The Shadow Knows

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© Davidson Loehr

31 August 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Prayer

In everything we do or fail to do, we’re writing the story of our lives.

Too often, the fantasy and the reality of our lives are a world apart.

Sometimes we can’t find our way, or can’t recognize the way when we have found it.

Sometimes it seems the cost is just too high to take the high road, so we settle for a lower road because we believe it is all we can really afford.

Let us take this time, this place, these moments, to remind us of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, consulting those angels of our better nature rather than the little demons and goblins of our lesser selves.

Let us think and act in ways that can do honor to us and to those who love us.

Let us act as though God were watching, as though those whom we love were watching, as though all the great and noble souls of history were watching.

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

We are, all of us, brothers and sisters, children of God, and the best hope of a more compassionate world.

Let us live in such a way that when we are finished, we can say, “In my time here, I was as compassionate, as courageous as I knew how to be. In my time I was, if even only in my small way, a blessing to those whose lives I touched.

“I came, I cared, and in the most important matters I tried to be authentic. I wasn’t perfect; but I was the best person that I knew how to be. And that is enough, it is enough, it is always enough.”

Amen.

SERMON: The Shadow Knows

One of the most famous and ancient story plots we have is about people going out on long adventures in search of a treasure they finally discover was buried at home all the time. I think of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy left Kansas and went to Oz, which had the same characters she had known in Kansas. She finally discovered that the home she was looking for was always as close as clicking her heels.

Also in that movie, the three other main characters were searching for something they thought they didn’t have: brains, courage, a heart. But it wasn’t true: they had them all the time, they just didn’t know it.

I try to look at religion and life’s questions in a lot of different ways here, because the same road doesn’t work for everyone, so I think it’s worth knowing a lot of paths. This morning, I’m looking at life through some lenses from Jungian psychology. I think the Jungians offer some fertile ways of understanding what we think of as salvation, or a kind of healthy wholeness.

For Jung, that especially meant bringing together the favorite parts of our personality, which he called the persona, and the equally important parts that stay hidden, which he called the shadow. The notion of a shadow may sound spooky, but it really isn’t.

Our society, our families and our relationships tend to “edit” us. They prefer certain parts of us, and encourage them. But there’s a lot more to us, and it doesn’t go away. When we shine a light on the parts of us we like, our other parts go into the shadows. The shadow is the despised quarter of our being, or at least the unknown part. It often has as much energy as our ego does. If it gets more energy, it can erupt with its own terrible purpose, and run our lives like a mad puppeteer.

In our culture, especially recently, when we find two opposing forces we are taught to use the bigger one to destroy the weaker one. Whether this will work in international relations remains to be seen. But it doesn’t work psychologically, or in relationships. The two sides are both parts of us, and must be integrated. Otherwise, we’re more likely to flip from one extreme to another: the abused boy who becomes an abuser, religious fundamentalists who attack heretics, or a country that defines itself as peace-loving while claiming the right to declare preemptive war on anyone it chooses. These are some ways the shadow can erupt to define or control us, if we can’t grow big enough to integrate it.

Since we don’t have effective means of integrating our shadow sides today, we project them into our horror movies, gangster epics, violence, rap, garish or shocking fashions, etc. But that can’t integrate them.

To refuse the dark side of our nature is to store up the darkness. Then these things erupt as symptoms: a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents – or war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance, etc. The front pages of our newspapers hurl our collective shadows at us every day.

It is a dark page in human history when people make others bear their shadow for them. Men lay their shadow on women, whites upon blacks, blacks upon Hispanics – as I learned when I moved to Austin – Catholics upon Protestants, capitalists upon 3rd world countries, the poor and powerless, Muslims upon Hindus, on and on.

– That was all a kind of theoretical introduction for those who like theories. Now let’s get more specific, because in real life, examples of people whose shadows control or cripple them are usually simpler. I’ve brought you three examples of this, from a personal, institutional and societal scale.

