turned up the volume so we could hear it through our own bodies. Grace is rhythm—steady, patient, syncopated enough to hold our mistakes without losing the beat. It’s the bass line that never quits, the drummer who knows when to drop to brushes, the horn player who waits six bars to let silence breathe before the next phrase begins.

The Church, the clinic, the nation—all falter when they drown that signal in noise or narcotic. But when they can bear the dissonance, when they let lament hold its measure, beauty emerges again. It’s the cosmos improvising its way back into glory, one forgiven note at a time.

I know the metaphor risks over-extension; a sextet cannot redeem a nation. Still, jazz keeps offering its small sacrament of listening—reminding me that the repair of any body, musical or ecclesial, begins the same way: someone stops soloing long enough to hear another’s time.

Coda: The Ridgeline as Altar

I’m learning—slowly—to let shame do its work. Not to eliminate it, not to drown it in positivity or theology, but to hear it as the pulse of grace—shame as signal, attunement as goal, communion as the music we’re made for.

Some days I catch the cue: the tightness in my chest becomes information rather than indictment. Other days the old defensive patterns spin—withdrawal, attack-self, attack-other, avoidance. But more often now, I can stay in the room. Feel the exposure. Name the disruption. Move toward repair.

And when I forget, when I retreat into performance, I remember: the rhythm section—God’s steady being-with—has never stopped playing.

The rhythm section—God’s steady being-with—has never stopped playing. I’m just learning to hear it again. To trust that when I drop the beat, the invitation isn’t rescinded. The ensemble adjusts. Makes space, keeps time. All I have to do is listen. Breathe. Find the downbeat. Come back to the groove.

The Ridgeline still smells faintly of coffee. It has become my traveling chapel—holding my fasting, tears, and prayers. The dashboard now holds more theology than any pulpit I’ve known.

When I drive it now, I sometimes think of Marie’s kitchen, Chris Charleton’s office, the yoga studio’s quiet hum, the bandstand’s groove. These are the altars where shame learned its proper name: not verdict, but invitation. Not exile, but the blush that calls us home.

The Ridgeline idles at a stoplight. The engine hums. My breath steadies. Somewhere a bass line walks. Somewhere, Marie sings.

The light turns green. I drive on—listening.

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ENDNOTES

1. Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (Harmony, 2023). The “centenary decathlon” became my temporary religion—a protocol for controlling what can’t be controlled.

2. Attia, Outlive, Chapter 17: “Work in Progress — The High Price of Ignoring Emotional Health.” The line about men disguising depression as overwork felt written directly to me.

3. https://interactcounseling.com/staff/christopher-j-charleton

4. When the reading list turned practical, the PTSD skills manuals did more for me than theory: Matthew T. Tull et al., The Cognitive Behavioral Coping Skills Workbook for PTSD (Oakland: New Harbinger, 2020); Claudia Zayfert and Carolyn Black Becker, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for PTSD: A Case Formulation Approach, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019); and Kiki Fehling and Elliot Weiner, Self-Directed DBT Skills: 3-Month Workbook (Oakland: New Harbinger, 2021). These became handrails for nervous-system retraining—less about insight, more about breath, pacing, and repair in real time.

5. John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You (Health Communications, 1988). His account of early mirroring finally named what therapy had been circling for years.

6. Niklas Luhmann invented the Zettelkasten—the legendary slip-box of linked ideas that produced whole libraries of German precision. Mine lives in Tana, which makes it worse: infinite index cards, no gravity. I built it to think, but mostly it became a panic room in the cloud—a place to hide from the avalanche of half-formed insights that keep multiplying while I sleep. Every new tag promised control; every backlink opened another hallway. Still, even this digital mess eventually started talking back. Somewhere between the nested bullets and the broken links, a theology began to assemble itself, humming in the background like a server that refuses to power down.

7. If you’re wondering why I keep referencing Data and Beast like they’re real people—well, they kind of are. They’re the survival strategies trauma created in me, autonomous patterns that flood situations before my adult brain can intervene. Data is my hypervigilant Rogue Controlling Child who calculates every social cue and tries to prevent abandonment through sheer competence. Beast is protective fury incarnate—the “I’m done!” energy that shoves people away before they can leave first. Add Gollum (shame-saturated comfort-seeker), Sadness (keeper of unprocessed grief), and Christopher Robin (my buried authentic self), and you’ve got what therapists call an Internal Family System. Captain is my adult self trying to coordinate this unruly ensemble. If this sounds either fascinating or absurd—or both—I introduced the whole crew properly in Essay #2: “The Factories We Can’t Stop”, where they help explain why dominative strategies always fail against things we can’t actually control. Worth the detour if you want to understand why I talk about my psyche like it’s a Star Trek episode directed by Tolkien.

