The car

     One inexpensive daily upgrade to the rental car price and my teenage son and I have found ourselves cruising Florida this week in a black Camaro convertible during my husband’s business trip. And people treat you differently in such a car! Groundskeepers don’t usually wave frantically at me and my ordinary SUV, teenage boys in Chargers don’t want to race me, and I don’t usually get tailed by police cars. These people were “objectifying” me, as it were. 

     They were acting upon assumptions about me based on my “body.” Think about this—Adam and Eve grabbed fig leaves after they disobeyed God.  We might ask, how did their shame from their eating of the tree of knowledge gained outside of God have anything to do with their felt need to hide their bodies? But Adam and Eve bodies were intricately connected with their spirit-infused souls, as we sometimes fail to acknowledge. 


     I like how Jose Granados and Carl Anderson illuminate John Paul’s teachings concerning this. In Called to Love they describe John Paul’s recognition of two types of shame. Immanent shame comes from denying the receipt of our bodies, others, and all of creation, as a gift from God.

Before man is cast out of Paradise, he has already cast God out of his heart: ‘By casting doubt in his heart on the deepest meaning of the gift, that is, on love as the specific motive of creation and of the original covenant, man turns his back on God-love, on the ‘Father.’ He in some sense casts him from his heart’ (TOB, 237)….Just as accepting God’s gift unified the whole of man’s experience, the primal refusal of it introduces a rift between man and God that tears human life asunder on every level” (Called to Love, 106-7).

This results in immanent shame, resulting in the grabbing of fig leaves.

     The other type of shame is relational shame, which this rift of refusing life as God’s gift creates:

 When man and woman are separated from the Source of love and are unable to share in a common world, the relationship between them further deteriorates….Moreover, damaged acceptance of God’s gift entails the impairment of man’s capacity to enter into the world of the beloved…. Adam echoes the same lament in Radiation of Fatherhood: ‘Too many of the bonds between us are external, there are too few inner bonds…you live too little in me, though you are so close’’ (RF, 356)….Consequently, the two gradually cease to treat each other as individual people, and increasingly they reduce each other to objects in a world already populated by faceless things with no meaning….The very fact that fallen men and women tend to treat each other as objects or as a means of satisfaction awakens a new sense of shame that did not trouble them before the Fall (Called to Love, 115).

Tory and Elizabeth have simplified these two experiences of relational shame in their talk for us (here). “So, shame represents two simultaneous experiences: (1)  not being treated as God’s gift to the other, and (2)   self-defense against such maltreatment.”

      So, back to my Camaro. The groundskeeper treated me and “my car” as God’s gift. But the bonds between the Charger-owning teenager and I were external, and the policeman saw me already as a sinner whom he was going to catch. (Does this work?)

     My car and our bodies analogy can only be taken so far because in Theology of the Body we learn that we are our bodies; we can’t separate what we do with our bodies from who we are, like you can a car. But—my son and I did receive the Camaro convertible and 70 mph freeways as a gift from God! However we did laugh together with the man in the car next to us at the stoplight as we frantically tried to put the top up during a freak downpour. Every body has its drawbacks, I guess.