Sunday Service @
Margie Allen, Summer Minister
CHALICE LIGHTING
Our chalice-lighting words this morning are from Ursula Le Guin's 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea:
Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably,
burning with so white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even
that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing
that came towards Ged…. As they came together it became utterly black in the
white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In
silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and
in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same
word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of
the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and
were one.
[from Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1998), p.44)]
There
is an old Sufi story about a philosopher who made an appointment to debate with
Nasrudin, a Sufi wisdom teacher. When the philosopher arrived for his
appointment he found Nasrudin away from his home. Infuriated, the philosopher
picked up a piece of chalk and wrote “Stupid Oaf” on Nasrudin’s gate. When
Nasrudin got home and saw this he rushed right over to the philosopher’s house.
“I had forgotten,” he said, “that you were to call. And I am sorry I missed our
appointment. But, I remembered our appointment the minute I saw that you had
written your name on my gate.
[DANCE, recognition: seated with shadow à standing
upstage]
The Shadow is a symbol, invented by the great
psychologist and theorist Carl Jung, which stands for all that is within us
which is not a conscious part of who we are in the everyday world. The Shadow
is not evil. The Shadow is not the Devil. The Shadow is the unknown, repressed,
unlit side of the ego complex. The persona—the mask we present to the world—constitutes
our fully lit, bright selves. The Shadow is the other part, aspects of
ourselves, qualities and tendencies, that are rejected and relegated to the
darkness as the person we choose to be in the world is moved up front into the
light, into interaction with others. The two parts—persona and Shadow—together
make a whole, like the comma-shaped dark and light Yin and Yang which, nestled one
against the other, constitute a complete orb. Robert Bly calls the Shadow “the
long bag we drag behind us.” [Robert Bly, A
Little Book on the Human Shadow (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1988),
p.17] Our bags can get very long and
burdensome, and we forget, if we ever knew, what exactly they contain.
The wholeness with which we emerge from womb to air at
birth is immediately subject to shaping. We are born emotionally healthy whole beings.
We accept and celebrate without question all of who we are. We live in the
moment, act out our feelings, and explore our expanding world with no sense of
restriction. At first. As we grow, who we are begins to be shaped by people’s
approval and by our observations about what keeps us safe and loved. Qualities
which “work” in the world go into the light, into our persona. Qualities which
trouble people and structures in our environment are forced into Shadow.
Different families and cultures select for different personality qualities, but
everywhere the “civilizing” process tends to split a whole person into halves:
acceptable and unacceptable, good and bad, moral and immoral, civil and
barbaric, controlled and uncontrolled, nice and not nice, sane and crazy.
How do you know what is in your Shadow? Well,
Nasrudin’s philosopher friend—do you remember him from the Opening Words?—he
declared a piece of his Shadow when he called Nasrudin a “Stupid Oaf.”
Projection, the ascription to other people of qualities we hold in Shadow and
refuse to own as ours, is a primary route Shadow takes into the light. The
judgments you make of others are really about you. It’s the old “one finger
pointing out and three pointing back at yourself.” “Stupid Oaf” is a quality of
the philosopher’s Shadow which, when it pops up into consciousness, he quickly
casts off himself and projects onto Nasrudin. Another way to learn what is in
your Shadow is to pay attention to the level of emotion you experience in
reacting to other people. If someone “hooks” you, gets you angry or anxious or
defensive, you can bet that something about that person is reflected in your
Shadow.
So
what kinds of things are relegated to Shadow? Well, things inclined to
disorder. Anger, aspects of our sexuality, selfishness, deviousness, vengeance
and hatred might be in there. Maybe sloppiness, gluttony and greed, jealousy,
hostility. Maybe gender ambiguity. But there is also treasure in Shadow, the
little bit of light in the darkness, like the speck of white Yang in the
blackness of Yin. Depending on family dynamics, on the emotional health of the
caretaker, on the rigidity of community expectations, a person’s Shadow may
contain “gold” like creativity, a childlike joy, trust, wildness, assertiveness,
power, competence, even love and desire. Even qualities that appear wholly
negative may have positive aspects when viewed in full light. The more negative
the persona, the more treasure might be discovered in Shadow. And often the
more “perfectly civilized” the outward personality, the blacker and longer the
inner shadow bag.
