A sermon delivered by Rev. Rudi Gelsey, minister, March 17, 1996, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the New River Valley
When we look at issues in our lives, we often focus on outward factors: the country in which we live; the time in history when we grew up: the Great Depression, World War 2, the Vietnam era. What is our family history: Did we have an alcoholic parent, a nurturing grandmother? How about our school or college experiences? What kind of an atmosphere do we work in?
Amid this complex web of circumstances, we tend to present ourselves to the world with those strands that make us appear in the most favorable light, while suppressing shades of darkness. We push the less glorious aspects of our personality underground, lock them up in the deep recesses of our being, and throw the key away.
Trouble is that when banned from the light of consciousness, our baser parts may come back with a vengeance. More and more effort is required to keep matters smooth, while our wounding secretly festers. There is always the danger of becoming, as Scott Peck put it "People of the Lie", victims of our own unacknowledged shadow. Too many people lead a double life, outwardly under control, inwardly churning.
When our lives start running into trouble - and I don't know of anyone who at one point or another, does not find himself or herself in that situation - one defense mechanism is to look for excuses, scapegoats, circumstances or people we can blame for our misfortunes. It is the fault of our parents, our spouse, racial discrimination, you name it.
No question, such circumstances figure in the matrix of our lives, yet we also need to look inward, ward off the temptation of self-deception.
Take an extreme case, Al Capone, the archetype of a Mafioso. At the end of his career, he reportedly said "My life's goal was to help people."
Contrast this with Wolfgang Goethe, the universally respected German classicist and statesman, confessing "There is no crime, however abject, that I might not have been capable of perpetrating."
Goethe, looking inward, saw his shadow, and was able to cope with it. 101 years after Goethe's death, Hitler came to power. Like Al Capone, Hitler had an idealized self-image. He was going to save Germany from the iniquities of the Versailles Treaty and create a magnificent Reich lasting a millennium. Hitler denying his shadow, left behind a trail of destruction and crime.
Besides the grand scale of world history, one of the very caring people in our congregation, recently told me that as a child, she tortured an animal, which helped her gain the insight, like Goethe, that she was capable not only of evil phantasies but of vile misdeeds.
With an assist from depth psychology, religion at its best, helps us to look inward, to recognize our imperfections and not project them upon others.
Religion, in its immature form, focuses on the antagonist or the infidel out there, rather than the doubts and demons within.
Today, in this country, when fundamentalists fulminate against religious liberals, it may be because ambiguity and the shadow are unsettling to true believers. Fundies, as a friend of mine calls them, adhere strictly to the letter of book and law, in the desperate hope it will guarantee their salvation.
The shadow, a term coined by psychotherapist Carl Jung, is that part in us we repress and reject, burying it deep in our psyche, then projecting it on someone else or a group that becomes the "identified problem."
How about us? Is there also such a thing as a Unitarian Universalist shadow? Since our Unitarian and Universalist histories are different, let us look at them separately.
Universalists have abjured Hell, and what is Hell if not the shadow of Heaven? Universalists, like Buddhists, want all people to be well and happy, now and forevermore, a virtual impossibility, so our waves of idealism break upon the rocks of reality.
We find it difficult to cope with evil, with conflict. As proponents of love and light, we are hard put to understand atrocities like genocide or on a smaller scale, this week's horrible massacre of some fourteen innocent children in Scotland.
In this country, our antagonists have their favorite whipping boys, liberals, welfare cheats, gays and lesbians, Blacks, illegal immigrants, to name a few.
Coming to think of it: Don't we have a parallel list of scapegoats ourselves: the fundamentalists, Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlaffly, the gun lobby, polluters, racists, sexists. There are lots of people we love to hate. I have uttered the taboo word: Hate. Aren't we supposed to love. Well, we have an elegant way out: we don't really hate. We only do it in the name of love, just as, in the name of tolerance, we are intolerant of intolerance.
The trouble with this paradox is that our opponents use the very same argument. During the Inquisition and the witch-hunts, for instance, the avowed purpose was to save the eternal soul of misguided unbelievers and victims of Satan. Nowadays, in the name of saving unborn babies, women are supposed to bear children of rape and incest.
So here is a chastening insight. What we reject in others, in a different form, is found in us. May I suggest: In lieu of being self-righteous, our religious task is to develop a sense of compassion, compassion toward our own shadow, and the shadow of others. Perhaps, instead of fighting the shadow, we might want to dance with it, establish a rapport where we are neither overwhelmed by the shadow, nor seek to eradicate it. The metaphor of the shadow as a dancing partner also seems appropriate, because our shadow is full of energy, imagination, creativity.
In Greek mythology we have Hermes, whose character encompassed both the sublime and the shadow. While Hermes was a messenger of the Gods, he was also a trickster who could cheat and steal with panache.
Let us now look at the shadow issue from a Unitarian perspective. Is there such a thing as a Unitarian shadow or blind spot?
Unitarians have a dual historical allegiance. Some, like founder William Ellery Channing, made reason into their guiding light, so that feelings and emotionalism were relegated to a shadowy existence. Religion was to be reasonable, manageable, not at the mercy of emotional outbursts, like the Revivalists and the Holy Rollers, or today's televangelists.
Other Unitarians, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, were mystical and soulful Transcendentalists in touch with tragedy, engaged in a valiant struggle with the preeminent shadow of American society in those days: slavery.
When I entered theological school in 1959, the rational side of the Unitarian way in religion was in the saddle, while now the cutting edge is spirituality, a religion of the heart. We are rediscovering music, poetry, meditation, even ritual.
Take, for instance, our practice of lighting the chalice. Obviously, in broad daylight, such a ritual makes little sense, yet at some level it speaks to our hunger for the sacred and reverence for life. And it is better to light a candle, is it not? than to project or curse the shadow.
We stand at the crossroads. It is time to end our exclusive emphasis on reason, our denial of feelings.
It is time to end our denial of hell, which is a way of denying evil. The direction of our religious quest is not perfection but wholeness. While perfection forever eludes, wholeness accepts and integrates shadow and light.
Compassion toward our own and other peoples shortcomings is the bridge over troubled waters, the link between the shadow we humbly acknowledge and the light we wish to radiate.
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