Reading: from A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly
The drama (of human life) is this. We came as infants "trailing clouds of glory," arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, brining with us appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life--in short, with our 360-degree radiance--and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn't want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That's the first act of the drama. It doesn't mean our parents were wicked; they needed us for something. My mother, as a second generation immigrant, needed my brother and me to help the family look more classy. We do the same thing to our children; it's a part of life on this planet. Our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre-verbal place.[1]

"In Ixtli In Yollotl/Face and Heart" by Francisco X. Alarcon

may our ears
hear
what nobody
wants to hear

may our eyes
see
what everyone
wants to hide

may our mouths
speak
our true faces
and hearts

may our arms
be branches
that give shade
and joy

let us be a drizzle
a sudden storm
let us get wet
in the rain

let us be the key
the hand the door
the kick the ball
the road

let us arrive
as children
to this huge
playground:
the universe[2]

This seems like a good week to talk about the human shadow. I picked this sermon topic six weeks ago--before the NATO bombs started dropping on Yugoslavia, before the bullets and bombs exploded at Columbine High School. Once the Balkan war flared I knew I would need to incorporate that into this sermon. Tuesday night I knew I would need to incorporate the massacre in Littleton into the sermon as well. Contemplating the shadow gives us another angle on these two complex tragedies as well as a lens to look at ourselves more carefully.

I have been struck how deeply both tragedies weigh on our minds and hearts here, though geographically they are distant. Television and the not-lost quality of empathy have brought these tragedies close to our hearts. Like some of you I'm sure, the haunting, terrifying images of Littleton and Kosovo have interrupted my sleep and have even invaded my dreams. Littleton in particular seems so close. How many of you, like me, looked at the newspaper pictures of the two perpetrators and thought, "They don't look like cold-blooded killers. They look like boys I know!" Warnings of a school shooting in Racine and Neenah and an out-of-control student at Appleton West High School bring Littleton even more powerfully close to home. Students we know and love are afraid to go to school. We are afraid for them to go to school. "Intruder drills" have been added to fire and tornado drills in our schools. "Intruder" doesn't quite capture it: in recent cases such as Littleton, the "intruders" are fellow classmates. So it's not just fire and tornadoes that threaten our children's safety; potentially it's their classmates. Each student is a potential victim of such a crime; and each student is a potential "intruder," a potential killer. Intruder drills have replaced the nuclear war drills of the 50s and 60s. What better symbol of a dramatic change at the heart of our society: the enemy is no longer the Soviet Union. The enemy is us. Tragically, the killings at Columbine School and the reactions as near as Appleton West High School and Neenah High School seem to announce emphatically that these school killings are not going to go away anytime soon. They have become a fixture on our American landscape. I lament this tragedy.

This week in particular, many of you have wanted to talk with me about these tragedies. You, like me, want to give voice to the pain and anguish and powerlessness you feel deep inside. We keep saying "Never again!" to horrors like high school shootings, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and vague, open-ended military campaigns that invite escalation. We say "Never again!", yet the horrors keep happening. Many of you have or work with children and youth. You, like me, are struggling with how to process the war and the school attack with them. You, like me, are stumped by the two questions that defy easy answers: How can we make sense of what is going on? and What can you and I do about it?

Too easy explanations and recipes for a cure abound. Take Littleton. We need to pass far more stringent gun control laws, some say. Others say, we need to get more guns into law-abiding citizen's hands so they can defend themselves--just like the principal in Mississippi who single-handedly ended one of the first school shooting incidents with his handgun. Some say we need to install metal detectors in our schools. Others say we need smaller schools. We need some way to get more and better help to troubled youth. We have to help our parents do a better job of parenting. We need school uniforms. We need to cut down on the mayhem so readily accessible to children and adults on TV, in movies and video games, on the internet. All of these and more are lifted up by some as answers to the tragedy in Littleton. I embrace some of the answers; others I reject. But even the ones I embrace are pathetically incomplete. All the good answers will take years to make a difference. Realizing this, it's so easy to fall into powerlessness and hopelessness.

