Barbara Holmes emphasizes how the arts are an integral part of crisis contemplation and healing communal wounds.  

The artists are the prophets. They say what can’t be said in ways that can be heard. They dance it, rap it, and write it in dramas. They are the forerunners for the community. During the Civil Rights Movement, what stitched the movement together was the art and the songs. Everybody did not agree on the process and strategies, but they all agreed on the old songs. Everybody knew them and could sing them. Art knit a community together without having to do a lot of talking about it. The poetry and rap rhythms offered survival to people who were marginalized into poverty. Through art, they could take that poverty and turn it on its head. In our communities, we offer graffiti images of folks who are slain. We dance. We let our bodies reveal our suffering and our persistence. When all else fails, we sing ourselves sane.  

Art opens portals to new realities…. Art is prophetic. Art is humanizing. It speaks truth to power, and so it is another way in which a community can come together and express themselves in ways the power structures can do nothing about. What do you do about a rap song that speaks of the brutality of the system?…  

Art is an expression of Spirit. A lot that comes out of artists is not coming from them. It’s coming through them. The reason art is so powerful is that when you have expressions of art coming through a group of people, a village, a community, you have a great deal of creative and strategic power that’s available to everyone for their use. Making art together is an act of creation that I find invigorating. My communities of choice are artistic communities because they’re always on the cutting edge. They’re not leading with what they think. They’re leading with what is coming through them and that’s always so healing. [1] 

CAC staff member Drew Jackson writes poetry inspired by the Bible. In this poem, he writes of the angel Gabriel and the prophets that confront injustice with God’s healing power. 

The Spirit of Elijah 

Luke 1:14–18 

I’ve been told that God shows up  
on shores, in boats, with Bibles  
and swords. 

I’ve been told that God does  
the bidding of kings  
seeking to plant their flag on my soil. 

I’ve been told that God snuggles up to  
power that delights to  
kill bodies like mine.   

But that’s not what Gabriel said.  

Gabriel said that God’s prophet  
will have the spirit of Elijah,  
bringing life to widows’ households.  

Gabriel said that God’s prophet  
will possess the power of the Tishbite,  
tearing down monuments to the god of domination.  

Gabriel said that God’s prophet  
will be filled with the Holy Spirit,  
committed to speaking out against Ahabs and Jezebels.  

Thus saith the LORD. [2] 

_______________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

All-satisfying God, My soul thirsts for You—for the living God. The deepest yearnings of my heart are for intimacy with You, Lord. I’m thankful You designed me to desire You, and I delight in seeking Your Face. Help me not to feel guilty about taking so much time to be still in Your Presence. I’m simply responding to the tugs of Your Spirit within me. You made me in Your image, and You hid heaven in my heart. My longing for You is a form of homesickness—a yearning for my true home in heaven. I realize my journey is different from that of other people, and I need courage to persevere. Yet I trust that the path You have called me to travel with You is exquisitely right for me. I’ve found that the more closely I follow Your leading, the more fully You develop my gifts. In order to follow You wholeheartedly, I need to relinquish my desire to please others. Still, my closeness to You can be a source of blessing to other people—as You enable me to reflect Your Glory in this dark world. In Your bright, shining Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 42:1–2; As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

1 CHRONICLES 16:11 NASB; Seek the Lord and His strength; Seek His face continually.

PSALM 34:5; They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed

2 CORINTHIANS 3:18; And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into His image with intensifying glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 189). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Retired Episcopal bishop and Choctaw citizen Steven Charleston draws on his Native American experience to navigate collective crisis. 