8. Bradshaw again—the page that describes the infant learning who it is from another’s gaze. Theology begins there long before words.

9. Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (W.W. Norton, 1992), drawing on Silvan Tomkins’s foundational affect theory. Nathanson calls shame the “affect of communion,” which is truer than most creeds.

10. Charleton calls this abandonment terror; neuroscience calls it implicit memory; theologians might call it original exile—three vocabularies for one wound. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014) elaborates the neuroscience; Barth’s strange and beautiful doctrine of das Nichtige—”the Nothingness” (CD III/3)—names evil as what God did not create: the rejected possibility that still shadows every good gift. If rightly-ordered shame is the creature’s way of staying oriented to communion, then disordered shame is that shadow—an echo of nothingness feeding on created goodness. It borrows energy from what is real and bends it toward absence. In that light, healing isn’t God erasing the nothing; it’s grace refusing to let the nothing have the last word.

11. Van der Kolk’s phrase. The body never stops taking notes.

12. Susan Eastman, Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology (Eerdmans, 2017), especially Chapter 4, “Members of Christ and of One Another.” Eastman shows that for Paul, personhood isn’t autonomous individualism—it’s participatory existence. We live in relation to Christ and through him to each other. Memory isn’t private property; it’s shared participation in a narrative larger than any single life. Paul’s language—”putting on Christ” (Gal 3:27), “bearing one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2)—describes mutual constitution, where one person’s experience becomes another’s reality through the Spirit’s work of incorporation.

What this means for trauma: my mother’s unspoken weariness became my implicit memory not because she chose to pass it to me but because personhood is porous. Her silences became my signals. Her unmetabolized grief settled into my baseline. Eastman gives us theological grammar for what attachment theory describes clinically—we’re made by our relationships, and healing requires more than individual insight. It requires being incorporated into a new story where Christ bears what we can’t hold alone. The body remembers, but the church teaches it what those memories mean.

13. When Paul calls the Philippians to think on “whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable” (Phil 4:8–9), he’s not assigning a Stoic exercise in self-perfection; he’s describing participation. Susan Eastman shows in Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology (Eerdmans, 2017) that Paul’s moral vision is always relational—an invitation to have one’s attention re-patterned by the mind of Christ rather than tightened by the will of the self. She contrasts the Stoic ideal of invulnerability with the participatory freedom that comes from being addressed and reconstituted in communion: the movement from anxious mastery to mutual indwelling. Douglas Campbell makes the same move ontologically in Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2025), grounding Paul’s moral grammar in the Trinitarian life itself—Father, Son, and Spirit constituted by relation, not autonomy. Excellence, then, is not performance to secure belonging but the overflow of belonging already secured. The mind of Christ does not polish the self into independence; it unlearns our anti-dependence by teaching us to breathe again in rhythm with others, the way jazz players listen for the downbeat that keeps the whole ensemble alive. Paul’s imperative (”think on these things”) functions less as moral striving and more as contemplative reorientation—fixing attention not to master virtue but to be mastered by the beauty that precedes and sustains all creaturely effort. This is why excellence in Paul’s grammar is never solitary: it’s always drawn toward others (Phil 2:3-4), poured out in service (Phil 2:17), and discovered in communion rather than competition (Phil 1:27). The shame affect, rightly ordered, serves this Pauline vision by guarding against both self-sufficiency and parasitic neediness—keeping us attentive to the rhythms of mutual belonging that constitute the body of Christ.

14. Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Eerdmans, 2009) and Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2025). Campbell distinguishes participatory theology from contractual theology with surgical precision. Contractual models make salvation transactional: perform correctly, avoid mistakes, earn righteousness. Participatory theology says salvation is incorporation—being caught up into Christ’s life through the Spirit, welcomed into Trinitarian communion that precedes any human response. Campbell’s grammar: salvation isn’t God doing something for us that we then accept; it’s God incorporating us with Christ into the divine life.

