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Victoria Shepherd Rao
Hillary Hutchinson
23 January 2005
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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PRAYER:
Psalm 139 (NRSV) Excerpts: verses 1-10, 13-14, 19-24
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol [Hell], you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me-
those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who ride up against you?
I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Amen.
AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:
Hillary Hutchinson
Good morning. My name is Hillary Hutchinson, and most of you know that I have been a member of this church for a very long time. June 1987 to be exact. Some of you may also know that I was raised along with my three siblings as a Unitarian. This does not mean that I find being a member of a liberal religious denomination easy, or the practice of faith automatic. I think in some ways, it has actually made it more difficult for me, as I have struggled to be a conscious human being – conscious of both my own limits and abilities, conscious of my impact on those around me, and even conscious of how my life, and my own life style choices, can impact those on the other side of the world that I do not know personally.
Today’s sermon topic is “Beyond Tolerance.” Tolerance is a word I feel is used entirely too loosely by Unitarian Universalists. What does it really mean to “tolerate” something? Are we pronouncing our acceptance of differing views? Or are we merely “putting up” with difficult, irritating, unpleasant people and situations until we can get away from them? As in, something we all recently experienced, “I’ll just have to tolerate all these weather related traffic delays since I cannot do anything about them.”
On a personal level, what do we tolerate in ourselves? Are we willing to really look hard at our own dark sides, the part of us that is racist because it is in fact a natural human reaction to people that are different from us? Can we look at ourselves directly and acknowledge our own capacity to commit evil? In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as she prepares to kill one of her mortal enemies, he stops her cold by asking, “Does not your power come from the dark side: without vampires, there would be no need of a vampire slayer.” The vamp has a point, I think. Fear and anger provide tremendous assistance for survival. All these parts, good and bad, co-exist in us and need to be balanced.
The psychoanalyst Robert Johnson refers to this dilemma as needing to own the shadow side. Johnson’s simple definition of the dark side is socially unacceptable feelings and/or behaviors. For instance, a child makes you angry, so you hit her. It could be that her statement, “You are so stupid, Mom” actually touched a very raw nerve, and lashing out was actually a response to an internal feeling of inadequacy. In my own case, I have a tremendous fear of failure. The message tape that plays in my brain is: “You are not good enough. You will never be good enough.” I can trace this message back at least four generations in my family, to a fire and brimstone Baptist preacher forebear, whose given name ironically was, “Reasoner.” By returning to school to pursue a PhD, I am challenging myself in a way that I never have before, and am terribly afraid I will be found wanting. As if I am playing bridge, and bluffing by attempting to show more suit strength than I actually have; or think of poker, where you keep betting though you are actually holding nothing worthwhile. I am terrified that the bluff will be discovered, and I will be found wanting when the time comes to lay my cards on the table.
Given this level of insecurity, how do you think I react when someone challenges me in an academic setting? Being scared, I am as likely to be rude as to answer graciously. Or end up exploding inappropriately. Or worst of all, freezing into myself, unable to muster any defense at all, only to explode later at the grocery store checker for nothing at all related.
I want to suggest that worship, which Davidson has told us come from the old English and means, ‘worth shaping,’ can be a path for integrating the shadow side. Think again about the way a card player holds his cards close. The rules of the game can literally allow space for holding our dark idiosyncratic ways within safely prescribed boundaries. To play the cards well, a strategy invoking secrecy may be necessary. The conscious symbolic exercise, or exorcize if you will, of our own dark side, can help us manage all these aspects of our being.
Dr. Johnson suggests small, ritualized behaviors to get rid of the shadow, such as writing down a some personal bad behavior and burning it. Lighting our candles of hope and memory can be a personal ritual of purification. Lighting and then extinguishing the chalice provides a frame for the dark and the light within the context of our services. We can also use Sunday morning sermons to shape our character, giving voice to anger, resentments, fear, and frustration in a manner that increases our compassion, instead of diminishing it. By going beyond mere acknowledgement to actual integration of our dark side, we can expand and extend our compassion for both ourselves and others. The conscious creation of a whole, or healed character, be a strategy allowing the play of dark in our life but within a rational and relational set of priorities. We can choose our reactions, if not what actually happens. Or as my own grandmother would say, “It’s not the cards you’re dealt, it’s how you play them.” So, here I am, telling you once again that we are all in this game of being human together. We all have our own shadow and our own light. And that, at least, is very comforting.