On an individual level, I think of a woman I knew some years ago named Betsy. She was in a shadow rut. She dated a series of men who were all just as judgmental and dismissive of her as her father had been. Her shadow was running this show, trying to win approval from her father through this succession of stand-ins. She was doomed to repeat this plot until she finally got in touch with the parts of her that needed her father’s approval, understand she was never going to get it, and get on with her life. Then, when her father or others like him charged her like bulls with demeaning and hurtful remarks, she could play the matador, just letting the dangerous bulls pass by, without trying to confront them.

For an institutional example where the shadow is running the show, I think of Christianity, especially now as we see the fundamentalist versions gearing up for holy war against Muslims. Hucksters like Jerry Falwell are teaching that Islam is an evil religion teaching war and murder – apparently ignorant of the Christian Crusades, where Christians were told to kill Muslims and promised an eternal reward in heaven for doing so. This entire script is being acted out by the shadow, because it is these Christians who are teaching war and murder, and embodying an attitude Jesus would have regarded as evil. For this kind of wounded Christianity to become healed, it would have to grow big enough to integrate its own shadow, to acknowledge its own contributions to hatred, war and evil in the world today. Only then could Christianity have power to focus the profoundly good energies and ideals of that great religion. This is the task many liberal Christians are taking on, though they have an uphill fight.

And for a really broad current example of a script written by a shadow, I think of the U.S. and our claim that we are the only country on earth with the right to wage preemptive war against any country we choose, without provocation.

We do this while wanting to believe we are a peace-loving nation. It is already having effects that our administration seems not to have expected. William Kristol – who has been a shadow figure in U.S. neo-conservative politics for twenty years – has been interviewed on national radio and television, calmly acknowledging that yes, members of his group, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, had been urging that we invade Iraq and control it since 1991. Yes, he says, we will control Syria and Iran next, and think we can do it without using our armies. What would you expect the effect of these statements and plans to be in Arab and Muslim countries? When people all over the world know our blueprints to establish economic and military dominance of the world, including plans to prevent Asia or the European nations from becoming a threat to these imperialistic goals, what do you think the effect will be in Asia and Europe? Our media don’t carry the stories that we have become the most hated nation on earth, and that G.W. Bush is regarded as more dangerous and murderous than Saddam Hussein. But a quick check of world news outlets shows us this is the background against which our denial is operating.

North Korea has already made public its plans to mobilize and strengthen its forces in response to U.S. imperialism. Don’t we think Europe will too? Do we honestly believe we can boss the entire world around, invading wherever we like without consequences? We claim to be a nation of democracy, goodness and peace, but people all over the world, and a growing number here, see our behavior as arrogant, murderous and evil, as our shadow side acting out a kind of adolescent and deadly imperialism that we are publicly trying to pretend doesn’t exist.

There are encouraging signs that the shadow side of America will make it into our collective consciousness. The fact that “Bowling for Columbine” could win an Oscar and get a standing ovation, the fact that Michael Moore’s incendiary and angry book Stupid White Men rose to the #1 bestseller in non-fiction four or five times in the past year and a half, the fact that America’s imperialist plans are being discussed by some of our own journalists in prime-time spots, and by others all over the world, the fact that the protests don’t seem to be diminishing – these are much stronger signs that the citizens are awake than we had anywhere nearly this early in the Vietnam War. So maybe we will insist on facing our own dangerous shadow sides. Maybe not. Time will tell, along with the collective vision and courage – not of our leaders, but of our citizens.

We tend to think of our shadow sides as bad, like these examples. Often, it is. The shadow isn’t necessarily bad, though; it’s just invisible to us, not integrated into our consciousness, so it has great power to mislead us. But a lot of our very best traits are also hidden in the shadows.

Hero-worship is also projecting our shadow. And it’s dangerous to us too, if we then expect the hero to save us, as we become passive.

And falling in love is projecting parts of our shadow, when we fantasize that this person exists to complete us, then later get angry when we find they were, after all, just a human, and their job really wasn’t to complete us.

Still, sometimes someone can help us find our shadow in a way that’s healing. But even then the power hidden in the shadows usually blindsides us.

One of my favorite stories about this is a story about my oldest friend, John. We met in 1968, while I was finishing an undergraduate degree in music theory and he was working on his Ph.D. in psychology. John rode a big Kawasaki motorcycle, which he could take apart and put back together. He loved fixing things. He loved fixing people, too. And it seemed that every woman he dated had something wrong with her that he thought it was his job to fix. This produced a fairly colorful list of girl friends, none of whom lasted very long – usually because they got tired of being another of John’s work projects.

