The term “the Shadow” as a psychological concept, refers to the dark, feared, unwanted side of our personality. In developing a conscious personality we all seek to embody in ourselves a certain image of what we want to be like. Those qualities that could have become part of this conscious personality, but are not in accord with the person we want to be, are rejected and constitute the shadow personality.

    “The term shadow refers to that part of the personality which has been repressed for the sake of the ego ideal.” (Edward Whitmont) The “ego ideal” consists of the ideals or standards that shape the development of the ego or conscious personality. These ego ideals may come from society, parents, a peer group, and/or religious mores. We may consciously and deliberately select them, or they may operate more or less unconsciously to mould ego development.

… So society tells us that we cannot steal, murder, or engage in other socially destructive behaviour without incurring punishment. Most of us conform more or less to this requirement and, consequently, deny and repress the thief and murderer within us. The Judaeo-Christian moral code goes further and urges us to be loving, forgiving, sexually chaste, etc. In trying to conform to this ideal we reject the part of us that gets angry, is vindictive, and has uncontrolled sexual urges…

    As we develop psychologically, we come to identify with our ego ideal and reject all those qualities that contradict it. But they rejected qualities do not cease to exist simply because they have been denied direct expression. Instead they live on within us and form the secondary personality that psychology calls the Shadow…

    One reason that the problem of the Shadow has been ignored by the Church is that it leads us to paradoxical situations and confronts us with the need for a paradoxical ethic.

    We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

    So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

    Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

    When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."

    Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."
"Tell me, teacher," he said.

    "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, ^{and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"}

    Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled."
"You have judged correctly," Jesus said.

    Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little."

SERMON

    You’ve heard me talk from time to time about the nature of the theological task in our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition and how it’s done. Theology is critical thinking, reasoning reflectively, connecting the revelations of our faith tradition to an analysis of our lives today, to see what meanings we can live into; and, thus, expand in depth our spiritual lives. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic orthodoxy begins the theological task with a declaration of what God is. For the creedal Christian this approach is found in the first line of the creed, “I believe in God the Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord.” But in our liberal theological tradition of Unitarianism and Universalism - also descended from the ancient Jewish and Christian traditions, and cousins to the Moslems - the approach to theology is different. Theology begins with the question of human nature, and discerning from that what might be considered Divine. This approach assumes some things, as all perspectives do. Faith is not about particular and certain beliefs, but about the quality of our trust. The opposite of faith is not wrong belief or unbelief, but fear. The spiritual life is about seeking to trust that contained in human nature and experience, the human condition and situation in nature, are elements that through their complexity and interconnectedness the Divine can in part be discerned. And, not only can it be discerned, but that we can choose to live into it. Everything human being does and experiences is grist for the mill of the spiritual life. Unless we are willing to engage the complexities that make us up, we will be enslaved by our own unconscious naiveté and ignorance. Thus, in Unitarian Universalism education and learning is an act that builds up faith, regardless of what we learn. There is no hidden or forbidden knowledge.

    One of the great modern ministers of a creedal Christian church was preaching on Easter Sunday a few years ago. He had carefully crafted his sermon to reach a theological, emotional, and spiritual zenith, approach to his faith tradition in that Easter Sunday was the most important Sunday of the year in his church. “There is only truth,” he bellowed, “only one redemptive truth, only one redemptive truth for all men and women. The truth that saves us, the truth that rescues us, the truth that redeems us. The truth of the erection! I mean, the resurrection!” A silence, then a collective gasp, and then uncontrollable laughter. Try as he might he had lost them and the moment. Oh, he would try to pick up the sermon again, and there would be a muffled laugh here, a coughing laugh there, and then the whole congregation would guffaw its way into bedlam. Again and again he tried to start over. He even tried to adjourn the sermon to the hymn, but, as he tells it, his accompanist couldn’t get through the hymn without breaking out into laughter, “Christ the Lord has Risen Today!” The preacher tried hastening the end the service with the Benediction but that didn’t work, either, and so he said, “Let’s all just go home,” and the whole congregation broke into a howling hilarity, hands slapping knees, heads shaking in mirthful incredulity. It was an Easter to be forgiven but never forgotten! You’ll remember this story too, I’ll bet. It is deeply instructive about human nature and the spiritual life.

    Why the minister’s slip of the tongue? Why couldn’t the parishioners stop laughing to finish the service? Humor like this is not haphazard, nor without Divine design. Humor is one means for the Shadow’s expression; that part of human being that we repress as we develop our concepts of the ideal self we seek to become.