SERMON: Finding Our Way Through The Dark
What are the parts of us that we would rather not see? The lazy parts, the selfish parts, the sad parts, the angry parts, the defeated parts, the weak parts, the fearful, the needy, the hurt parts. They are there but we try hard, don’t we, to hide away, so they wont bother anyone too much. I bet we could all do a little inventory and identify those antisocial and uncivilized parts as well as a natural resistance to go there. Or maybe we have lost sight of our own capacities to be wild, or undependable, or unpredictable or violent, or vindictive and doubt or deny that we are anything but well-intentioned. We might not go so far as to say we are pure goodness, but haven’t we convinced ourselves of the saintliness of someone who loved us well? It is comforting to dwell on our capacities for giving, for being enthusiastic and positive and seeing the best in others, but does this tendency serve any purpose beyond ourselves?
If others knew how lazy, angry, sullen or despondent we can be they might not want to work with us or live with us or be our friends. So we do our best to contain these difficult or ugly aspects of our being, we put them in the closet and hide them in the shadows. It is a common human experience. We all do this and we do it to get along and function the best way we can as members of families, religious communities, as members of staffs or teams or professions, as members and citizens of our society.
This morning I want to speak to these dark sides of our being and crack the closet door open and see what happens if we go ahead and look at the parts of us we would rather not see, or have lost sight of altogether. Because we might discover that it is not only the foibles of our characters that have got shoved into the shadows over the years but some great parts too which were hidden just because they were inconvenient or unwanted or threatening to others.
The wholeness of our weird and wonderful beings is something we come into the world with and which we spend a good portion of our life carving up to suit our life circumstances only to slowly reclaim as we are able and as the demands of this life ebb and free us from the constraints which we have allowed to define us. It is the older and wiser among us who have the most insight into this process. And they are the ones who are the most likely to see the paradox inherent in being human. The ones who have learned that there is a time to speak and a time to remain silent, that it is good and right to have goals and dreams to strive for and that it is also good and right to sacrifice those same goals and dreams and to let them go.
When Hillary suggested the topic of Owning Your Own Shadow in the Worship Associates meeting way back last September, I was unfamiliar with the little book she was making reference to by Robert A. Johnson. He wrote the book in 1991 with the full title, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche. He is a great synthetic thinker who combines sociology and comparative religion in his psychological interpretations of the human condition. How many of you have read his books? He is a Jungian analyst and he works with the notion that we all operate from both conscious and subconscious impulses and that all human beings are co-inheritors of the collective unconscious, deeply embedded symbols which speak to the human condition. Hillary wanted to share his basic message that we can maintain better control of our natural human tendencies towards violence, aggression and bigotry by acknowledging the wholeness of our individual natures, including all the nasty qualities we’ve tried to disown and giving them symbolic expression through religious ritual.
I was drawn to the topic because I have come to believe that evil, or the human capacity to do harm to others or ourselves, is inherent, as natural to our being human as the capacity to nurture and to love. And I hoped that there would be something to be gained by our recognition of this potential, if I could persuade you of its truth, whether it be a greater vigilance in the way we examine our motives, or a greater awareness of the import of every decision we make in the way we lead our lives. It seemed to me, and it still does, that we are less likely to fear evil if we can recognize it as something so close at hand. That we would be less likely to see it as the fault of another if we could see it as a possibility for ourselves.
And reading Johnson partly affirmed this hunch. Let me briefly outline the progression of his book. First, he says that the process of disowning those parts of ourselves is natural. A baby learns not to bite. A child learns slowly to control her temper. In school, kids learn to reign in their energy and sit still. Exuberant free play gets shaped into focused attention as the skills and rules of sports are acquired. The capacities of the child to bite, to lose her temper, to play wildly are still there, but they are contained. Later in life, the socially acceptable ways of behaving as a lady or a gentleman are adopted as the adolescent strives towards recognition as an adult. Then the demands and the constraints of a job identify which character traits are to be given fuller expression. In most fields and professions for instance, it is much more important to be reliable than spontaneous. It is more desirable to be careful and competent than daring and experimental. As with the child, the underlying nature of the person remains intact and complete. They have just abandoned some of their qualities in favor of others in order to participate in their culture. Johnson calls it an inexorable law that all aspects of the individual’s character endure. It is just a matter of cultivating the qualities which help us function in our world and hiding the ones which don’t.
