Sometimes we experience a sense of ongoing shame when we really have done nothing wrong, and that needs to be prayerfully worked out, sometimes in a therapeutic setting, sometimes through a spiritual retreat. I think, though, that for most of us, we do not experience in our faith journey's a healthy view of shame. Shame is a normal and healthy and natural response to an experience of the Holy. It always precedes repentance. It is a catalyst for change.
Faith begins in embarrassment.
Jesus was teaching in a synagogue one Friday night. And right in the middle of one of his best lectures he noticed a woman in his congregation with a terrible back problem. She was bent over. She hadn't stood up straight for a generation. She looked no one in the eye.