The Shadow Knows
So, a minister, a priest and a rabbi went for a hike. It was an unbelievably hot day, a real scorcher. So when they came upon a small lake, a little skinny-dipping seemed like the natural thing to do. After all, they were friends and the spot was secluded.
But wouldn't you know it, right as they were getting out of the water, along came a group of women from town.
All three clergy took swift action. The minister immediately covered his privates, as did the priest. But the rabbi's hands shot up and covered his face.
After the dust settled and they found their clothes, the minister and the priest turned to their friend the rabbi and said, "What in heaven's name were you thinking, leaving yourself exposed like that ?!" To which the rabbi replied, "Well, fellas, I don't know about you, but in MY congregation, it's my face they would recognize."
And so it is that we begin this morning with the recognition that, while it may be different for each of us, we all have parts of ourselves that we want to hide! As Robert Bly says, we've all got our bag. For some of us, it's full of parts we're ashamed of. For others, it's packed with undeveloped parts we've ignored. For still others, that bag is a refuge for wounded parts that have given up on healing and now are devoted to staying hidden so they can never be hurt again.
Psychologists call it our "shadow"-a perfect description, really, as these are the parts of ourselves we pretend aren't there and yet they trail behind us. They "shadow" us no matter what we do. It's not like a wallet-a container for precious possessions we want to keep safe and know the whereabouts of at all times. No, we're talking about the bag we wish we could throw in the river, the parts of ourselves we wish would just go away, the parts we all-too-often fool ourselves into believing have gone away! For us responsible folks, it's our laziness. For us laid-back, go-with-the-flow folks, it's our desire to have things just a certain way.
For us strong types, it's our need to be taken care of.
For us empathetic types, it's our selfishness.
For us peace-loving pacifists, it's the desire to wring Rush Limbaugh's neck.
I'll never forget how this came up with Hildegarde Vandersluess, a member of my former church in Syracuse.
She is one of the "church saints," loved and admired by everyone, the kindest and most generous-hearted person you'll ever meet. I praised her for it one day. "I wish I had your ability to always see the best in others," I said. She smiled and said, "Oh, thanks, dear, but you have no idea how many times a day I look at people and think to myself, 'What a putz!!'"
Now, as much as it amazed me that Hildegarde had such thoughts, what amazed me even more, frankly, is that she was willing to admit she had those thoughts. It's just not something that most of us do! Her undesirable parts had no bag. On the mantle in her mind's eye, they sat there right alongside her great kindness. She didn't put them "out of sight and out of mind." No, somehow she had the courage to look at and embrace her entire self. And, friends, who of us doesn't wish we could --more often-- be that brave?!
Fredrick Buechner, the Pulitzer-prize winning author and maverick Christian theologian, says the central paradox of the human condition isn't desiring holiness yet being inherently sinful; it isn't desiring perfection yet falling short. Rather, it's that we hunger to be known in our full humanness and at the same time fear being known in our full humanness more than anything else.
Buechner doesn't use the word shadow; instead, he talks about our "secrets." We want more than anything for others to know our secrets, he says, and yet we can't imagine anything more dangerous. Forget what you've heard about hypocrisy or people wanting to seem holier than thou, he says. No, the reason we keep secrets is simpler and more basic: we want to be loved and we're scared to death our secrets will get in the way. And so they stay hidden, both from others and also from ourselves.
That brings us back to Robert Bly's question. Suppose, he says, that the bag remains sealed. Suppose we keep our secrets hidden. "What happens then?" he asks.
Well, here's where the Tibetan Buddhists help me more than Western psychologists. They tell of a beginning meditation student who, it seems, had finally figured out how to reach that deep trance-like place between waking and sleeping, when suddenly he saw a spider dangle down before him on a silken thread. It was ugly and threatening, and each day during his meditation, it came back, bigger and uglier and more threatening than the day before.
Finally the student became so frightened he went to his teacher. "Master," he explained, "for days now a spider has distracted me from my meditation. From now on I'm going to meditate with a knife in my lap, so the next time the spider comes I can kill it."
His teacher explained patiently that in the Buddhist tradition, knives and meditation usually don't go together!
Instead, his teacher suggested an alternative strategy. "Forget the knife and bring a piece of chalk with you to meditation," he said. "When the spider appears, just mark an X on his belly and then report back to me."
It was a peculiar assignment, but the student did as his teacher instructed. The next day, sure enough, when he had entered into that place between waking and sleeping, the spider descended and dangled in front of his face.
Resisting the urge to attack, the student marked an X on its belly. When he was done meditating, the student rushed from his room to report to the teacher. "Master, I did as you said; I marked an X on the belly of the monster." "Excellent! Congratulations!" said the teacher. "You have just learned one of life's greatest lessons." The teacher reached out and lifted up the student's shirt, revealing a giant chalk-marked X.
Now although I'm awfully tempted, I'm not going to ask us to raise our shirts this morning. I don't want to embarrass us, not just by exposing our love-handles but by exposing the fact that very few of us have that chalkmarked X on our bellies, do we?
No, the truth is-as healthy and sophisticated as we like to think of ourselves-we are as human as everybody else! We are just as scared as the next person to talk, or even think, about the X's that rightly belong on our bellies. We much prefer fighting imaginary spiders.
And there's our answer, isn't it? Again, Robert Bly asks : What happens if our scary and unwanted stuff stays in the bag? Well, we don't really need the Buddhist story, do we? Deep down we already know the answer:
Refusing to look at and own our own stuff doesn't make it go away; it infuses the world with a whole bunch of monsters that need slaying.
Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, called it "shadow boxing." I think that term is just perfect. Like the Tibetan Buddhists, he was able to see, just so much better than the rest of us, how our battles with bad guys out in the world are more often than not wrestling matches with our own inner demons. This is what makes the shadow metaphor so helpful. Just like our physical shadows, our psychological shadows regularly slip between us and others, creating a dangerously distorted picture in which we think we are seeing the enemy before us when in truth, we're looking in the mirror.