This maps exactly onto my therapeutic reckoning. I’d been living contractual spirituality—performing excellence to earn safety, offering competence to secure belonging. What I needed wasn’t better performance but participation, learning to receive rather than achieve, to be-with rather than work-for. Campbell gave me language for what therapy was teaching my nervous system: grace isn’t transaction but incorporation, not achievement but gift, not performance but presence. My anti-dependence was contractual soteriology in emotional form—trying to secure salvation through flawless execution instead of trusting I’m already held.

15. Samuel Wells develops his theology of being-with across several works rather than in a single volume: see Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); A Nazareth Manifesto: Being With God (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); and Constructing an Incarnational Theology: A Christocentric View of God’s Purpose (Cambridge University Press, 2025). In these works he describes divine accompaniment and the Church’s formation in presence rather than rescue —the same rhythm that attachment theory names in therapeutic language as co-regulation.

16. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Hauerwas insists that Christian ethics can’t be practiced solo—character isn’t individual achievement but communal formation. We become virtuous through participating in practices embedded in a community that tells a particular story. The church doesn’t just teach doctrine; it trains perception, showing us how to see the world as God sees it through repeated practices: Eucharist, confession, works of mercy, Sabbath rest. These aren’t illustrations of theology; they’re how theology becomes muscle memory.

My nervous system learned disordered shame through early relationships. Relearning required communal re-formation—not cognitive reframing but embodied practices in a truthful community. The church’s liturgical life functions as therapeutic environment: confession teaches that exposure doesn’t destroy us, passing the peace teaches that rupture can be repaired, Eucharist teaches the rhythm of receiving and offering. Hauerwas’s “community of character” is the ecclesial version of what Porges calls a “co-regulating environment”—a social context that transmits safety through sustained, embodied presence. Shame becomes bearable when the community refuses to let it mean what trauma taught us it means.

17. Craig Geevarghese-Uffman, “One World, One Word: A Theology of Knowing Together,” Common Life Politics, https://www.commonlifepolitics.com/p/one-world-one-word-a-theology-of. This essay defended the unity of faith and science, arguing that reality itself must be read through an integrated epistemology—one that honors both empirical knowing and the affective life through which we experience communion.

18. The Hebrew word bôsh (בּוֹשׁ) carries nuanced meaning often flattened in translation. In Genesis 2:25, the phrase “they were not ashamed” (lo yitboshashu) uses the Hitpolel form—a reflexive intensive that emphasizes internal experience rather than external judgment. The semantic range includes “to be disappointed,” “to be confounded,” “to be put to shame”—all suggesting relational disruption rather than moral defect. The verb appears 129 times in the Hebrew Bible, most frequently in the Psalms where it becomes a prayer: “Let me not be put to shame” (Ps 25:2, 31:1, 71:1). In prophetic literature, bôsh describes Israel’s experience when covenant relationship fails—not guilt over law-breaking, but the ache of broken communion (Jer 2:26, Hos 10:6). The word’s etymology may connect to delay or waiting that disappoints—the prolonged gaze that doesn’t land, the bid for connection left hanging. This philological background supports reading Genesis 2:25 not as absence of shame capacity but as unactivated affect—the alarm at rest because no disruption exists.

19. Genesis joins an ancient argument. Babylon’s Enuma Elish (ca. 12th century BCE) has Marduk creating humans from slaughtered god-blood to be divine slaves. The Akkadian Atrahasis epic (ca. 18th century BCE) tells the same story—humanity fashioned from clay and deity blood, created out of divine exhaustion and rivalry. These cosmologies make vulnerability proof of cosmic violence, shame the mark of subordination to capricious powers. Genesis changes the key entirely: humanity created in divine image, blessed not burdened, given dominion as participation in God’s creative delight rather than exploitation. Vulnerability here isn’t cosmic punishment but design feature—the creature made for communion, equipped with affects that signal relationship rather than servitude. Where Enuma Elish treats shame as proof of inferior status, Genesis treats it as signal for restored connection. That theological contrast sharpens when Genesis 3’s shame response is read not as punishment introducing corruption but as the affect doing exactly what it was designed to do—alerting to disrupted communion and calling toward repair.