We inhabit a period in history that seems to be filled with conflict. The world has become an uncertain place, a dark place, where we cannot see what may happen next. All we know, based on our recent experience, is that things could—and probably will—get worse.…  

For millennia, my ancestors followed a spiritual path that was respectful of the earth, inclusive of all humanity, and visionary in its transformative power. That tradition has survived. It is one of the oldest continuous spiritual paths on earth. My ancestors’ faith continues to this day despite every hardship and persecution it has been forced to endure…. I was asked to write a brief commentary about the Christian theology of the apocalypse: the final, terrible vision of the end of the world. I said my Native American culture was in a unique position to speak of this kind of vision, because we were among the few cultures that have already experienced it. In historic memory, we have seen our reality come crashing down as invaders destroyed our homeland. We have lived through genocide, concentration camps, religious persecution, and every human rights abuse imaginable. Yet we are still here. No darkness—not even the end of the world as we knew it—had the power to overcome us. So our message is powerful not because it is only for us, but because it speaks to and for every human heart that longs for light over darkness. [1] 

Charleston takes inspiration from the hope embodied by his ancestors during crisis and displacement.  

My ancestors did not survive the Trail of Tears because they were set apart from the rest of humanity. Their exodus was not a sign of their exclusivity, but rather their inclusivity. In their suffering, they embodied the finite and vulnerable condition of all humanity. They experienced what the whole tribe of the human beings has experienced at one time or another throughout history: the struggle of life, the pain of oppression, and the fear of the unknown. Their long walk was the walk of every person who has known what it means to be alone and afraid. But they walked with courage and dignity because they had the hope of the Spirit within them.… 

Hope makes room for love in the world. We can all share it, we can all believe in it, even if we are radically different in every other way. We no longer need to fear our differences because we have common ground. We can hope together—therefore, hope liberates us. It frees us from our fear of the other. It opens our eyes to see love all around us. It unites us and breaks our isolation. When we decide to embrace hope—when we choose to make that our goal and our message—we release a flow of energy that cannot be overcome. Hope is a light that darkness can never contain. [2] 

_______________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

Triumphant God, Your Word poses the rhetorical question: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” I trust that You are indeed for me since I am Your follower. I realize this verse does not mean that no one will ever oppose me. It does mean that having You on my side is the most important fact of my existence. Regardless of what losses I experience, I am on the winning side. You have already won the decisive victory through Your death and resurrection! You are the eternal Victor, and I share in Your triumph because I belong to You forever. No matter how much adversity I encounter on my journey to heaven, nothing can ultimately prevail against me! Knowing that my future is utterly secure is changing my perspective dramatically. Instead of living in defensive mode—striving to protect myself from suffering—I am learning to follow You confidently, wherever You lead. You are teaching me not only to seek Your Face and follow Your lead but to enjoy this adventure of abandoning myself to You. I rejoice that You are with me continually and You are always ready to help me in times of trouble. In Your magnificent Name, Jesus, Amen

ROMANS 8:31; What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?

PSALM 27:8 NKJV; When You said, “Seek My face,”. My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.”

PSALM 46:1 NLT; God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 188). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Dancing in the Darkness

United Church of Christ minister Otis Moss III reflects on joy’s availability even in difficult times. During a harrowing period when his church received violent threats, Moss woke late one night to unexpected sounds in his house. Fearing an intruder, Moss instead discovers his daughter dancing in her room. 

Her movements were so jubilant, her spirit so free of worry or fear that I couldn’t even stay mad at my baby girl.

She’s dancing. The darkness is all around her as it’s all around you—but she’s still dancing….  

Instead of seeing Makayla as just another addition to the night’s problems, I glimpsed her as a fellow traveler…. Like her frightened father, this six-year-old fellow traveler was awake in the night.  

Even so, there was a difference. I was caught in a cycle of worry and anger. I was not just walking a dark path; I had let the darkness inside me. Evil always seeks to obscure the light, because once it has you living in darkness, that which should not be painful becomes so….  

What we forget, faithwise, in our fear—what I was forgetting that night in my daughter’s room—is that even in the darkest night, when we see no light at all, the light is still there. The sun is still shining over Earth even when our side of Earth rotates away from it. The stars still shine above us, no matter … how thick the clouds above our heads. What we need in the darkest nights is to keep walking along the path until we can glimpse the stars again. What we don’t need is to panic and run blindly into the woods.  