For instance, take that lazy younger brother of yours. Everybody else in the family seems to take him with a grain of salt. They see him as laid back, marching to a different drummer. But not you, no sir! Every time you're around him his failure to help or to show up on time drives you crazy. You see it for what it is - a deep and dangerous moral failing. And you just can't figure out why others tolerate this behavior. So, in your mind, and often out loud, you let him have it. You confront him regularly or throw him dirty looks, letting him know that at least one family member has the guts to call him on his selfish and thoughtless behavior.
Now if this describes you, then Carl Jung would say congratulations, you've got this shadow boxing thing mastered. You may tell yourself it is your baby brother you are slugging, but really it is your own shadow you're chewing out! The give-away, says Jung, is the excess of emotion. Sure, your little brother is lazy (Aren't they all!). You're not imagining that. But your reaction is simply way out of proportion to the offense.
That extra energy, Jung says, is coming from you. That poor slug of a baby brother isn't just catching your disgust for his irresponsibility; he's also absorbing the disgust you have for your own irresponsibility--or maybe he's catching all your pent up resentment at always having to be the responsible one.
But whichever it is, it's not about our spidery siblings, right? It's about that unacknowledged X under our shirts.
So what are we to do?!
Well, here's where Carl Jung and the spiritual traditions offer what I think is their greatest gift, because what they ask us to do is so different from what our instincts would suggest.
The first hard-to-wrap-your-mind-around thing they ask us to do is celebrate. That's right, celebrate. Forget beating yourself up. Forget wallowing in or confessing your hypocrisy. Instead, start celebrating, they say!
Remember the first thing the Buddhist teacher said to his meditation student? Congratulations, he said. Not "Shame on you." Not "Go forth and ask forgiveness." Congratulations.
Yeah, we've unfairly beat up our little brothers. And yeah, we should apologize. But to stop there, these masters of the psyche and soul say, is to completely overlook what has just occurred. We've not just unfairly taken our stuff out on someone else and made them into a victim. No, they say, we've just made a great discovery: We've found ourselves a spiritual team-mate.
There's a Jewish teaching which says the first thing we will be asked to do when we go to heaven is go visit all our enemies, not to make peace with them but to thank them, for all they tried to teach us about ourselves during our time on earth.
This is exactly what Carl Jung and the great spiritual traditions are saying, with the additional plea to not wait until we get to heaven. Do it now, they say. This very day. Start seeing your enemies as your greatest teachers, your greatest team-mates in the spiritual quest, maybe even your greatest friends. I love the way Gandhi captured this idea: "We should thank those we hate," he said. "They help us see ourselves most clearly."
Which leads to the second peculiar thing Carl Jung and the spiritual traditions tell us to do. Once our enemies help us identify the spiders in our bag, the next logical step would seem to be finding the courage to eradicate those personal spiders. But that's not what Jung and the spiritual traditions instruct. They tell us to feed them.
Again, get all that hypocrisy stuff out of your mind. The spiritual goal from this perspective is not about getting us to remove the log from our own eye before going after the splinters in the eyes of others. This is about getting us to think about that log in our eye in a brand new way. According to Jung, the most important thing our enemies teach us is not how hypocritical and terrible we really are, but how secretly hungry we are.
Again, going back to the example of our little brothers. From Jung's perspective, the fact that we overreact to his laziness doesn't so much mean we're hypocrites as that a big piece of us wants to let our hair down and stop being the responsible one all the time!
Do blowhards drive you crazy? Do you just hate them?! If so, pay attention to that, says Carl Jung. More likely than not, it means a part of you is just dying for the day when you feel confident and free enough to speak your mind.
Are you excessively hard on people in power positions? Great! says Jung, that's a message from your soul that a piece of you probably wants more control over your life.
Hate gluttons? Awesome! You've just been told that a piece of you feels like it is starving.
Show-offs get under your skin? Perfect! You've just learned something deep inside you needs to be noticed.
Do you secretly believe that stay-at-home moms are taking the easy way out? Super! says Jung. Your soul has just announced that a part of you doesn't really love the fact that work dominates your life.
And do you just hate it when those needy women and quiche-eating men cry and fall apart at the drop of a hat?
Excellent! You've just been introduced to that part of you that is scared to death about having to handle things all on your own, that part of you that desperately wants to be taken care of but doesn't know how to ask.
It's all so very screwy, I know. It's more than enough to make your head spin. It'd be so much easier if all we had to do was eliminate our enemies and our shadow sides, rather than understand them. It'd be so much simpler if all we had to do was denounce our dark, weak and vulnerable sides, rather than embrace and own them.
And of course it would also take a lot less courage.
And maybe, in the end, this is the message we most need to be reminded of this morning: That it takes courage.
That the spiritual life, above, all requires courage.
It's not easy to look honestly at yourself.
It's not easy to take the wide-eyed rather than the blind-eyed path.
It's not easy to admit that your enemies are largely your own creations.
It's not easy to admit that your stuff is more in control of you than you are of it.
And it's certainly not easy to admit that we sit here today with needs so great we fear saying them out loud.
But this is exactly what is asked of us, not just by our religion but also by our deepest selves. Forget all that talk about our deepest selves wanting purity; what those holy and hard to hear parts want most is to be known and fed.
This is why, the poet Derek Walcott, in the poem that Kaaren read earlier, was so confidently able to say:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself...
arriving at your own door,
in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
...loving again the stranger who is your self.
May each of us find the courage to make sure this time, this greeting, this knowing, this welcoming, this wholeness... comes soon.
So be it. Amen.
October 1, 2006