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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Walking in the Night
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
October 28, 2007
I spoke to a six year old last week who told me that she’s going to be a vampire for Halloween. To demonstrate her character’s amazing powers she gave a ghoulish laugh and curved her fingers at me in a menacing way. This is quite a change for her; she had lived in princess clothing, almost day and night, for the past few years. Sometime over the last year she must have accomplished the great work of integrating her inner princess.
And now I find it interesting that she’s very excited about being a very ghoulish, very toothy vampire. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that she’s chosen to be a vampire at the very time that she’s losing her baby teeth. Is this a way for her to practice sinking her permanent teeth into the world, biting it off, chewing on her own experience? Could it be that as she leaves her family and makes her way alone into the larger world and begins to learn its rules, she’s chosen to explore by becoming a wild, un-rule-y character—one that can only come out at night?
If you had the chance to dress up for Halloween this year, what would you be? I’ve never been to one of those fantasy Halloween parties—come as your favorite character from a novel or move, or favorite sports figure. If I was invited, I wonder who I’d want to dress as.
The question gets more interesting when I peek into darker areas of my psyche. The characters I’d most like to let out into the darkness are parts of myself that rarely get to strut their stuff in public. I remember one stressful day when I was in divinity school. I’d been thinking and studying deeply about goodness, morals and all kinds of virtuous stuff. At the same time the pressure of academics, parenting teenagers, work, extended family issues and commuting began to approach a magnitude that felt as if it could crush coal into diamonds. And suddenly I, who am always so responsible about my commitments, began to have a very persistent leave-it-all-behind fantasy about going on the road as a back up singer for a very grungy MTV rock star who grossed me out because he was such a slob.
At first I was repulsed and embarrassed when I noticed that my fantasy self could have been Grunge Guy’s twin sister. But she was strangely compelling, and I felt better when I thought about her, so I kept saying hello to her and listening to the passion and sorrow in her singing. And as I did, I began to realize that part of me was feeling not just stressed but also bullied, even oppressed by the expectations, pressures and deadlines in my life at that time.
I wonder what other characters might live inside me, unknown. The Jungian psychologist, James Hillman, says that everyone has a whole boardinghouse full of characters inside, some who haven’t ever met each other. The ones who like to follow the bright, clear day light rules, he says, “may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for…the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.”
Jungians call all the parts of ourselves that we repress or put on hold “the Shadow.” When we refuse to acknowledge these things, the contents of our Shadow can become a great source of embarrassment, pain and fear. So we have a tendency to ignore whatever repulses us or frightens us. We push all this into the basement of our minds, turn out the lights and bolt the door.
But we might want to rethink that, because there’s tremendous power that’s lost to us when we deny parts of ourselves, spiritual power as well as psychic power. If we don’t ever invite the oddballs of our inner world into the light of day to have a conversation with us over afternoon tea, they have stealthy, creative, powerful ways of sneaking out of the basement and into our waking life all on their own. They upset our carefully arranged lives and plans and presentations when they do, sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in the form of major crises and disasters.
At first they might just slow us down. When we don’t acknowledge our full range of being, we cut ourselves off from vital life energy. We use up tremendous energy pushing these vital forces down and away. It’s exhausting, and we eventually become lethargic and depressed. We might not want to know how much we need our inner clown, our inner wise guy, our inner grunge singer, but we do need them. It can be embarrassing to face what we don’t like in ourselves—all the ways we fail to measure up to our own inner expectations and demands. But we ignore our Shadow qualities at our peril, not theirs.
Even more, we begin to notice what we’ve pushed away beginning to pop up everywhere. When we refuse to accept all of ourselves, we risk pushing our disdained, unwanted parts off onto others who we then label with contempt and revulsion. Suddenly, someone’s minor idiosyncrasies begin to drive us completely nuts.
What’s even worse though than labeling others behavior “strange,” is that we name them as evil. And soon we begin to see the “evil doers,” those repulsive, dangerous others everywhere we turn. And we become convinced that they’re out to get us.
Logic is not much help. You can’t just decide not to act in ways that your less desired self urges, because it’s sneaky. It’s a trickster. It stays hidden or disguised and yet somehow makes you believe that whatever it’s urging you to do is all your own idea, and that you have good ideas. It makes you think other people really do possess whatever quality you cannot admit to in yourself. Until it coaxes you into the open and tricks you into exposing your ignorance. Not to humiliate and embarrass you—but rather to help you understand something about yourself.
The Shadow has no regard for logic, rules or regulations. What it does have is energy for life and for making things happen. “In Eastern teachings there is a saying that everything has a front and a back,” Diane Berke writes. “Energy expresses itself in polarities, in opposites…We contain both darkness and light, sorrow and joy, the capacity for selfishness as well as generosity, for cruelty as well as compassion.” However strange or frightening or repulsive we perceive it at first, our Shadow comes to us in service of growth and wholeness; our Shadow means us well.
This past summer I took a class. We were learning about the ten sefirot, the energy centers Kabbalists recognize in the body. One energy center on the right side is Chessed, lovingkindness, compassion. One on the opposite side is Gnef, which means healthy limits, or enough. The Kabala teaches that you can only go so far into one side, one aspect of a quality before it turns from a positive into a negative. Too much compassion and you give yourself away and allow others to become tyrants. Too much limit setting becomes harshness and withholding, or it can become selfishness and loneliness.