Makayla was just a child, but on this night, she had moved ahead of me on that path. By dancing in the dark, by doing one of the things she most loved, she was making her own light.…  

The enduring words of Psalm 30 struck me afresh: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning…” The eleventh verse of the Scripture made me shout: “You have turned my mourning into dancing.” 

Seeing his daughter dance inspired Moss to share the message with his community:   

Sunday, I told the congregation that we must meet the threats in our lives. We must fight for justice, for our safety, and for the right to live in a world where we can thrive. But even in the darkness of midnight we can maintain a connection to the light. When we cannot survive in darkness by using visual tools of sight, we still have internal tools of memory to remind us of our terrain. Until dawn comes, we need more than the determination to fight for justice. We need love to keep us from getting lost in distraction, love to keep us from falling into despair, love to help us restore ourselves, get back into harmony with ourselves, so we can last through that dark night.  

“Dance,” I urged them. “Dance in the dark!”  

[49] The Same

The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 26-27). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Impasse and Opportunity

There is not only the so-called dark night of the soul but [also] the dark night of the world. What if, by chance, our time in evolution is a dark-night time—a time of crisis and transition that must be understood if it is to be part of learning a new vision and harmony for the human species and the planet?
—Constance FitzGerald, “Impasse and Dark Night” 

Catholic theologian and Carmelite Sister Constance FitzGerald uses “impasse” to describe facing an extended experience of crisis:  

By impasse, I mean that there is no way out of, no way around, no rational escape from, what imprisons one, no possibilities in the situation. In a true impasse, every normal manner of acting is brought to a standstill…. The whole life situation suffers a depletion, has the word limits written upon it. Dorothée Soelle describes it as “unavoidable suffering”…. [1] Any movement out, any next step, is canceled, and the most dangerous temptation is to give up, to quit, to surrender to cynicism and despair, in the face of the disappointment, disenchantment, hopelessness, and loss of meaning that encompass one.  

Despite the potential for despair, FitzGerald finds the possibility of hope and transformation amid both personal and societal impasse: 

Paradoxically, a situation of no potential is loaded with potential…. While nothing seems to be moving forward, one is, in fact, on a homeward exile—ifone can yield in the right way, responding with full consciousness of one’s suffering in the impasse yet daring to believe that new possibilities, beyond immediate vision, can be given….  

The psychologists and the theologians, the poets and the mystics, assure us that impasse can be the condition for creative growth and transformation … ifthe ego does not demand understanding in the name of control and predictability….  

Our experience of God and our spirituality must emerge from our concrete historical situation and because our time and place in history bring us face to face with profound societal impasse. Here God makes demands for conversion, healing, justice, love, compassion, solidarity, and communion. Here the face of God appears, a God who dies in human beings and rises in human freedom and dignity.  

We close off the breaking in of God into our lives if we cannot admit into consciousness the situations of profound impasse we face personally and societally…. The “no way out” trials of our personal lives are but a part of the far more frightening situations of national and international impasse that have been formed by the social, economic, and political forces in our time….  

It is only in the process of bringing the impasse to prayer, to the perspective of the God who loves us, that our society will be freed, healed, changed, brought to paradoxical new visions, and freed for nonviolent, selfless, liberating action, freed, therefore, for community on this planet earth. Death is involved here, a dying in order to see how to be and to act on behalf of God in the world.  

[48] My Neighbor

A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him…. The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The Spirit Comes in Crisis

I’m cracked open now / No longer drifting 
Running past their hate and mine / Tipping past “Come here, gal!”…  
I’m cracked open now / looking for myself,  
Maybe I spilled into the cleft of the rock / Hiding from the slave catching dogs 
Maybe I died trying too hard / To birth myself sane 
I’m cracked, not broken / Still searching for me 
Amid the shards of God’s broken heart.
—Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable 

In season four of The Cosmic We, Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes and co-host Rev. Donny Bryant discuss “crisis contemplation.” Holmes believes contemplative experience can emerge in times of collective crisis. 