Johnson then identifies the problems that can creep up. For instance if we try to ignore the shadowy parts of ourselves and pretend they do not exist we will resent being reminded of them and might well despise the same qualities in others, projecting onto others aspects of our own unwanted being. Johnson says that this can happen collectively and whole societies can be similarly driven by such subconscious rejection of their disowned qualities. We must believe we are freedom-loving and dedicated to the ideals of democracy so we condemn or attack societies that we accuse of tyranny and feel it is somehow righteous to impose our chosen form of governance on them. We must believe we are peaceful and peace-loving and we fail to recognize the expression of our own rejected nature in the constant stream of horror films, violent television shows, and digital war games. Can we continue to accept the lie that fighting wars is necessary to achieve the peace we love so well? What would happen if the skeleton in the nation’s closet was to be revealed? Maybe the aggression and the will to dominate could energize the rebuilding of this society?
Finally Johnson points to the healing mechanism of religious ritual to re-unify the different parts of ourselves and restore a wholeness to our being. It can do that he says by giving symbolic representation to the darker aspects of life in a context which allows for both the expression and the containment of the destructive as well as the constructive aspects of our nature. Johnson talks about the gory imagery of the Christian mass or communion ritual. The participants celebrate the eating of their savior’s flesh and the drinking of his blood. The image of the tortured man hanging on the cross is glorified as the means of their salvation. The paradox of a persecuted, dying man having the power to save all who would confess his name contains healing. Johnson says any mechanism by which two separate and divergent forces are joined together can heal. He says the joining of two people whether in a glance or in sexual union can be so healing.
Christianity is not the only religion that incorporates images of destruction to serve the purpose of integrating the dark parts of human nature. In Hinduism’s godhead, Shiva is understood to be the God of destruction in counterbalance to Brahma, the God of creation and Vishnu, the God of preservation. In this arrangement there is a full acknowledgement of the dynamic nature of existence. There are creative, sustaining and destructive forces, and they each are honored and recognized. And all the worshipers can then acknowledge such divergent forces in their own being. This is one of the reasons I have valued the Hindu Goddess Kali. She is a truly frightening warrior Goddess, depicted with severed human arms strung around her waist and severed human heads hanging from her neck. She holds a bloody knife and wags a long obnoxious tongue in the air. Yet she is worshiped as a mother, loved and supplicated by her devotees. They expect her to be as giving and loyal to them as they are to her, though they know she can be dangerous. Now, that is a depiction of integration. Loving mother and wild woman. Kali does not give license to her devotees to follow her example but she does offer them a paradox which they can use to try to find a balance between the dispirit qualities of light and dark they experience in life and in themselves.
We need to be encouraged towards integration and wholeness. As religious liberals we need to bring together the parts of our being which we may have lost connection with. But we don’t take communion, and we don’t go to confession. But confession is probably closer to our religious tendencies than worshiping gods and goddesses. And this is where we turn to the therapeutic effects of talking. Not so much in dialogue with another but out loud with the sense that we are being heard. Talking out whatever is burdening us, honestly we can come to a place of greater self understanding and hope to reclaim those parts of ourselves that have been to wretched, depressed, enraged, or frightening to own up to. We do not need a priest to mediate this confession but we do need a safe and contained place to begin to sort out the wholeness of our being.
Here is a story told by Rachel Naomi Ramen about the power of her grandfather’s blessings. When she was a little girl she went to have tea with her orthodox Jewish grandfather every week. These are her words:
After we had finished our tea my grandfather would set two candles on the table and light them. Then he would have a word with God in Hebrew. Sometimes he would speak out loud, but often he would close his eyes and be quiet. I knew then that he was talking to God in his heart. I would sit and wait patiently because the best part of the week was coming.
