{"id":26667,"date":"2026-03-17T10:52:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T14:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26667"},"modified":"2026-03-17T11:29:29","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T15:29:29","slug":"26667","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=26667","title":{"rendered":"Grieving Systems of Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Nothing to Fear - Porter&#039;s Gate featuring Audrey Assad - Lyrics\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6seZhG6MWF4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Grieving Systems of Shame<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Tuesday, March 17, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/email.cac.org\/t\/d-l-ghtsdk-dkgktyktu-y\/\">READ ON CAC.ORG<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Theologian Yolanda Pierce grew up in a church that offered her a sense of belonging. She grieves that churches often fail to follow Jesus\u2019s example of welcoming and including everyone:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I grew up in [a Holiness-Pentecostal] church, and in the space of those wooden pews, which were lovingly dusted and polished by the church mothers, my gifts were affirmed and room was made for my talents\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong>is only with an adult\u2019s deep gratitude that I can appreciate a space that never shamed me for what I couldn\u2019t do well, never humiliated me for my failures, and also managed to extract gifts I didn\u2019t even know I had. Not a single soul told me that I sounded like a hoarse frog when I sang. No one told me that I missed a line in my Easter speech.\u2026 I was simply aware that I could try anything in this church and it would be a safe space to land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it grieves my spirit that so many churches, so many religious spaces, have been sites of humiliation and shame for individuals and groups. I mourn that a place that taught a little Black girl that she could go to a college no one had ever seen before is the same place that tells someone else they are going to hell for who they love or who they marry. I lament the private and public humiliations suffered by those whose truths and identities are mocked from the pulpit. I grieve with those whose humanity, vocational calling, or salvation seems under debate by way of narrow-minded sermons and poor biblical exegesis\u2026.<br><br>These hierarchies, in which those with power and privilege\u2014or those who simply wield the microphone\u2014shame and blame others and reinforce their \u201csuperior\u201d social standing, diminish the radical equality God promises in places like Galatians 3:28. These hierarchies fail to recognize that we are all one in Christ Jesus and that our work as Christians is to exalt God, not to shame our neighbors\u2026.<br><br>I grieve that a place that loved me and propelled me to a rich, full life has been a space of condemnation and castigation for others.<br><br><em>By relinquishing the tools of shame, we become God\u2019s beloved community:<\/em><br><br>Here is the holy lesson that I have learned: t<strong>here is no progress unless the wounded among us\u2014those broken in heart and bruised in spirit\u2014have space to tell their stories and share their burdens. Justice is only possible if the ones cast outside of the camp, the city, or the church are lovingly brought back into a changed and transformed community.<\/strong> The <strong>discarded and forsaken must be given the lead if we are to move forward in building God\u2019s beloved community<\/strong>\u2026. We build a new foundation for justice and love by releasing the power of the tools of shame and humiliation used by those who try to break our souls. After all, is it progress if we leave the most vulnerable behind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>==============<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.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.-abI_N8Nbk4LhdhZWZY-x3Yo43xCBovKPnNZEaJftKI?\"><\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Thoughtful faith, progressive theology, and a gospel that\u2019s still good news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/app-link\/post?publication_id=4885540&amp;post_id=191246259&amp;utm_source=post-email-title&amp;utm_campaign=email-post-title&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=2dkj2&amp;token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozOTkyMzY2LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxOTEyNDYyNTksImlhdCI6MTc3Mzc1NjcxMSwiZXhwIjoxNzc2MzQ4NzExLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNDg4NTU0MCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.MEROODErRggkErdNLbXXCnByLNLHz6pjrQlCb02QhkU\">Silence in a Culture of Hot Takes<\/a><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Part 5 of the Lenten Series: The Season We\u2019d Rather Skip<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@beaustringer\">BEAU STRINGER<\/a>MAR 17<\/td><td><a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@beaustringer\"><\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Everybody has an opinion about everything now. And not just an opinion but an urgent, fully formed, publicly stated opinion that needs to be shared within the first fifteen minutes of any event happening anywhere in the world. A politician says something controversial and within seconds your feed is a wall of hot takes. A celebrity makes a statement and suddenly everyone you know is a cultural commentator. A tragedy happens and before the facts are even clear there are already a thousand threads telling you exactly what it means and who is to blame and what you should think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>We are drowning in words. And I don\u2019t think most of us realize how much it\u2019s costing us.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I read somewhere recently that the average American consumes somewhere around thirty-four gigabytes of information per day. I don\u2019t even know what that means exactly but it sounds like way too much. We wake up and reach for the phone before our feet hit the floor. We fill the car with podcasts. We scroll through lunch. We fall asleep to Netflix. Every available moment of silence gets stuffed with content and noise and opinion and commentary until there is literally no space left in the day where we are just quiet. Just still. Just existing without someone else\u2019s words in our heads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the church has bought into this completely. Pastors feel the pressure to make public statements about every cultural moment within hours of it happening. If you don\u2019t post your take fast enough, people assume you either don\u2019t care or you\u2019re on the wrong side. Social media has turned ministry into a never-ending press conference where silence is interpreted as complicity and thoughtfulness is mistaken for cowardice. The hot take has replaced the sermon as the primary unit of pastoral communication and I think we\u2019ve lost something enormous in the exchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">My Commute<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This Lent I made a commitment that sounded simple and turned out to be one of the hardest things I\u2019ve done in a while. I decided to drive to and