Donny Bryant: Crisis contemplation begins with what you call the communal, village, or tribal experience of crisis. Many times, we tend to deal with crisis at the individual level. We tend to look at what’s happening to me, what I have lost, what I feel, how this impacts me … or my emotional stability. Experience of crisis at the individual level is critically important, and we don’t want to discount that. But you are inviting us to frame and understand how crisis can be experienced at the communal, tribal, national, and global levels.  

Barbara Holmes: When you’re experiencing crisis as an individual, that’s what St. John of the Cross calls “the dark night of the soul.” You’re wrestling with God. You’re doing what you need to do to handle what’s coming up out of you that you don’t understand. It’s personal. You’re getting a divorce, your child is ill … or you’re just having the catastrophe of everyday life.  

But that’s not the same thing for a group of people. I use three categories to talk about crisis contemplation—the event is without warning; the people upon whom it is inflicted can’t do anything about it. There is no recourse. You’re caught. There is no place to go in the hold of a slave ship. There is nothing to be done when you’re walking from North Carolina as a Native American to Oklahoma. Something else has to arise to keep you going, to enliven your spirit, to help you survive—if survival is in the cards.  

Crisis contemplation is that spirit that emerges when the breaking occurs. We find it in every single culture. The Chinese call this spirit chi (qi), the Egyptians call it Ma’at, and Hindus call it prana. Kuzipa Nalwamba writes of the concept of Mupasi, which is an African description of a spirit that dwells within all of us. [1] It’s individual but also communal…. When you are all suffering, Mupasiis that vital spiritual voice that weaves the lives of all of us into an inseparable bond. It makes reality one whole. It gives kinship to all of us. When you think about it, that means that loving our neighbors is not just a little anecdote or possibility. With the moving of the Spirit, it’s inherent to our being, for where the Spirit abides there’s always unity.  

Slowing Down Is the Solution

It’s in the darkness, it’s in the moment of crisis when you have fallen through all of your own expectations that there is the opportunity for rebirthing.
—Barbara A. Holmes, “Contemplation,” The Cosmic We  

CAC teacher Barbara A. Holmes calls contemplation “a soft word in a hard world.” In this episode of The Cosmic We, she differentiates between crisis contemplation and contemplation as it’s usually considered:  

Most of us think of contemplation as something we do voluntarily. It’s an entry into deep and sometimes sacred places. We’re usually safe and comfortable, and this type of contemplation is more personal. But when we’re talking about crisis contemplation that has communal impact, we’re talking about a completely different type of contemplation. For me, it’s a breaking and a shattering of expectations. It’s the experience of your worlds colliding. Everything is happening that shouldn’t be happening. So the question becomes, how do you contemplate when you’re devastated? When you’re under siege? When you’re beleaguered by ecological catastrophe, injustice, and oppression? How do you contemplate then? 

Crisis contemplation begins, Barbara Holmes shares, when we relinquish our usual approaches to problem solving:  

When we’re in a crisis situation, the question becomes, “What’s the answer?” and “How does contemplation help, if it can?” No one is going to like the response because there isn’t a response in the ordinary ways. Everyone is going to want a clear process to resolve something. What do we do? How do we do it? What’s going to make us all feel better? There aren’t any answers like that. When there is nothing to do, some of the things that can be done are things we don’t want to do. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe says it most clearly. He says the first thing you do is slow down:  

To ‘slow down’ … seems like the wrong thing to do when there’s fire on the mountain. But here’s the point: in ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises. We rush through the same patterns we are used to. Of course, there isn’t a single way to respond to a crisis; there is no universally correct way. However the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved…. It is about staying in the places that are haunted. [1]   

Holmes describes the challenge of “slowing down”:  

In order to love, you have to slow down. There’s no such thing as “drive-by loving.” You have to give attention to the object, to the person, of your love. There has to be reciprocity and mutuality. It is giving ourselves over, letting go so that something else can do the loving through us and for us, because we’re not capable of it.  