Thinking about the shadow this week has helped me contemplate the recent events in Littleton and Yugoslavia. The shadow, a metaphor first articulated by Carl Jung, sheds some light on the personality of humans and human communities. It's important to remember that the shadow is a metaphor, a picture, not an empirical concept. Robert Bly, a writer and follower of Jung, pictures the shadow as a big, invisible bag we each drag behind us. As children, we unconsciously put the parts of ourselves our parents don't like into that bag. We want and need our parents' love and approval so much that we feel compelled to get rid of the parts of ourselves that might threaten that love. Our bag keeps growing as we grow: we put in the parts of ourselves our teachers don't approve of. Then we put in the parts our peers don't like--especially in adolescence when our peers' approval can feel so crucial. By the time we reach adulthood, our bag is brimming--brimming with things like anger, wildness, sexuality, the energy of the opposite sex. Often we have so thoroughly internalized the lessons we have learned from parents, teachers and peers that we hate the parts of ourselves we stuff in the bag. But what's in that bag is part of us, just as much a part of us as the "nice" qualities we have cultivated.

Lets take anger as an example. Many of us relegate anger to the shadow. We are raised with the idea that our angry side is not at all desirable. Nice people don't get angry. If you want to be a nice boy or girl, then you better not show your anger. Hide it at all costs! Many of our parents modeled this brilliantly: they avoided ever getting angry at each other in front of us. A week ago I heard a lecture about the shadow. The lecturer talked about remarking to her mother a few weeks ago, "Mom, you and Dad never got angry." "Oh yes we did," the Mom replied. "Remember when we went out on Friday nights. Well, we'd get a motel room and either argue or make love." That's the kind of lengths many of us go to in order to shield our children from anger. The problem is that we all inevitably feel anger: it's part of being human. So when we feel anger, we feel ashamed and stuff it in that bag behind us.

Stuffing anger or another part of ourselves in this bag isn't in itself a problem. Dragging this bag or shadow behind us isn't a problem either, and the stuff in the bag is not in itself evil or terrible. Anger for example is not inherently evil or terrible.
Problems arise when we try to ignore our bag, when we try to pretend that it doesn't exist, when we believe the stuff in our bag doesn't really belong to us. Problems arise when we don't own our shadow. Problems arise when we repress our shadow. At the lecture I attended last week, the lecturer shared a poem by an unknown author that gets at the heart of repressing the shadow:

When you repress or suppress those things
That you don't want to live with,
You don't really solve the problem
Because you don't bury the problem dead--
You bury it alive!
It remains alive and active inside you!

You see, the things in our bag don't go away. They stay right there, as close and as ever present as a shadow. And whatever's locked in the bag regresses over time. The ignored stuff in our bags becomes destructive, barbaric. It becomes more and more hostile--even toward us. The more regressive and hostile it gets, the more dangerous it is to open the bag. So we try even harder to repress it, to keep the bag closed tightly at all costs. And the more we repress this side of ourselves that we hate, the more it slips out of the bag sideways: in violence, war and prejudice, for example.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde is a classic myth of the shadow. Here's the nice, kindly Dr. Jekyll. But repressed deep inside, ready to come out sideways, is the demented and dangerous Mr. Hyde. Jekyll and Hyde is a metaphor for the dangers of a repressed shadow. The more repressed Mr. Hyde becomes, the more consumed Dr. Jekyll becomes with hiding this part of himself. More and more of Dr. Jekyll's energy goes into repressing Mr. Hyde. The same thing happens with repressing our shadow: it is an enormous energy drain, preventing us from using our energy for more positive, creative parts of our life.
Another feature of a deeply repressed shadow is what Jung called "projection." Projection happens when we unconsciously take those images we have thrown into our shadow and project them on to someone else--just like a film projected onto a screen. This is another, destructive way the stuff from our shadow bag leaks out sideways.

Take anger again. A person learns as a child to hate the anger feelings within her. So she stuffs them in her shadow. Eventually she may unconsciously project these anger feelings onto someone else--a bully at school or a professor or a co-worker or a spouse. Since these anger feelings appear disconnected from herself, she can hate them and react to them in this other person. Yet her feelings in reaction may be far more about herself and her relationship with her own shadow than the person she now despises.

