Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

2/3/02

 

 

Meditation for 2/3/02

 

Creative Spirit, Spirit of Life

That which cannot be fully known nor understood,

 

Our piece of the world was blanketed by white this week

Snowfall, late in arrival,

Heavy in moisture

Indiscriminate in its handiwork,

Beautiful in its uniformity.

 

As we wander through our newly winterized world

May we see ourselves more clearly

Against the white backdrop

Of our living.

 

May we see others more clearly as well.

Others who we are sometimes quick to judge and slow to forgive…

Others upon whom we can project our own faults and frailties…

Others who, at the core,

are rarely as different from ourselves as we might believe…

 

With our noisy world now muffled by a cottony coat of snow,

May we listen to each other more closely

And hear more carefully

The voices that are always waiting to be heard

If we will only open our ears and our hearts

long enough to hear them.

 

And may we listen,

Truly listen,

To ourselves,

And to the still, small voice of our living

That is always calling us toward acts of compassion and forgiveness

Even when we believe there is nothing to be heard.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

Reading

From Theodore Roethke:

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

 

What’s madness but nobility of the soul

At odds with circumstance?  The day’s on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,

Or winding path?  The edge is what I have…”

 

 

Sermon

I first thought of what I would talk about today months ago.  I remember sitting down to plan out the year, seeing that this Sunday would fall just after Groundhog Day.  Seemed like it might be a good time to consider the Groundhog Day ritual and to begin anticipating spring.  Well those thoughts look a little different now, several months later.  It feels silly to talk about anticipating spring when, at least until this week, we haven’t had much of a winter.  A heavy snowfall in late January, no matter how typical, usually feels to me like unwarranted punishment.  This week, however, the snow has filled me with delight.  To think that I would want to see snow in February…kind of makes me shudder. I even had fun shoveling my driveway!  Go figure.

 

Well, as it turns out, yesterday, Punxsutawney Phil, the furry Pennsylvanian prognosticator of weather, did in fact see his shadow, forcing him to retreat back into his proverbial hiding place…an indication that we will be experiencing six more weeks of winter.

 

As I have already mentioned, six more weeks of winter doesn’t sound all that bad to me this year.  However, I am interested in the association between Phil seeing his shadow and his needing to hide.

 

Perhaps I should explain.  Ever since I took a seminary course, which covered the thought of Carl Jung, the notion of anyone “seeing his shadow” has taken on new meaning for me.  One of the founders of analytical psychiatry, Jung spent his career exploring the hidden pathways of the human mind--particularly his own—and developed many important insights and theories about the human psyche that will no doubt continue to influence work in all fields related to understanding the human mind and personality.

 

One of his theories is that within the human psyche there exists a shadow side, what he described as “a hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality” which has its roots in a more primitive stage of humanity.[1] Jung contended that the shadow is the personification of “everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself…[and yet it] is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly.”[2]  In other words, the shadow embodies everything in ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge…and yet, and this is the key aspect for my message this morning, if we don’t attempt to bring it into consciousness, it will inevitably assert itself anyway, wreaking havoc in our lives and forming the basis of the misplaced projections we make onto others.   Our shadow side holds the hidden aspects of our personalities that, if brought out into the open, would fill us with shame. So when the shadow tries to make an appearance, we will likely attempt to ignore it, to pretend that the dark thoughts don’t exist, to try to bask in the glow of our ego, a glow that while providing the illusion that the shadow does not exist, is actually providing an even starker contrast for when the shadow does emerge.  It is for this reason, that we should most closely question ourselves precisely at the point when we are feeling most self-righteous…most on top of the world…most in control.  Chances are good that at these moments, our shadows will be already at work, ready to remind us of the real truth of our lives, that control is an illusion.

 

Because there is no way to eliminate the shadow, in fact, the attempt to do so only encourages the shadow’s growth in power and impact, the best we can hope to do is to acknowledge its presence without running away, to sit with our shadow, to become familiar with its impulses so that we won’t be surprised by its influence.  This idea of not only seeing our shadow, but sitting with it, really getting to know it, seems dangerous, foolhardy, like an invitation to a dark place which, once entered, may never let us go.  Again, this is a trick the shadow plays on us.  The more we try to deny the shadow’s existence, the more the shadow will assert itself in our lives…in direct and indirect ways. 

 

Robert Johnson, author of the book Owning Your Own Shadow, describes one couple’s attempt to honor their dark side.  He writes:

 

“I recently heard about a couple who had the good sense to call upon the shadow in a wedding ceremony.  The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their ‘shadow vows.’  The groom said, ‘I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself.’  The bride replied, ‘I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control.  If anything goes wrong, I will take your money and your house.’  They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out.  They were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmasked it.”[3]

 

Jung wrote, “Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbor, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive.” [4] 