[47] No One Loves Because He Sees Why

Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downward.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Father Richard views shadow work as essential for our transformation:  

Shadowlands are good and necessary teachers. They are not to be avoided, denied, fled, or explained away. They are not even to be forgiven too quickly. First, like Ezekiel the prophet, we must eat the scroll that is “lamentation, wailing, and moaning” in our belly, and only eventually sweet as honey (Ezekiel 2:9–3:3).  

There’s a shadowland where we are led by our own selfishness, stupidity, sinfulness, and by living out of the false self. We have to work our way back out of this with brutal honesty, confessions, surrenders, forgiveness, and often by some necessary restitution or apology. By any account, it is major “inner surgery” and feels like dying—although it also feels like immense liberation. We need help at these times.  

There’s another shadowland, however, into which we’re led by God and grace, and the nature of the journey itself. Many saints have called it “the dark night.” The difference is that we still sense that we have been led here intentionally, somehow. We know we are in liminal space, betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun—filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort—but it is the dark night of God. All transformation takes place in such liminal space. [1] 

Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama wrote this prayer for those dwelling in the shadowlands:  

God of darkness 

You must be the god of darkness 

because if you are not, whom else can we turn to?  

Turn to us now.  

Turn to us. 

Turn your face to us.  

Because it is dark here.  

And we are in need. We are people in need.  

We can barely remember our own truth, and if you too have 

forgotten, 

then we are without a hope of a map.  

Turn to us now.  

Turn to us.  

Turn your face to us.  

Because you turned toward us in the body of incarnation.  

You turned toward us.  

Amen. [2] 

_______________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

Mighty God, Help me to trust You by relinquishing control into Your hands—letting go, knowing that You are God. This is Your world: You made it and You control it. My part in the litany of Love is to be responsive to You. You have planted in my soul a gift of receptivity to Your Presence. I want to guard this gift and nurture it with the Light of Your Love. I rejoice that You encourage me to speak candidly to You—pouring out my heart as I express my concerns and bring You my requests. After opening up to You, I like to thank You for answering my prayers even though I don’t yet see results. When the problems come to mind again, please remind me to continue thanking You for the answers that are on the way. I’ve found that when I tell You about my concerns over and over again, I live in a state of tension. But if I thank You for how You are answering my prayers, my mind-set becomes much more positive and peaceful. Thankful prayers keep my focus on Your Presence and on Your great and precious promises. In Your excellent Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 46:10 NASB; Stop striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted on the earth.”

PSALM 62:8; Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.

COLOSSIANS 4:2;  Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.

2 PETER 1:4; Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. 

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 181). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Self-Critical Thinking

The Hebrew prophets do not hesitate to criticize their religious tradition, even while loving it. Father Richard shows how they help us to incorporate the shadow side of reality:  

The Hebrew prophets are in a category of their own. Within the canonical, sacred scriptures of other world religions we don’t find major texts that are largely critical of that religion. The Hebrew prophets were free to love their tradition and to criticize it at the same time, which is a very rare art form. One of the most common judgments I hear from other priests is, “You criticize the Church.” But criticizing the Church, as such, is just being faithful to the pattern set by the prophets and Jesus. That’s exactly what they did (see Matthew 23). The only question is whether one does it in a negative way or in a way that is faithful to God. I pray that I am doing the second. You pray too! 