I wonder if projection played a role in the tragedy in Littleton. Did the two boys who did the killing project all they hated in themselves onto athletes and minorities and then, at the suicidal end, back onto themselves? I read in yesterday's newspaper that one of the boys had a Jewish grandmother. Part of his identity was Jewish, yet paradoxically he idolized Hitler and targeted his rage on Jews and other minorities. Did he project a twisted hatred of who he was on others? Did these boys, who by many accounts had their "nice" side, so repress their shadow to the point that the stuff in their bags exploded out? The shadow gives us another angle to contemplate and try to understand the tragedy.

The shadow metaphor can be helpful in contemplating not just individuals but whole communities and even nations. Communities and nations can similarly repress their shadow characteristics. The shootings in Littleton and the bombing of Yugoslavia might be seen as repressed expressions of our American shadow. As a nation, we tend to see ourselves as the righteous, peace-loving good guys. Yet barely below the surface lies a conflicting tendency: we are so quick to resort to violence. As a people, we rationalize using violence to destroy what we hate. While I don't mean to equate dropping bombs on Yugoslavia and killing fellow students at Columbine High School, there is a connection. We have to ask: Why are we one of the most violent people's on the planet? Is our tendency toward violence a destructive expression of stuff we've shoved in our national bag? Are there aspects of our national character we have repressed in this bag, aspects that come out in our violence?

Now comes the hardest question: What can we do about all this--on personal and collective levels? In part, we need to do what Jungians call "shadow work." This starts with yourself--there's never a better place to start changing than with oneself. We need to become more conscious of our shadow, more aware of what we have stuffed into the bags we drag around behind us. We need to pull those parts of ourselves we hate back into our consciouness. We need to integrate these repressed pieces of ourselves back into ourselves. We need to explore who we really are, asking the hard questions of ourselves and our communities, the kind of hard questions suggested in the Aztec poem I shared earlier. Jungians suggest lots of ways to do this; I'm going to concentrate on three.

First, we need to befriend our shadow. I think this is the theme of the beautiful closing hymn we shall sing in a few minutes.[3] The darkness that is our shadow isn't evil; it only comes out expressed in evil ways when we repress and ignore it. By befriending our shadow and being attentive to it--by owning it--we can transform the darkness of our shadow into the "sweet, sweet" darkness praised in the hymn. In the darkness of our shadows may be tremendous gifts of energy and creativity. If anger is in your shadow, don't repress and despise it. Rather, take that anger and befriend it. Ask questions of it. Find out what it has to tell you about yourself. Pull it out of your bag and put it back in yourself. If you do this, you'll have a whole lot better chance of expressing this anger that is a part of you appropriately than if you keep it stuffed in your bag.

Second, we need to watch what we hate. What you hate may well be a projection of a part of yourself that you hate. Being attentive to what we hate can be a wonderful path to confronting and unmasking our own repressed shadow. I am convinced that hatred of what seems to be Other is the most pressing problem facing our species--and I am convinced that what seems to be Other often is really ourselves, manifested as a shadow.

Finally, we need to find creative, non-destructive expressions for the aspects of ourselves we have stuffed in our shadows. Find creative and safe ways to open that bag you drag around and let some of it out. How do you integrate your shadow? Robert Bly writes:

In daily life one might suggest making the sense of smell, taste, touch, and hearing more acute, making holes in your habits, visiting primitive tribes, playing music, creating frightening figures in clay, playing the drum, being alone for a month, regarding yourself as a genial criminal. A woman might try being a patriarch at odd times of the day, to see how she likes it, but it has to be playful. A man might try being a witch at odd times of the day, and see how it feels, but it has to be done playfully. He might develop a witch laugh and tell fairy stories, as the woman might develop a giant laugh and tell fairy stories.[4]

It strikes me that this was exactly the spirit of our youth service last week. In that service, youth from our Fellowship gave creative, non-destructive, playful expression to some of the shadow aspects of themselves. To be honest, a few parts of the service made me uncomfortable. Some of you may have felt the same way. We should be uncomfortable in the presence of another's shadow. Yet what a beautiful way for our youth to own and give creative, non-destructive expression to their shadow aspects. That service may well have been a very powerful, healthy and concrete answer this community can give to the tragedy in Littleton. And just maybe the youth last week suggested some ways that we adults can also do some of our own shadow work. Wisdom does not just come from our elders.

[1]Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988), p. 24.
[2]Francisco X. Alarcon, Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992).
[3]"When Windows That Are Black and Cold"--hymn #165 in Singing the Living Tradition.
[4]Bly, 42.