    We develop concepts of who a man and a woman should be. We grow into good men and women, spiritual men and women, by cultivating and nurturing certain aspects of human nature. We are assisted in this development of a concept of human nature, and the real growth of the self into the persons we are, by parents, families, spiritual communities and traditions, neighborhoods, schools, and a million other social influences. We develop a psychological ego from an ideal that forms in us about who we are and should be as individuals. Yet, those parts of human nature that are unseemly, unsavory, or that just plain cause embarrassment or fear or shame, these we repress. But the facets of human nature are not destroyed. This is the Shadow side of the self, and it will gain expression in some way. Humor is one vehicle, as are dreams, and slips of the tongue and puns and the delight of double meanings.

    A human being is a mystery that causes fear to rise in us as much as wonder. And as fear is the opposite of faith, of trust that is the core of the spiritual life, it is critical that we face our fear.

    There are three general ways besides outright denial, to deal with the fact that human beings do bad things. The first is to declare that there is a higher law from God, the all powerful and all good being from which all good things are derived. And, that the individual self is impotent to affect either that ultimate goodness or the goodness of the world, except to frustrate it. God’s will, will be done, and we will not be a party to creating it because our evil nature does not allow us to. Existence is the domain of the cosmic war between God and the Devil. The best we can do is seek to place ourselves under God’s lawful plan, choose the right side to defend, and take all of what comes as somehow in our best interests like obedient foot soldiers a war. Our faith tradition does not represent this belief because we know that it is men and women who design all the lawful plans they ascribe to God, and measure what is the evil they ascribe to the Devil.

    The second is to declare that there is a war inside of us, like what Paul talked about in the reading. This is a war between the goodness we can discern, the Spiritual, and the badness that we are, the material. Paul accurate reads the human condition in pointing out that the good he could do he does not. But, his prescription to the malady of human nature is to seek purging the evil that is in us. The purging is done by Jesus’ atoning for our sin on the cross. We’re inherently sinful, but if we accept God’s gift – His pain is our gain – we can be purged of the evil that is human being, the sinful nature in which we exist in this world, and earn a heavenly reward upon our death. Our faith tradition does not represent this belief because it supposes that human being is essentially depraved and incapable of doing anything good, such that humanity is in need of a divine rescue. It assumes human nature is created in distinction from God; whereas our faith tradition assumes a likeness to God.

    The aim of the spiritual life in our tradition, and the task of theology, is to discern the boundary between resembling and not resembling the Divine. Thus, the third is to see that what we call evil is part of human nature and human existence, but need not necessarily gain dominion over us. The jury is still out on any one of us, and in terms of the quality of human existence, although it is a blessing to be alive. That is our faith tradition in seeking to trust. To walk towards the far horizon trusting that this life is a blessing somehow! But what is certain when beliefs are not, is that to gain trust, to live the life of faith, requires a confrontation with our fears.

    Have you ever had a dream that seemed so real and disturbing that you awoke frightened? Like a dream where your murdered or stole or betrayed or became a vile racist? Once I had a dream that my insides were being consumed by cancer. I could see the gradual advance of the cancer through my insides, and the dream was so real that I awoke gasping for breath and certain I would die that moment! I knew what the Shadow was expressing. I was confronting presently in my life, what would certainly and clearly destroy my spiritual, moral, and ethical life like seeing cancer consume a body. Shortly after that, I made a choice that took me towards health and away from spiritual, moral, and ethical death. But I remember that the dream seemed as real as the world I awoke to.

    It takes such great effort to confront the prospect that within human nature is the capacity of the thief and the betrayer and the murderer and the racist. We are both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that mystery is the source of a fear of ourselves. We look over the history of humanity and find instances where individuals have become wholly and completely the very evil that the Shadow contains. It is not just a Star Wars’ movie line, to choose to go over to the Dark Side, and this we rightly fear:

It is because we must see it specifically that looking into the mirror and seeing our dark reflection meets with great resistance. Part of this resistance is perhaps the fear that if we recognize the Shadow it will overcome us; we dread seeing our dark side for the fear we will become it. (Sanford, 64)

    And psychologists point out that the Shadow side of us is where life energy is contained as well. If you remember in the literary classic Faust, the lead character is tempted by the Devil to sell his soul in return for the Devil giving him all things in this world that he desired. Faust’s life was bereft of vitality. His purity had exhausted him.

    Thus it takes so much of our energy to repress the Shadow out of a fear of it. And when we consider what we might become but struggle mightily not to, the guilt over the prospect we are betrayers, thieves, murderers, and racists only exacerbates this fear.