20. When I say “shame is evolution’s gift” or describe biological affects as “God-given,” I’m not claiming God micro-designed every synaptic pathway or that natural selection operates independently of providence. I’m following Thomas Aquinas’s distinction: God as primary cause (the one through whom all things exist and are sustained) works through secondary causes (the natural processes through which God’s creative will unfolds). Applied to affect theory: the biological capacity for shame—its neural circuitry, its pre-cognitive firing, its role in mammalian attachment—develops through evolutionary processes that themselves exist within God’s creative intention. The Spirit doesn’t bypass our creatureliness; the Spirit works through it, consecrating natural biological signals toward communion with God, neighbor, and creation. This isn’t deism (God winds the clock and walks away) or interventionism (God tinkering with biology from outside). It’s classical Christian theism: recognizing that all creaturely processes, including the evolution of affective systems, occur within the sustaining wisdom of the Creator whose nature is being-with. When shame fires in an infant’s nervous system to signal disrupted attunement, that biological alarm serves God’s architecture of love precisely because God creates through, not against, the natural order.

21. I’m building on work by Phyllis Trible (God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Fortress, 1978), who deconstructed hierarchical Genesis readings; Ellen Davis (Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, Cambridge, 2009), emphasizing the ‘adam/‘adamah relationship; Walter Brueggemann (Genesis, Interpretation series, 1982), attending to literary artistry and theological drama; Terence Fretheim (God and World in the Old Testament, Abingdon, 2005), focusing on divine vulnerability; and J. Richard Middleton (The Liberating Image, Brazos, 2005), arguing for royal-functional rather than substantive image-of-God readings. None of these scholars use affect theory explicitly, but their work creates space for reading Genesis through embodied, relational, non-punitive frameworks. My synthesis brings Nathanson’s shame-as-communion insight into dialogue with this exegetical tradition, proposing that Genesis 2:25’s “naked and unashamed” describes rightly ordered shame at rest—a reading consistent with both Hebrew philology and developmental psychology.

22. Lexicons of Hebrew bôsh confirm it means “disconcerted” more than “corrupted.” The silence before shame is communion. Standard references include The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), eds. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, and Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon.

23. The connection between ‘adam (humanity) and ‘adamah (ground/soil) in Genesis 2-3 is more than wordplay—it’s theological ontology. The human (‘adam) is formed from the soil (‘adamah) in 2:7, establishing material interdependence from the start. When communion breaks in chapter 3, the curse doesn’t fall on humanity directly but on the ground: “Cursed is the ‘adamah because of you; in toil you shall eat of it” (3:17). Ellen Davis notes in Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture that this represents ecological, not just moral, rupture—the human-soil relationship distorted by grasping autonomy. The same word-root connection appears in God’s punishment of Cain (4:11): “You are cursed from the ‘adamah“—exile from the land becomes exile from identity itself. Davis argues that Genesis presents agriculture not as human mastery over nature but as partnership, requiring attentiveness and humility. Shame, in this framework, signals not only interpersonal rupture but ecological disruption—the affect that calls us back to right relationship with the soil that sustains us. Rightly ordered shame would recognize our dependence on created order, our need to receive rather than extract, our call to till and keep (2:15) rather than dominate and deplete. The theological-ecological connection reinforces the essay’s central claim: shame protects communion at every level—with God, neighbor, and land.

24. The movement from shame to violence in Genesis 4 reveals how misheard signals escalate. When God accepts Abel’s offering but not Cain’s (4:4-5), Cain’s face falls—the physiological shame response Nathanson describes. God immediately addresses it: “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?” (4:6-7). This is the moment of pastoral invitation—God naming the affect and offering the path toward repair. But Cain cannot bear the signal. Instead of returning toward communion, he attacks the one whose acceptance he envies—classic attack-other on Nathanson’s Compass of Shame. Abel’s blood cries from the ground (4:10), and Cain is exiled “from the presence of the LORD” (4:14, 16). Walter Brueggemann notes in Genesis that Cain’s punishment is relational, not retributive—”a fugitive and wanderer” describes broken communion more than legal penalty. Yet even here, God marks Cain for protection (4:15), refusing total severance. The narrative shows that shame unmetabolized becomes violence, but God’s persistent presence leaves repair possible even in exile. The theological point: unaddressed shame doesn’t stay contained—it ripples outward from self to other to community to land. Healing that stops at individual self-awareness never completes the circuit. Rightly ordered shame calls not only for personal repair but for the mending of neighborhood, the restoration of the commons—what Brueggemann calls “the practice of the presence of shalom” against the isolating logic of Cain’s city (4:17).