When Grandpa finished talking to God, he would turn towards me and say, “Come.” Then I would stand in front of him and he would rest his hands lightly on the top of my head. He would begin by thanking God for me and for making him my Grandpa. He would specifically mention my struggles during that week and tell God something about me that was true. Each week I would wait to find out what it was. If I had made mistakes during the week, he would mention my honesty in telling the truth. If I had failed, he would appreciate how hard I had tried.
These few moments were the only time in my week when I felt completely safe and at rest (pg. 23, My Grandfather’s Blessings).
I love how well this story expresses the power of acknowledging our weaknesses and connecting them to our struggles to be good. It is healing to be known in the fullness of our being and deeply reassuring to realize that our wholeness can encompass our foibles without leaving us beyond the hope of another’s love and care.
We Unitarian Universalists do not enter so fully into the language of ritual. We come together to worship and light a chalice. And the flame does reveal both the power of light and the power of transformative forces but it does not speak powerfully of the dark in our lives and I think we might need more to help us come to terms with the darkness in our world and in ourselves.
There is a symbol which could speak to the paradox of the different and opposing parts of our nature. I am sure many of you are familiar with the Chinese Yin and Yang symbol. Here it is. The circle represents the whole of existence, the cosmos. Within the cosmos, there is a duality that can be seen in all “the ten thousand things” in the world and in the forces of nature.
This duality is represented by the equal sections of black and white. These forces are opposite in nature but contain within themselves the seeds of the other as represented by these two dots (the black dot in the middle of the white field and the white dot in the middle of the black field. There is a dynamic quality to these dual forces. They both seem to be moving into the other and this is a representation of the constancy of change in the world. In this symbol there is an acknowledgement of the profound relatedness of all apparent opposites. It suggests that integration is the nature of all things and there is less need to draw together the good and bad, the active and passive, the creative and the destructive, and more need to become aware how all qualities of being find their complete expression through their relationship to their opposite, how all states are impermanent and will move, change and even completely transform with time.
I want to finish this morning with another story from Rachel Naomi Ramen. This one is about an emergency room physician named Harry and how he was surprised into recognizing a greater wholeness to his being. Like all medical and other professionals, Harry was trained to be competent and expert and was used to putting his emotions in the shadows where they could not reveal his hopes, fears and vulnerabilities to his patients.
One night he was on shift and a woman was brought in by ambulance, a very pregnant about to give birth woman. He examined her and called her OBGYN but it was just a
courtesy call. He knew it was likely too late, that he’d be delivering the baby. So the woman’s husband was brought into the emergency room and the nurses prepared quickly for the birth. Harry was pleased as he liked delivering babies. This baby came very quickly with no complications at all. Harry was then holding the newborn along his arm with her little head in his hand, and as he was using a suction bulb to remove the mucus from her mouth and nose, suddenly the little girl opened her eyes and looked right into his eyes. Harry had a moment of discovery. He realized that he was the first human being that this little girl had ever seen. He felt his heart go out to her in welcome from all people everywhere and tears came to his eyes. Later, as he reflected on this, he realized that although he had delivered hundreds of babies in his career, he had never let himself experience the meaning of what he was doing until that one birth. In a sense he felt that that was the first baby he had really delivered as both a physician and as a human being.
I want to leave you with a reassurance that life can surprise us with unanticipated opportunities to grow in the fuller expression of our own being and that far from endangering those around us with the possibility of our shadow sides, we can reveal more powerfully the depths and the truths of our shared humanity. We need to be careful and intentional in inviting the shadow parts into the light of day, but we can also trust, that to the degree that we dare to bring the wholeness of our being into the circle of light, into the company we keep, and into the consciousness with which we make our choices, to that degree we can hope to make a difference.
Embodying the paradox that light and dark coexist in us and all around us and demonstrating the power in the human capacity for honesty. As religious liberals we mostly reject the idea that humans inherit original sin but can we deny that evil is inherent to our being? Let us commit ourselves to living up to our assertion of the worth and dignity of every person with an understanding that it is by the decisions we make that we are ennobled or debased. We are all like the child in today’s story (Nicolai’s Questions, adapted from Tolstoy), asking how to be a good person. We want to be a good person but we don’t always know the best way to do that. But like the story said, if we can remember that the most important moment is now, and the most important person is the one you are with, and the most important thing to do is to do whatever you can for the one by your side, then we will be alright, regardless of the shadows and in despite the dark.