    It is a paradoxical ethic. If we admit the Shadow we might become it. Facing it causes unbearable guilt. Fleeing it dries up energy. And, there is one more very important addition. Being naïve or ignorant of human nature only gives the Shadow the driver’s seat to our thoughts and activities. Who didn’t think the Governor was visiting prostitutes, or denied that the preacher condemning homosexuality is gay and at war with who he can’t accept he is?

    We can project out our capacity to do evil onto all of existence, fashion it into a persona, believe that persona is alive in the form of Satan or Hitler or Bin Laden, battling God like a Lord of the Rings movie, and pray for deliverance from the evil of this world. But, such certain belief will not deepen trust or faith.

    Or, like Paul, we can deny and repress the Shadow, call it sin, and believe the self is a battleground between it and virtue. The inner turmoil becomes our nature, and the need for control becomes greater and more pressing. The spiritual life becomes a hopeless struggle to expel the inherent depravity which human being essentially is at the core. We become anxiety and dread and the sickness unto death. We become the walking dead believing with unwavering certainty that Jesus’ death and resurrection atone for this cosmic crusade within us that has made us wretched and in need of a vicarious rescue! “For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” That, my friends, is pathological. And the thing is, the Shadow will drive us even as we think our purity has expunged it!

In practice, it is exactly the opposite way; we are more likely to be overcome by the Shadow when we do not recognize it, for the unrecognized Shadow has myriad ways of asserting itself, as… seen in the case of projection. (Sanford, 64)

    Or, to say it another way, the unsavory violence contained inside movies like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, both Oscar nominees, are not inducements to tempt one away from a purity that would destroy evil. They are the expressions of the Shadow, and evidence of what drives human beings when purity is sought and the Shadow denied and repressed. The violent capacity within human nature is not defeated but just more on display, when Mel Gibson uses it in service of his belief in Jesus’ atonement through physical horror! He just doesn’t recognize his Shadow when it writes, produces, directs, and stars in his movie!

    If we strive to become good by thinking we can eliminate our capacity for evil we become hateful. Of course, there are those who design the self in the likeness of the Shadow, and this absolutism of the self is thoroughly destructive and evil. The growth of the spiritual self is by a certain kind of cultivation. It is not to cultivate virtue by repressing our capacity for vice. Neither is it to become licentious, the complete victory of vice over virtue.

    Spiritual freedom is not when our capacity to choose evil is forgotten or denied or fled from, as in the case where the Shadow is repressed. And neither is Spiritual freedom when there are no boundaries, when anything the self desires is lifted up as necessarily good. We often want to flee virtue or to see vice as virtue, because to engage the Shadow and choose the light requires us to live inside of our guilt, act upon the need to confess the injuries we are complicit in, and to ask for forgiveness.

    “I am sorry” is, in fact, the spiritual mantra of those who have engaged the Shadow, know what they are capable of, and yet seek an Affection that liberates, and an Ultimate Trust that this existence is a Blessing.

    Thus, Jesus said what he said about the woman’s sins being forgiven. Her sins were forgiven not because Jesus said they were. He was just identifying what was obvious to him from her behavior, as it should be obvious to all human beings. The Pharisee showed he believed himself the religious one, and her not. But the religious and spiritual are not about believing in becoming pure and devoid of the capacity to transgress. The religious and spiritual are not about eliminating the reality that we owe debts to others by what we have done or left undone. The religious and spiritual are not about embracing vice, either willingly or because we refuse to use the Spiritual freedom with which we have been created. Shunning what we are capable of, will harden the heart with hatred, yield enmity towards those who believe differently, and hostility towards this blessed existence. Life becomes as much a prison to those who seek virtue in this way, as it does to those who shape their life by betraying freedom in living licentiously with no boundaries as to what they will do and not do.

    To live the spiritual life is to engage what we are capable of, confess it when we have lived the Shadow instead of the light, seek to right it with those upon whom we have transgressed, ask for forgiveness, and forgive others. The spiritual life is to live into the Spiritual Freedom that exists and into which creation unfolds in beauty and truth. Because to do all of this, to recognize what we are capable of as human beings, and yet to live into Affection, is to walk with others towards the likeness to the Divine in which all souls are created. It is to cultivate trust and live the life of faith.

He who has been forgiven little loves little. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much.

AMEN.

BENEDICTION

Be not afraid. And seeing there is naught to fear, and bearing witness to what can never die, go forth into the world in peace.

Be of good courage.

Search all things

And hold fast to that which is good.

Render unto no one evil for evil.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Help the afflicted.

Love all men, love all women, love all children,

Love all souls.

Serving the Most High.

And rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

AMEN.