25. Finitude is gift, not curse—and that stands against both Gnostic escape and Promethean overreach. Irenaeus taught that humanity was created immature, designed for growth into divine likeness through embodied participation—what he called “becoming accustomed to God.” Limitation isn’t failure; it’s pedagogical design. Maximus the Confessor argued that creaturely nature finds fulfillment not by transcending finitude but by having it deified—matter itself capable of mediating divine presence. Kathryn Tanner’s Christ the Key (Cambridge, 2010) insists that the Incarnation vindicates creatureliness: God assumes finite human nature without abandoning divinity, affirming that limitation is compatible with divine purposes. Applied to shame: our need for others, our dependence on communion, our capacity to be wounded by disconnection—these aren’t design flaws but features of being created for love. The shame affect fires precisely because we’re creatures built for relationship. It becomes evidence that our vulnerability serves God’s intention rather than frustrating it. Finitude isn’t the distance between us and God; it’s the condition within which God meets us.

26. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, §50, “God and Nothingness” (T&T Clark, 1960), pp. 289-368. Barth’s das Nichtige—usually translated “nothingness” or “the null”—names what God rejects in the act of creation. Not simple absence (Augustine’s privation) but an alien anti-force, the shadow cast by God’s “no” to chaos. Das Nichtige has no legitimate existence, yet it exerts real destructive power by parasitically distorting what God affirms. Barth insists it will be finally defeated in Christ, but until then it remains threat enough to require incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection.

Disordered shame functions like das Nichtige. It has no rightful place—shame as designed serves communion, protects vulnerability, calls toward repair. But trauma rewrites the signal, converts the calibration into condemnation, turns God’s gift into weapon against the self. Grace doesn’t erase the distortion by pretending it never happened. Grace exposes the lie, refuses to let it define reality, restores what was intended. The shadow persists until Christ returns. But it no longer gets to write the story.

27. Thomas F. Torrance’s doctrine of Christ’s “vicarious humanity” provides theological depth for understanding Jesus’ relationship to shame. In The Mediation of Christ (Eerdmans, 1992), Torrance argues that Jesus doesn’t merely act on humanity’s behalf but acts as true humanity—fulfilling from the human side the covenant relationship we cannot sustain. This includes bearing not just guilt but shame: the experience of broken communion, the weight of disconnection, the full exposure of creatureliness before God. In Gethsemane, Jesus experiences what Nathanson would call unbearable shame—the anticipation of utter abandonment, the prospect of the Father’s face turning away. His sweat like drops of blood (Luke 22:44) signals physiological distress at the threat of cosmic rupture. Yet Jesus remains present, stays in the garden, keeps communion when every nerve signals flight. On the cross, he cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)—vocalizing the full experience of shame as disrupted attunement. But Torrance insists this isn’t God actually abandoning Christ; it’s Christ bearing from the human side what total disconnection feels like, so that in resurrection he can restore humanity’s communion with God. Jesus doesn’t fix shame by eliminating it; he redeems shame by listening rightly to its signal—hearing it as call rather than verdict—and remaining present through the rupture. In Torrance’s terms, Christ’s vicarious response to shame becomes the pattern for our own: staying in relationship when everything in us wants to hide, trusting that God’s face has not turned away even when affect signals otherwise.

28. Donald Davidson’s principle of “interpretive charity” from Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Clarendon, 1984) suggests we must presume rationality and shared meaning in others to make interpretation possible at all. If we assume the other’s words are nonsense, communication collapses before it begins. Charity isn’t naive generosity; it’s epistemological necessity—the condition that makes understanding possible. Applied to shame dynamics: when the shame affect triggers during interaction, we face an interpretive choice. If we read the other’s neutral face as rejection (worst-case interpretation), we respond defensively and escalate rupture. If we extend charity—assuming the neutral face reflects tiredness, distraction, or emotional processing rather than contempt—we keep the interpretive triangle intact and leave room for repair. Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy builds on this insight: couples spiral into attack-withdraw patterns when they stop reading each other charitably, when every ambiguous signal gets interpreted through the lens of threat. Therapeutic repair involves restoring interpretive charity—helping partners read the same behaviors differently, seeing bids for connection instead of acts of rejection. Theologically, this is how grace functions epistemologically: God reads our fumbling attempts at faithfulness charitably, interpreting our broken gestures as genuine reach toward communion rather than evidence of irredeemable corruption. The church teaches us to extend that same charity—to read each other’s shame responses not as verdicts of unworthiness but as signals that connection matters and repair is possible.

29. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (Little, Brown, 2008). Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy grounds itself in attachment theory: the emotional bond between partners organizes everything else in intimate relationship. EFT identifies the negative cycles—pursue-withdraw, attack-attack—that emerge when partners feel their attachment bond threatened. The cycles aren’t personality flaws or communication deficits; they’re attachment panic, the terror of abandonment or engulfment that hijacks rational thought.

Repair happens when couples slow the cycle enough to name the underlying need: “I need to know you’re there.” Risk vulnerability instead of defense. Johnson’s framework maps directly onto Nathanson’s Compass of Shame—when shame becomes unbearable, we withdraw, attack ourselves, avoid, attack others. EFT teaches couples to read these defensive moves as attachment distress rather than evidence of incompatibility. The work isn’t fixing the cycle but learning to recognize it, interrupt it, reach back toward connection. Healing requires sustained presence that refuses to let rupture become permanent severing. (See also endnote 43 where Johnson’s repair becomes “listening the wrong note back into belonging.”)

30. Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight (Little Brown, 2008). Her “repair cycle” is what grace sounds like in human time.

31. Van der Kolk’s order of healing—body safety before insight—became my line: “Cognitive insight follows bodily safety; revelation follows incarnation.”

32. Donald Davidson’s principle of “interpretive charity” again. As I said in note 26, if we assume the other’s words are nonsense, communication collapses before it begins. Charity isn’t naive generosity; it’s epistemological necessity—the condition that makes understanding possible.

33. Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory (W.W. Norton, 2011). The vagus nerve as the body’s wisdom before theological translation. The trio behind mimetic virtue: Linda Zagzebski (Virtues of the Mind, 1996), Susan Eastman (Paul and the Person, 2017), and Samuel Wells (Being With, 2018).

34. John Bowlin, Tolerance Among the Virtues (Princeton, 2016). His “patience as the tempo of charity” shaped my sense of forbearance.

35. Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology (Eerdmans, 2025). Incarnation not as rescue but as revelation.

36. Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker Academic, 2007). Begbie shows how music offers theological insight unavailable through visual or spatial metaphors. His “repetition with difference”—the way themes return throughout a composition, each time enriched by what preceded—gives us a model for grace that escapes both static repetition (nothing changes) and progressivist supersession (the old gets discarded). When a melody returns in a new key, it carries forward everything that came before while opening new possibilities. Past, present, and future interpenetrate. This temporal thickness reflects Trinitarian life and the eschatological nature of redemption.

The shame affect that disrupted Eden returns in resurrection—not eliminated but transfigured. The capacity for recognizing broken communion persists, but it’s retuned. Now it sounds within Christ’s unbreakable fidelity, where every rupture becomes invitation to renewed attunement. The melody of communion returns, transposed into resurrection’s key. Begbie’s musical theology gives aesthetic framework to Wells’s Eucharistic pattern and the jazz metaphor in Movement V: grace isn’t erasure but recapitulation, not replacement but redemptive repetition-with-difference.

37. James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Orbis Books, 1972). His claim that the Spirit is the groove still explains more theology than most systematicians. Cone argues that the blues are not secular music but theological expression—lament that refuses despair, pain that insists on presence, suffering that won’t stop singing. The blues testify that life’s contradictions don’t need resolution to be truthful, that grace can sound like a minor seventh, that God meets us in the dissonance. This theological musicology directly parallels the affect-theory framework: just as shame signals disruption without demanding immediate resolution, the blues hold tension without collapsing into either toxic positivity or nihilistic despair. Marie’s kitchen, filled with her blues, was my first seminary.

38. Cone again: endurance as divine improvisation. The blues tradition teaches that survival itself is resistance, that continuing to sing when the world says you have no right to voice is an act of defiant hope. This theological insight anticipates Nathanson’s affect theory by decades: healthy shame (the kind that calls toward repair rather than crushing into silence) requires the capacity to endure discomfort without fleeing or attacking. The blues rehearse that endurance, training the body to sit with unresolved tension—the flatted third that aches but doesn’t break, the bent note that wails but keeps time. Jazz inherited this from the blues and made it conversational: endurance becomes dialogue, lament becomes ensemble. Every solo is an exercise in bearing vulnerability before witnesses who won’t abandon you. That’s incarnational theology in 4/4 time.