We learn to fear our Shadow and we work hard to
maintain the splits as we have been taught because we think it is easier to
ignore our Shadow than risk letting it see the light of day! It takes a lot of
energy to keep the Shadow “down,” often increasing amounts of energy. The more
we fear and repress Shadow energy, the more likely it is to de-evolve, to
become more primitive and surly. This constant effort to repress our consciousness
of Shadow uses energy which is then not available for living life. People with
active Shadows are tired and depressed, and sometimes, worn down and in
despair, Shadow will overtake them and violence can then break out towards
oneself or others.
The quest to raise into
consciousness the contents of the shadow, to recall and engage a lost
wholeness, demands a heroic struggle. Jung said
“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the
whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without
considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the
dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential
condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it, therefore, as a rule, meets
with considerable resistance.”
[C.G. Jung, Collected
Works, Vol.9, Part II]
The
Shadow remembers a time when we were one. The Shadow knows.
[Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers (NY:
Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 110]
I’d like to invite you to
make yourselves comfortable for a short guided meditation. I am going to guide
you into an unfolding scene. I will periodically make suggestions about where
to go and what to do as you experience the situation I will describe. There
will be some pauses to allow you to imagine what happens. Some of you may find
your minds wandering, or notice that something entirely different is happening
in your mind’s eye. Some of you may take a nap or think about a work project or
something else. That’s OK, but if you can, let my words guide you. Now, relax
and close your eyes, if that is comfortable for you. At the end of the
meditation I will sound a chime.
You
are waiting to board a big Greyhound bus bound who knows where. In a moment you
will climb the steps and move down the aisle looking for a seat. Right now you
are standing in a line of people. I ask you, now and when you board, to pay
very close attention to the people with whom you will be sharing the coach. Now
you are stepping up into the bus. What does the driver look like? Make your
observations as if you were writing them down. “The driver has a blue uniform
on…,” you write. “His hair is a tangled mess.” What else do you notice as you
move by him slowly making your way up the aisle…. You are in no hurry to find a seat. You are
much more interested in the people. Notice every detail about the people on
both sides of the aisle as you look for an empty seat, moving very slowly along….
What are they wearing? What colors,
fabrics, styles of clothing? What are they doing—reading, eating, talking? Can you catch a snatch of conversation? Do
you smell, or hear, or see anything that draws your attention, as you pass the
first row… and the second…and the third. Are there children? Older folks? What
ethnicities? What races? Is there anyone particularly attractive or
unattractive to you? Anyone you know? Anyone who frightens or disgusts or disturbs
you particularly? If so, what is it
about them? You are passing the fourth row of seats and the fifth and the
sixth…. Don’t sit, just walk slowly and
look about you…. Walking slowly up the
aisle, making detailed observations about your fellow travelers, as if you were
an anthropologist or a poet…. Try to
memorize every detail you can about the people as you slowly pass…. Who are they? What can you know about their
stories? Now you are near the back of the bus, the only person not seated. It
is time to choose a seat and you make your way back down the aisle towards
someone you noticed sitting with an empty seat. Take a seat and notice every
detail you can about your seat companion….
When the chime rings, the bus will lurch to a start and your journey
will begin….
[DANCE, struggle: standing upstageà despair]
Homily II: STRUGGLE
Forty-two year-old Thomas Junta was sentenced to
Families, communities and nations can have Shadows
too. Ronald Reagan called the former
Three decades now we have
lived
The shadow’s voice
cries out to us to cry out.
Its nails dig
into our souls
to
wake them:
‘Something,’ it
ceaselessly
repeats, its silence
a whisper, its whisper
a shriek…—
‘…something can yet
be salvaged upon the earth:
try, try to survive,
try to redeem
the human vision
from cesspits where human hands
have thrown it, as I was thrown
from life into shadow…’
Levertov
captures the desperation with which our shadow, whether personal or national or
global, longs for salvage—could we say salvation?—for recollection, for
contact, for re-union. She has a poet’s
knowing that it is the Shadow which, in the deep darkness of blind fear,
treasures the lamp of human salvation.