Once when he was between girlfriends, I said, “John, what would happen if you found a really healthy woman who loved you, was compatible with you, but didn’t need any work done?” “Oh,” he said, “that wouldn’t be at all appealing!”

About 25 years ago, after visiting England several times, he finally moved there. He said the U.S. felt like an adolescent society, and he wanted to live among grown-ups. A few years later, he wrote to say he’d met a woman named Mary, so I realized that, grown-up or not, England had some work projects for John. Mary was going through a divorce, and the legal and emotional hassles of dividing the assets from a successful travel agency she and her husband had owned. I couldn’t imagine that John would know anything about much of this, but I was sure he could find something to work on in her, so he’d be content.

Then they visited while I was living in Chicago, and I got to meet Mary. She was John’s worst nightmare: a perfectly healthy woman who loved him, was compatible with him, and didn’t need any fixing at all. I said I didn’t understand why she was attractive to him. He said it had blindsided him. Since she was stressed out when he met her, he thought she could be another good work project. When the divorce was over and the business had been divided, he suddenly discovered that she wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing at all. But by then, he said, it was too late. They’d learned to love each other, and he had been seduced into a healthy relationship in spite of himself. They’ve been married over twenty years.

His shadow, the part of himself he hadn’t learned how to integrate, was the part that simply enjoyed living, that could find healthy people attractive because they were healthy. It was the part that trusted life and trusted others. He had moved to England because he wanted to live among adults rather than adolescents. And then he met one of those adults, and outgrew his own adolescence.

In some ways, I can identify easily with John and Mary. But in others, they are very different people from me. They are both into every screwy supernaturalism known to humankind: astrology, numerology, palm reading, crystals – they’ve got ’em all. They also told me that they had been together in a previous life, where they needed to work through some things, but this time around it was just about perfect.

I was alarmed by all that supernatural hokum, and I thought about trying to make them a work project. Then I realized I was in the presence of two people who had found their own path toward wholeness and happiness. I decided to leave them alone, and just bless them.

So much life comes from the shadows, you’d think we would get over our fear of them. Yet we are often afraid of the dark. We are afraid to go there, to find what hides there, to face it. We are afraid because we fear that the truth will be bad.

Betsy was afraid she could not live without her father’s approval. But in truth, she couldn’t really live until she no longer needed his approval.

Some Christians are afraid that if they welcome Islam and all other religions as equally legitimate paths to salvation, then theirs will lose its special appeal. In fact, for many people, a religion secure enough to build bridges rather than walls is much more appealing, and much more religious. Many Christian apologists feel that if they ever acknowledge the truth about a very human Jesus or the fact that there are many roads to spiritual fulfillment that need not go through Christian doors, that they’ll lose their flocks. Maybe. But I think what they lose through fear they might more than make up for through what they gain in trust and respect.

Our current administration seems to think we can only be safe by threatening everyone else on earth. That too seems unlikely.

It is easy and natural to wonder how the answers could come from what seems our weakest area. But thousands of years of mythology and religious teachings say it usually comes from the shadows.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah says the stone the builders rejected will become the cornerstone. In the Christian scriptures, a voice asks, “What good could come from Nazareth,” a backwater place of low repute. Yet that’s where they said Jesus came from.

In virtually every great story we know, the hero comes from the fringes, the shadows. From Jesus to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, to Frodo in the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, it is the weakest character who turns out to be the strongest, the one able to build bridges between parts of a disjointed world.

Within and among us too, it is often our hidden parts that hold the power and knowledge we need. And so we perch between two kinds of life, two kinds of belief: the belief that the truth will be bad, and the belief that the truth can set us free. We perch between fear and life, even as we know there are mostly two kinds of people in the world: those who are alive and those who are afraid. And the message I’ve tried to pass on this morning is a simple message, taken from ancient religious insights and modern Jungian psychology. It is simply this: don’t be afraid of the dark. Those things you need to know to be more alive are as close as clicking your heels. You can trust the shadow. The shadow knows.