The presumption for most people is that if we criticize something, then it means we don’t love it. Wise people like the prophets would say the opposite. The Church’s sanctification of the status quo reveals that we have not been formed by the prophets, who were radical precisely because they were traditionalists. Institutions always want loyalists and “company men”; we don’t want prophets. We don’t want people who point out our shadow side. It is no accident that the prophets and the priests are usually in opposition to one another (see Amos 5:21–6:7, 7:10–17). I think it is fair to say that the prophetic charism was repressed in almost all Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity. None of us have been known for criticizing ourselves. We only criticize one another, sinners, and heretics—who were always elsewhere! Yet Paul says the prophetic gift is the second most important charism for building up of the Gospel (1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11). [1] 

We have to experience the negative side of reality along with the positive. No wonder we split, avoid, and deny. No wonder we prefer abstract ideas, where we can dismiss the unacceptable material. But the Hebrew Scriptures amazingly incorporate the negative. Jesus does the same when he is “tempted by the devil for forty days” (Luke 4:2). The Jewish people, against all odds, kept their complaining and avoiding, and kept their arrogant and evil kings and their very critical public prophets inside of their Bible. [2]  

Of course, there is such a thing as negative criticism and positive criticism. I think we can feel the difference on the level of energy. When we read the spare, unfiltered texts of the prophets, some of them sound negative, as does Jesus, too. But my assumption is that this criticism comes from a primary positive encounter with Divine Reality. We see this in other parts of their lives and writings. The positive energy is the overriding experience. [3] 

[49] The Same

The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 26-27). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The Grace of Aging

Author Connie Zweig writes about shifting our emphasis from our “roles” to our “souls” as we age, and how shadow-work allows us to discover a deeper identity:  

The shadow is our personal unconscious, that part of our mind that is behind or beneath our conscious awareness.… The shadow holds the key to removing the inner obstacles that block us from finding the treasures of late life.…  

The shadow is like a darkroom in which our feelings, dreams, and images lie dormant. Shadow-work is like the process of development in which our feelings, dreams, and images come back to life.  

In the context of age, most of us learn that being independent, quick, productive, and strong are highly valued and result in rewards of approval and status. On the other hand, we learn that their opposite traits—dependent, slow, unproductive, and weak—are devalued and result in disapproval and shame. Naturally, we dread the loss of these socially acceptable traits as we age, slow down, do less, and need others more.  

If our images of and associations with aging remain outside of our awareness, dormant in the darkroom, then … we don’t even notice that we fail to notice them. Like my eighty-nine-year-old friend, who told me that he didn’t want to be with “old people” because he wasn’t like them, we deny our reality and reject a part of ourselves. Our physical, cognitive, and emotional changes carry a heavy burden of shame. But without that awareness, our opportunities are lost.  

When we learn how to establish a conscious relationship with those parts of ourselves that are outside of awareness, we can attune to our many inner voices and detect which can be guides for us now—and which can sabotage our dreams. We can learn to slow down, turn within with curiosity, and open to what’s calling to us without dismissing it—and without being taken over by it. That’s what I call “romancing” the shadow. [1] 

Father Richard acknowledges that the shadow work of moving beyond identification with our roles and personas takes a lifetime:  

I’m sorry to report that shadowboxing continues until the end of life, the only difference being that we’re no longer surprised by our surprises or so totally humiliated by our humiliations! As we age, we come to expect various forms of half-heartedness, deceit, vanity, or illusion from ourselves. But now we can see through them, which destroys most of their game and power.  

We all identify with our persona so strongly when we are young that we become experts at denial and learn to eliminate or deny anything that doesn’t support it. Our shadow self makes us all into hypocrites on some level, someone playing a role rather than being “real.” We’re all in one kind of closet or another and are even encouraged by society to play our roles. Usually everybody else can see our shadow, so it is crucial that we learn what everybody else knows about us—except us! [2] 

[48] My Neighbor

A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him…. The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 26). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

What the Shadow Reveals

This week’s meditations focus on the shadow self, an essential concept in Richard Rohr’s work drawn from Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jungian analyst Ann Belford Ulanov describes it this way:  

On a personal level, our shadow is all we would not be, often all our parents told us was bad behavior; it is all we would improve, all we would fix and get over, move on from.… Our enemies can tell us what our shadow is in a minute, though it is hard for us to see because, like a physical shadow, it is always behind us, adding three dimensions, depth. Most of us have dreams of being chased by a shadowy figure; that was the origin of Jung’s name for this complex. We find in our shadow complex what our ego deems negative, and usually it is. But we also may find in the shadow good parts, positive dreams, capacities for hope and creativity that we have left to languish. Sometimes it is the shadow part that saves our lives, that points the new direction. [1]  