from work in complete silence. No podcasts. No music. No phone calls. No audiobooks. Just me and the road and thirty minutes of nothing each way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first few days were brutal. I\u2019m not exaggerating. The silence felt physically uncomfortable, like an itch I couldn\u2019t scratch. My hand kept reaching for the phone. My brain kept racing to fill the gap with something, anything, because apparently I have trained myself over the years to be incapable of sitting in a quiet car without external stimulation. That realization alone was worth the experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But somewhere around the end of the first week something started to shift. The noise in my head began to quiet down. Not all at once and not completely, but enough that I started to notice things I hadn\u2019t noticed before. Ideas I didn\u2019t know I was carrying. Convictions I\u2019d been too busy to feel. Creative thoughts that had been waiting patiently for a gap in the noise to slip through. Some mornings the Holy Spirit showed up in that silence in ways that genuinely surprised me. Not in a dramatic, clouds-parting kind of way. More like a quiet nudge. A thought I didn\u2019t generate on my own. A gentle correction I probably would have missed if I\u2019d had a podcast filling the space instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Five hours a week. That\u2019s what an hour of silence a day during the work week adds up to. And I can tell you honestly that those five hours have been more formative than most of the content I\u2019ve consumed in the last year, because it turns out you can\u2019t hear much of anything when you never stop talking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Ministry of Shutting Up<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>James 1:19 might be the most ignored verse in the entire New Testament. \u201cEveryone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.\u201d Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Read that again and then open any social media platform and notice how completely we\u2019ve inverted that instruction.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and angry about everything all the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have built an entire culture around the exact opposite of what James is telling us to do and then we wonder why everything feels so exhausting and fruitless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Henri Nouwen understood this. He wrote that \u201csilence is the home of the word\u201d and that \u201cwithout silence, the word loses its power.\u201d I\u2019ve been sitting with that idea during these quiet commutes and I think he\u2019s right in a way that goes deeper than just personal devotion. Our words have lost their power because we\u2019ve multiplied them beyond all reason. We speak so much and so fast and so constantly that nothing we say carries weight anymore. Everything is content. Everything is a take. Everything is noise piled on top of noise until the signal is completely buried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nouwen spent significant time living in monastic communities and what he discovered there<strong> wasn\u2019t that monks had figured out how to escape the world. It was that they had figured out how to be present in it. Silence wasn\u2019t just the absence of something, it was the presence of something. <\/strong>It was the space where God\u2019s voice could actually land because someone had finally stopped talking long enough to hear it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Silence Isn\u2019t<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>I want to be careful here because I don\u2019t want to over-spiritualize this. Not every silent commute ends with a divine revelation. Some mornings I just drove to work and thought about what I was going to have for lunch. And that\u2019s fine. <strong>Silence doesn\u2019t have to be productive. It doesn\u2019t have to result in a spiritual breakthrough or a creative epiphany or a moment of profound clarity. Sometimes silence is just silence.<\/strong> And in a world that demands constant output and constant engagement and constant noise, just being quiet for thirty minutes is a radical act all by itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I will say this. The <strong>days when something does break through are the days that remind me why this matters.<\/strong> There is a version of my life where I fill every available second with sound and stimulation and never once create enough space for God to get a word in. I\u2019ve lived that version. Most of us have. And it\u2019s exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with physical tiredness and everything to do with spiritual depletion.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You can be busy for God and completely deaf to God at the same time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know because I\u2019ve done it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Try This<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This week, find your silence. You don\u2019t have to join a monastery or go on a retreat or sit cross-legged on a cushion for an hour. <strong>Just pick one space in your day that you normally fill with noise and leave it empty.<\/strong> The commute. The morning coffee. The walk to pick up the kids. Whatever it is, let it be quiet. Don\u2019t fill it. Don\u2019t optimize it. Just sit in it and see what happens when you give your soul a few minutes without words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You might hear nothing. You might hear everything. Either way, you\u2019ll be practicing something the church has known for two thousand years that our culture has almost entirely forgotten.<\/strong>\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is close your mouth and open your ears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>===========<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Individual reflection:<\/strong>&nbsp;Think of a space in your life \u2014 a relationship, a community, a season \u2014 where you were free to fail without being shamed. What did that freedom make possible in you that you couldn&#8217;t have accessed otherwise?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Group discussion:<\/strong>&nbsp;Pierce grieves that the same community that made space for her has shut others out. Stringer suggests we&#8217;re often too noisy to hear the people we&#8217;ve marginalized. Where do you see those as the same problem \u2014 and what would it actually cost us to practice the silence that makes room for those Pierce calls &#8220;the discarded and forsaken&#8221;?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grieving Systems of Shame Tuesday, March 17, 2026 READ ON CAC.ORG Theologian Yolanda Pierce grew up in a church that offered her a sense of belonging. She grieves that churches often fail to follow Jesus\u2019s example of welcoming and including everyone: I grew up in [a Holiness-Pentecostal] church, and in the space of those wooden [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26667"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26667"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26675,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26667\/revisions\/26675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}