He took this idea beyond the individual personality, though, contending that there exists a collective unconscious shadow side that, if not integrated into consciousness, would lead to a kind of collective psychosis.[5]  Writing during the Holocaust, Jung asserted that “In Hitler, every German should have seen his own shadow, his own worst danger.  It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow….  The world,” Jung wrote, “will never reach a state of order until this truth is generally recognized.  In the meantime, we amuse ourselves by advancing all sorts of external and secondary reasons why…[this state of order] cannot be reached, though we know well enough that conditions depend very largely on the way we take them.  If, for instance,” he continued, “the French Swiss should assume that the German Swiss were all devils, we in Switzerland could have the grandest civil war in no time, and we could also discover the most convincing economic reasons why such a war was inevitable.”[6] “It is surely better,” Jung believed, “to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart.” [7]

 

The notion that our own worst enemy exists within us does not seem all that comforting or easy to accept.  Nor does it really jibe with the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days.  Ever since September 11, we have heard much talk of evildoers, evil regimes, evil intentions.  Clearly the terrorist attack that prompted this verbiage was not rooted in what we would call goodness.  And yet, I fear the ease with which our President and elected officials have been using the descriptor evil is an indication that our leadership is not fully engaging with our own collective shadow.  Overuse of the moniker evil strikes me as a sign of oversimplification and over-adherence to our own over-inflated national pride and ego.  There seems to be little room in this rhetoric for the US to do some self-examination of its own.  Not to say, of course, that we (or anyone for that matter) deserves to be attacked the way our nation was on September 11th.  This is also not to say that our military action is not being propelled by good intentions.  I just wonder how the apparent tendency to over-emphasize our national purity might be leading us to overlook a crucial aspect of our own collective psyche…our own shadow side that permeates all that we do, whether we acknowledge it or not. 

 

If we want to take a peek at our collective shadow, all we have to do is to turn on the “Super Bowl” tonight—not just the ultra-violent game played by multi-millionaires on behalf of two corporations masquerading as community representatives of St. Louis and New England—but the sideshow that will go along with it: the extraordinary displays of overkill to be found in the pre-game and half-time extravaganzas that will no doubt feature multi-millionaire performers shamelessly appealing to national pride and extravagance.  I can’t help but think that to people outside the party atmosphere in the Superdome tonight, people who might be homeless or starving, this display might look pretty evil.

 

I offer this consideration of our collective shadow to you this morning because I believe, as a religious community, we should be searching for understandings of ourselves that allow us to, as the word religion suggests, re-relate to our common humanity, to renew the ties that ultimately bind us together, regardless of our differences.  If we are to heal the wounds that separate us, if we are to approach the kind of world community our UU principles say we want, we must begin with ourselves.  We must acknowledge, as Mahatma Ghandi did that “the only devils in the world are those running around in our hearts.” For then, and only then, will we be able to approach peace, liberty, and justice for all of humanity…not just ourselves.

 

Jung contended that we should keep our eyes open to the shadow that looms within us all.  Though he was writing about the Germans, we could just as easily translate his ideas to our current world crisis.  He wrote, “We have no need to hold up the devil’s mask before the Germans.  The facts speak a plainer language, and anyone who does not understand it is simply beyond help.  As to what should be done about this terrifying apparition, everyone must work this out for himself.  It is indeed no small matter to know of one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s own shadow.  When we are conscious of our guilt we are in a more favorable position—we can at least hope to change and improve ourselves.”[8]

 

Choosing to ignore the shame, malice or greed lying dormant in our hearts is not the avenue to self-discovery.  It is more likely the avenue to self-denial and destruction.  Jung asserted that “to confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.  Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self.  Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”[9]  And this middle place, this fulcrum point of our seesaw personalities, our seesaw lives, is a holy place, a place of healing, a place where we most closely approach the paradox of our living, the humility it calls us to accept, and the hubris it calls us to avoid.  When we allow room for paradox in our experience and understanding of ourselves and others, we begin to accept the groundlessness always surrounding us.  We begin to understand that the true place for reverence in our lives is not the place where we have the “answers” but the place where we are living the questions…the place where we can conceive of our own fallibility…the place where we receive the invitation to that which is greater than ourselves.

 

Theodore Roethke wrote:

“I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,

Or winding path?  The edge is what I have…”

 

The edge, the paradox, the question…Theologian Paul Tillich contended that to be human is to be the question posed by our very existence.  To be human, he said, is to be the question.  To be human then, is to live with paradox, to live in-between the seemingly contradictory impulses of our ego and our shadow.  To be human is to welcome all that we are, both what pleases us and what fills us with shame. 

 

There is a story from the Native American tradition that emphasizes how the shadow should be honored and integrated into our lives:

 

“Each night, when one lies down to sleep, the shadow departs, going out to explore the world it is not free to explore during the day.  The shadow may become quite intrigued by the lard and strange world, and be reluctant to return home at daybreak.  So it is necessary for the person, early in the morning, to hum the shadow home.  Each person has a song that only its shadow will recognize, and the shadow must obey the hum.  If one is too busy, or too thoughtless, to hum the shadow home, the whole day will be difficult.  Until the shadow comes home, the person is not whole, is not all together.  It is like the person who got up on the wrong side of the bed—part of him is still missing.  Humming the shadow home is necessary for harmony, for inner unity.”[10]

 

Perhaps 13^th century mystic poet Rumi said it best when he wrote:

 

“This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

 

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture,

Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

For some new delight.

 

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in.

 

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.”