Richard counsels us to be mindful of ways religion can create the shadow within:  

Persona (Greek for “stage mask”) and shadow are correlative terms. Shadow work gradually detaches us from our diligently constructed personas, often shaped in the first half of life. Our stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” Our shadow is what we refuse to see about ourselves, and what we do not want others to see. The more we have cultivated and protected a chosen persona, the more shadow work we will need to do. Therefore, we need to be especially careful of clinging to any idealized role or self-image, such as minister, parent, doctor, nice person, mentor, moral believer, or president of this or that. These are huge personas to live up to; they trap many people in lifelong delusion that this role is who they are or who they are only allowed to be.  

The more we are attached to and unaware of such a protected self-image, the more shadow self we will likely have. This is especially dangerous for a “spiritual leader” or “professional religious person” because it involves such an ego-inflating self-image. Whenever ministers, or any true believers, are too anti-anything, we can be pretty sure there’s some shadow material lurking somewhere nearby. Zealotry is a good revelation of one’s overly repressed shadow. 

Our self-image is not substantial or lasting; it is simply created out of our own mind, desire, and choice—and everybody else’s preferences for us! It is not objective at all but entirely subjective (which does not mean that it doesn’t have real influence). The movement to second-half-of-life wisdom has much to do with necessary shadow work and the emergence of healthy self-critical thinking, which alone allows us to see beyond our own shadow and disguise and to find who we are, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). [2] 

The Overly-Defended Ego 

Father Richard explains the ego’s role in creating the shadow self:  

The ego is that part of the self that wants to be significant, central, and important by itself, apart from anybody else. It wants to be both separate and superior. It is defended and self-protective by its very nature. It must eliminate the negative to succeed at this. The ego is what Jesus called an “actor,” usually translated from the Greek as “hypocrite” (see Matthew 23). If our “actor” is merely defended, the shadow will be denied and repressed; but if our “actor” is overly defended, the shadow is actually hated and projected elsewhere.   

One point here is crucial: The shadow self is not of itself evil; it just allows us to do evil without recognizing it as evil! In fact, we often believe that we’re doing something good. That’s the power of the shadow. That is why Jesus criticizes hypocrisy more than anything else. Jesus is never upset with sinners, but only with people who pretend they are not sinners. Check this out, story by story, in the Gospels. This is surprising and even shocking! Why is it that this clear pattern is seldom pointed out in sermons? It might have to do with the fact that religion often can’t see its own shadow and projects it elsewhere. Thus, the high degree of morally judgmental people among most religious groups, which allows them to remain untouched in their self-sufficiency, racism, militarism, and materialism. 

Jungian scholar Ann Belford Ulanov points to the dangers of the group shadow: 

On a cultural level, shadow means what our group, our tribe, our religion, our political party deems negative, out of bounds, to be shunned, to be improved, or to be punished. Behind every social oppression lurks a piece of group shadow whose members are exporting it onto others who are not of their tribe. When the shadow part is not faced, it goes unconscious and lives there. [1] 

Father Richard continues:  

We cannot really get rid of the shadow; we can only expose its game—which is, in great part, to get rid of its effects. Or as it states in Ephesians, “Anything exposed to the light turns into light itself” (5:14). The cause of our unrecognized and fully operative evil is our egocentricity, not our weaknesses. Only those who are converted can say like Paul, “When I am weak, I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). When Jesus does oppose human sinfulness, it is the sins of malice with which he has no patience; the sins of weakness are always patiently healed. Jesus rightly accuses us religious folks of “straining out gnats while swallowing camels” (Matthew 23:24). This pattern exists to this day. 