Recovery of our personal and collective Shadow is a
religious project. In a previous sermon [July
20, 2003] I named what I believe
constitutes a commonly-held Unitarian Universalist theology: each life is but a part of a larger
whole we call the web of all existence, the sustainability of which depends on
the ability of each human being to function in the world as a whole, spiritually
integrated person. We are about fostering the individual quest for wholeness
that we may as a “web of all existence” enjoy a whole and healthy future. The
links on the web of life consist of relationships. Two entities in relationship
conduct the full life force of the web only if each is functioning as an open,
balanced whole, if Shadow material has been raised from the darkness and
reintegrated. This is the salvation to which Levertov refers. I believe that “sin”
is the reluctance of a constituent on the web to attend to the work of
“salvaging” the Shadow. Sin is all that we do to ignore the fact that we are
alienated from half of who we are and therefore from those to whom we are
linked on the web. “Evil” then, in my understanding, is the dynamic which infects
the web when the life-giving flow of love and justice to a unit component—a
person, a family, an ecosystem, a nation—is blocked. Evil isolates and distorts
persons and relationships when they are separated from the whole and isolated.
Evil is enabled when fear and denial and projection allow that which we cut off
within our selves to act through us, despite us, to damage the web that holds
us all. The Shadow is neither sin nor evil. It is a portion of who we are. It
is us. This the Shadow knows.
[DANCE, integration: despairà reconciliation]
Homily III: INTEGRATION
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I invite you once again to relax
into a moment of meditation. So make yourselves comfortable and close your eyes
if that feels helpful.
I ask you to
find yourself sitting on the bus you boarded earlier. Take a moment to look
around you and remember your fellow travelers. The driver is just now pulling
off the highway into a service plaza. You disembark the bus and head into the
restaurant. You pick up a meal and take a seat at a small table. The dining
area is not crowded, so you are surprised to find that one of the people from
your bus is sliding into the seat across from you at your table. And you are
even more surprised when you see who it is. Of all the people on the bus, why
this one? In the next few moments, have a conversation with this person. I will
ring a chime to end the meditation.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
[chime]
There is something within us which longs to reclaim
the wholeness we are at birth. Something in us remembers. What a gift in life
that is. Again and again, because of how our minds work, it seems, we are given
opportunities to reclaim what we have lost of our original selves. Our cultural
assumptions about “good” have as much to do with control and power as they do with
wholeness. Carl Jung once said: “I’d rather be whole than good.” Wholeness
involves the balancing and blending of all the essential human qualities
without splitting. The goal is to know ourselves in our wholeness, to know both
our shadow and our light, to express our whole selves—carefully and
responsibly—as we go about making ourselves useful in the world.
All of the people on the bus, in the
guided meditation as in dream interpretation, represent aspects of yourself,
your sub-personalities. Some of them, the ones which evoked some emotional responses,
which “hooked” you, may very well be parts of yourself that you hold in shadow.
Maybe the person who was so bold as to join you at table is one. Entering
dialogue with your Shadow is much like dealing with any other being with whom
you must find a way to get along—sometimes by merely listening with warmth and
curiosity, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes simply by offering
a loving and compassionate presence. Integration is the process of regarding
all these traits and qualities without judgment, detaching from identity with
either pole of the split, and learning to live in the gray, in ambiguity, in
the knowledge that as a whole and free
person you can choose from all life’s options. “When you understand that
you contain everything you see in others, your entire world will alter (Debbie
Ford).” You will be open to transformative processes. Your ability to be
compassionate towards others will expand. And as you become more whole and
healthy, whole healthy people will begin to enter your life. Energy once locked
up in Shadow dynamics will become available for uses in the service of life and
continued growth.
Confronting and entering into
relationship with the Shadow can be a terribly challenging task. I believe it
is not one we need tackle alone. The struggle to become aware of the “long bag
we drag behind,” to identify and interrogate its contents, and to negotiate a
relationship in wholeness with our Shadow selves is one we can engage in
religious community. The word religion, I am sure most of you know, derives
from the Latin word religare, to “tie
back.” It is a religious task to reunite with that which we lost in the dubious
process of being “civilized,” to knit back together our original whole self,
our original Yin and Yang, to dance the dance of the dark and the light which
is Life. The Shadow knows, and cries out to us: “Something can yet be
salvaged!” May the darkness and the light meet inside of us, and dance us into
life, set us free.
Let
it be so. AMEN.
CLOSING WORDS
These closing words are from Ten Rungs:
Hasidic Sayings, collected and edited by Martin Buber in 1947:
Question: The Talmud says that the child in the womb of his mother looks from
one end of the world to the other and knows all the teachings, but that the
instant he comes into contact with the air of earth an angel strikes him on the
mouth, and he forgets everything. I do not understand why this should be: why
first know everything and then forget it?
Answer: A trace is left behind in man through which he can reacquire the
knowledge of the world and the teachings, and do God's service.
© Margie Allen, Summer Minister
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