The way to manage this is to embrace whatever state you find yourself in, but to keep going because energy moves through the centers in looping patterns. And if you keep moving you’ll break through the downside of one state into the up side of another. And when you reach the downside of that state you’ll push through to the upside of the other. Spiritual practice helps you stay in the positive side for longer, and get out of the negative side quicker, but it denies neither. This is basic polarity theory, but spiritual teachers discovered these principles long before modern science and business.
If you want to try something interesting, you could sit with a blank piece of paper and get quiet, and imagine the face of your best self...what are some of the qualities you see there….focus, composure, serenity, determination, kindness, intelligence, thoughtfulness, happiness….and imagine how you might draw the face of your best self on that paper.
And now if you flip the paper over….imagine the face of your worst self…what are some of the qualities you see on your worst self’s face…anger, impatience, arrogance, greed, selfishness, cruelty…and imagine the expression you might draw to show the world the face of your worst self.
We know which self portrait we’d rather hang over the living room mantle. The trouble is, whichever one we chose would be dishonest, because what’s reflected on our real face is actually a mixture of both our best and worst qualities. We can choose which qualities we want to cultivate and express, it’s true. That’s one of the tenents of Unitarian Universalism—we can cultivate our character, our soul. But we can’t simply ignore one side of our self or the other. If we did that a tyrant would come to live in the basement of our psyches. Even if we try to out run it, we can’t, because our rejected qualities are swift and start running after us the moment they sense our movement to get away from them.
Something more interesting might be to get the two sides to talk to each other. Get them to tell each other what they each need. Sweetness and Light might say to Impatience and Arrogance, “Dear One, what I need most from you is some backbone. Help me set limits so I don’t disappear completely.” And Impatience and Arrogance might say, “Listen Toots, you could help me if you reminded me to slow down and think about what it feels like on the other side. I need help in thinking of someone other than myself.”
This is the place where the psyche and the spirit meet and interact; as such, it’s holy ground The Jungian Robert Johnson said, “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline.” When we work on our shadow we grow our souls. The writer, Tian Dayton, reminds us that when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we might understand it as a walk through our own dark side.
What modern people have lost is a sense of darkness as holy, darkness in which wholeness might be cultivated and embraced. In medieval times, the Catholic Church encouraged the celebration of Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve. In the liturgical life of the church, the great holy days are Christmas and Easter. In medieval times both holy days actually began the evening before with vigils (although now Christmas Eve technically isn’t a vigil, but Midnight Mass is a vestige of the old vigil), because the spiritual work of transformation always takes place in the darkness, in the shadow of God’s dark night.
We’re a long way from the pre-industrial world, and much is better in our lives because of advances in science and technology. Unitarian Universalism had a big part in insisting on the importance and right of human reason. However, what’s not better, I believe, is that we’ve lost things that are crucial to a rich, satisfying inner life. We’ve lost a sense of mythos. Mythos isn’t something that’s fake or false or a lie, but rather is something poetically, metaphorically true. Not literally true, in the sense that this world all around us is literally true, but true nonetheless.
###
Last Friday night it was fairly mild and not terribly windy. Children and their families came here dressed in costumes to eat together, play some seasonal games, carve some spooky glowing pumpkin lanterns, and roast hot dogs over a fire. The kids had fun running around, hanging out on the playground and climbing the trees in the darkness. It was strange and different, a world turned inside out in the darkness.
When the world gets turned inside out, we get that way a little bit too. We become aware of parts of ourselves that had been hidden, unknown. Feelings, thoughts that had escaped our attention suddenly come closer, and we notice them in detail. In the darkness we are suddenly full of thoughts and feelings, and wonder. By paying attention to all this we feel closer to others; we increase our capacity to know more of what it means to be human. By paying attention we gain mastery over our lesser selves, which is not so much a matter of boxing up a magic being to control it, as spending time with it, getting to know it’s real name. In folktales, when you know an entity’s real name, you have power over it. By getting to know our lesser selves, we gain the mastery and power to be in relationship to it, without being controlled by it.
As we come to know our own power and capacity to be cruel, or selfish or angry, we begin to name the demons within ourselves. This is not about cultivating our power in order to use it over or against others. Rather, we can use this energy for good. If we spend time with our own inner thief we begin to know how her mind works. Not so that we can set out to become the world’s best cat burglar, but so that we might become wise about not getting taken in by dishonest people.
When we know our own inner capacity to commit acts that are evil, it doesn’t mean that we will go out and do evil deeds. It does mean that we have a better chance of not projecting our fear and dread about the power of evil onto people who aren’t members of our culture or our faith. It dramatically lessens the possibility that we’ll turn our military powers out against them.
###
The dark returns on a very regular basis every evening. When we find ourselves walking in darkness, may we be courageous and wise enough to turn toward what frightens us and name whatever we encounter.
In so doing, may we claim the power of our experience in this sometimes strange, magic, holy, beautiful world. Amen.
Tian Dayton, The Quiet Voice of Soul, Susquehanna University Press, 1995
James Hillman, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, Random House 1999
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