39. Charles Limb’s fMRI studies of jazz improvisation, published in PLoS One (2008), show that when musicians improvise, the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—the region associated with self-monitoring, inhibition, and conscious self-censorship—goes quiet. Meanwhile, the medial prefrontal cortex, linked to self-expression and autobiographical narrative, lights up. In other words, the brain stops judging and starts conversing. Limb describes this as “deactivation of executive control” coupled with “activation of the self-expression system”—a neurological shift from performance anxiety to authentic presence. The theological resonance is unmistakable: this is what Wells means by being-with. When we stop performing competence and allow ourselves to be known, communion becomes possible. Jazz pedagogy teaches exactly what therapy and liturgy teach: the path to connection runs through vulnerability, through releasing the need to control outcomes, through trusting that the ensemble will hold you when you take risks. Limb’s research offers neurological confirmation that the brain itself is wired for this kind of relational improvisation—that we’re designed not for isolated self-sufficiency but for the mutual responsiveness jazz requires. Science catching up to Pentecost.

40. The Anglican liturgy for The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed (All Souls’ Day, November 2) provides a liturgical structure for corporate lament and remembrance. Unlike All Saints’ Day, which celebrates the triumphant faithful, All Souls’ Day makes space for grief—naming the dead without requiring their canonization, honoring ordinary belovedness rather than extraordinary holiness. The service typically includes reading the necrology (list of names), lighting candles, prayers for the dead and for those who mourn. It’s liturgical blues—the church singing its losses without pretending the losses don’t hurt. When I served St. Thomas’ Church in Rochester, we held this service in near-darkness, with only candlelight, each name spoken aloud followed by silence. The congregation would breathe together in the quiet. No sermon, no explanation—just presence. The candles breathe theology better than sermons do. It’s the ecclesial version of what Marie did in the kitchen: making space for sorrow to exist without demanding it resolve into easy comfort. The dead remain dead, the grief remains real, and still we light candles. Still we say their names. Still we trust that God’s being-with includes both the living and the dead in one communion. That’s incarnational eschatology: not denying death but refusing to let death have the final word.

41. The oncology-team ritual my wife described: her clinic gathers every few weeks to name patients who have died since the last meeting. They share stories, name what they learned from each person, express gratitude, and breathe together before returning to care for the living. It’s medicine practicing what liturgy teaches—that grief doesn’t disqualify you from service, that remembering the dead strengthens rather than weakens your capacity to stay present with the living. No creed, no theology—just communal space for sorrow. Yet it enacts grace more clearly than many church services: the acknowledgment that loss is real, that caregivers need care, that naming the dead keeps us human in systems designed to make us efficient. This is secular liturgy, therapeutic Eucharist—the same rhythm of receiving and offering Wells describes, practiced by people who might never use the word “incarnational” but who live it anyway. Medicine as communal prayer. The Spirit works through every practice of presence, whether or not the practitioners invoke theological language. Grace is happening whenever people refuse to let grief become isolation, whenever communities make space to hold what cannot be fixed.

42. The Naval Academy’s annual Memorial Bell ceremony takes place at the Class of 1951 Memorial Bell outside Alumni Hall. Each year, typically around Memorial Day, midshipmen and graduates gather to remember classmates who have died in service. A bell—cast from metal donated by the families of fallen midshipmen—rings once for each name read aloud. The sound carries across the Yard, the resonance lingering in the chest like an unresolved chord. Even the polis has its liturgy. The military, often (and rightly) critiqued for valorizing violence, here practices something closer to lament: acknowledging that service costs, that not all who enter will leave, that we owe debts we cannot repay. The ceremony doesn’t glorify death or romanticize sacrifice. It simply names the dead and lets the bell speak what words cannot hold. I’ve attended these gatherings and felt my throat tighten as names were called—classmates I knew, voices I remembered. The bell’s tone is neither triumphant nor despairing; it’s just true. The sound becomes a kind of truthful presence—acknowledgment without explanation, grief without denial. Even institutions built on hierarchy and control can create moments of genuine communion when they stop demanding resolution and simply bear witness. That bell is the Navy’s version of All Souls’ candles, medicine’s naming ritual, Marie’s blues—different traditions, same refusal to let death silence memory.