Jesus and the prophets deal with the root cause, which is always our radical egocentricity. Our problem is not usually our shadow self nearly as much as our over-defended ego, which always sees, hates, and attacks its own faults in other people, and thus avoids its own conversion. 

[42] Members of One Another (Seemed appropriate for this Juneteenth)

We shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers. For He cannot be our Father, save as He is their Father; and if we do not see Him and feel Him as their Father, we cannot know Him as ours.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 23). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Jesuit priest Greg Boyle founded Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program. He shares stories of the men and women he works with who demonstrate that each of us is sacred, no matter what we’ve been through:  

Joel, a man who did considerable time in prison, told me, “When my toes hit the floor in the morning, I’m on the lookout.”  

“On the lookout for what?” I asked him.  

“For God,” he said. “God is always leaving me hints. He’s dropping me anonymous tips all the time.” This is the God of love trying to break through. This God will not be outdone in extravagant tenderness. Leaving hints as “deep as the nether world or high as the sky,” as the prophet Isaiah reminds us [7:11]. We get to choose: the god who judges and is embarrassed [by us], or the One who notices and delights in us.  

Greg Boyle or “G,” as he is affectionately known, tells the story of Anthony, a trainee at Homeboy Industries who has three daughters: 

Half of Anthony’s life had been spent in jails and detention facilities. Before coming to us, a meth addiction crippled him surely as much as his earlier gang allegiance did. We’re speaking in my office one day and he tells me that he and his twin brother, at nine years old, were taken from their parents and a house filled with violence and abuse and sent to live with their grandmother. “She was the meanest human being I’ve ever known,” Anthony says. Every day after school, every weekend, and all summer long, for the entire year Anthony and his twin lived with her (until they ran away), they were forced to strip down … sit in this lonely hallway … and not move. “She would put duct tape over our mouths … cuz … she said, ‘I hate the sound of your voices.’” Then Anthony quakes as the emotion of this memory reverberates. “This is why,” he says, holding a finger to his mouth, “I never shush my girls.” He pauses and restores what he needs to continue. “I love the sound … of their voices. In fact, when the oldest one grabs a crayon and draws wildly on the living room wall and my wife says, ‘DO something! Aren’t ya gonna TELL her something?’ I crouch down, put my arm around my daughter, and the two of us stare at the wall, my cheek resting on hers, and I point and say, ‘Now, that’s the most magnificent work of art … I have ever seen.’”  

Here is the Good News: The God we most deeply want IS the God we actually have, and the god we fear is, in fact, the partial god we’ve settled for. God looks at us and is ecstatic. This God loves the sound of our voices and thinks that all of us are a magnificent work of art. “You’re here.” God’s cheek resting on ours. God’s singular agenda item.  

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Sarah Young

My loving God, You are my Strength! I begin this day feeling weak and weary, but that’s okay. My weakness is a reminder of my dependence on You. I need to remember that You are continually with me, and You will help me as I go along my way. So I take hold of Your hand in joyful trust—asking You to strengthen me and guide me. I delight in Your loving Presence! Whenever I’m feeling inadequate for the task ahead, it’s crucial for me to stop and think about my resources. You, my Strength, are infinite: You never run out of anything! So when I work in collaboration with You, I must not set limits on what can be accomplished. Instead, I will depend on You to give me everything I need for this endeavor. Whether I reach the goal quickly or gradually, I know I’ll get there in Your perfect timing. Thus, I can refuse to let delays or detours discourage me. Help me to keep moving forward step by step—and to trust wholeheartedly that You know what You are doing. I’m learning that perseverance and trust make a potent combination! In Your strong Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 59:16–17; But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love; for you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble. 17 You are my strength, I sing praise to you; you, God, are my fortress, my God on whom I can rely.

ISAIAH 41:13; For I am the Lord your God. who takes hold of your right hand. and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you

PHILIPPIANS 4:13 NASB; I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. 

ISAIAH 40:28–29; Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. 29 He gives strength to the weary

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 174). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.