43. Light, breath, and sound—three ensembles, one rhythm of remembrance. The Anglican / Episcopal liturgy lights candles and names the faithful departed; the oncology team gathers to speak gratitude for patients lost; the Naval Academy rings its bell for shipmates who never made it home. These practices share common grammar: naming interrupts anonymity, ritual creates space for grief to breathe, communal presence makes bearable what no individual could hold alone. They practice what Wells calls being-with—not fixing the unfixable but staying present through it, creating structures that hold sorrow without demanding it convert to comfort. Each ritual teaches the same incarnational truth: presence endures when explanation fails, love keeps time while we learn again how to play. These aren’t metaphors for grace; they are grace enacted—the Spirit working through candle flame, exhaled breath, bronze bell, human voice. The music of remembrance moves through multiple registers but plays the same tune: we were made for each other, death does not erase belovedness, and God’s being-with holds both the living and the dead in one unbreakable rhythm.

44. “The ensemble listening the wrong note back into belonging”—my translation of Sue Johnson’s concept of “repair” from Hold Me Tight into musical language. Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy teaches that healthy relationships don’t avoid rupture; they practice repair. The couple that never fights isn’t necessarily healthy—they may simply be avoiding the vulnerability real intimacy requires. But the couple that can rupture and return, that can name the hurt and reach back toward connection, that can hear “I hurt you” and respond with “I’m here”—that couple knows the dance. Jazz works the same way: the “wrong” note isn’t failure, it’s information. A skilled ensemble doesn’t punish the mistake; they absorb it into the music, adjust the harmony, and make space for the player to find their way back. The solo that starts off-kilter becomes interesting when the band decides to treat it as invitation rather than error. This is grace in real time: the wrong note heard charitably, reinterpreted as a new direction, listened back into beauty. The music becomes richer because it survived the disruption and found a way forward that includes rather than excludes. That’s what Johnson means by repair: not erasing the rupture but meeting it with presence, reinterpreting the misstep as bid for connection rather than evidence of incompatibility. The bandstand teaches what the therapist’s office and the liturgical assembly both practice: love is the refusal to let the dropped beat mean the song is over.

45. Jazz pedagogy meets Nathanson’s affect theory: the blush as downbeat, the shame affect as cue for return. When you miss an entrance in rehearsal, the flush in your face isn’t punishment—it’s your nervous system signaling that synchrony matters, that you’ve lost the groove, that the ensemble is waiting for you. A good director doesn’t scold; they call “again from measure 32” and give you another chance to find the pocket. The shame affect, functioning properly, does the same work: it alerts you to disruption and calls you back toward repair. The problem isn’t feeling shame; the problem is misinterpreting it. If the blush means I’m incompetent and don’t belong here, you’ll withdraw, quit, never return. But if the blush means I care about this music and I want to get it right, you’ll listen harder, adjust, come back in on the one. Jazz rehearsals are laboratories for healthy shame—spaces where the signal is normalized, where messing up is part of learning, where the band’s patience teaches you that belonging survives imperfection. This is why I keep returning to music as theological metaphor: because it enacts in sound what the gospel proclaims in narrative. The blush is the downbeat. The wrong note is the invitation. The band never stops playing. You just have to listen through the static and find your way back to the song.

46. Nathanson’s claim: shame is the affect that keeps communion honest. When shame functions rightly—when it signals disruption without collapsing into chronic self-condemnation—it serves love by protecting vulnerability. Without shame, we’d have no internal brake on behavior that damages connection. We’d wound others casually, dismiss feedback carelessly, inflate our importance endlessly. Shame is what makes empathy possible—the felt sense that our actions affect others, that relationships are fragile and require attention. It’s not the enemy of belonging but the guardian of it. The jazz ensemble embodies this: every player must balance self-expression with sensitivity to the collective sound. Too much ego and you drown the band; too much deference and you disappear. Shame calibrates that balance—reminding you when you’ve taken too much space, when you’ve stopped listening, when your solo has overstayed its welcome. It’s the affective metronome that keeps the music in time. Rightly ordered shame says: You matter, the others matter, the music matters more than any of us alone. That’s communion made audible. The blush that interrupts grandiosity is grace in biological form—the creature’s built-in humility, the body’s wisdom that refuses autonomy’s lie. Shame doesn’t need fixing. It needs listening to.