In Ourselves, in the Church, in our Nation
I have long considered the story that is told through the Gospel reading on the First Sunday in Lent as a foundational spiritual story (that reading is found here). There is something that is in that story — always a version of what is usually called the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness — that points to something fundamentally true about our humanity, both individually and collectively.
In essence, we can see this story of Jesus being tempted in the desert as a confrontation with the shadow self. As Carl Jung so clearly pointed out in his ground-breaking work, there is something of the shadow in all of us. Mature spirituality recognizes the shadow, looks directly at it, seeks to understand it, and integrates it to develop a personhood that is more whole and more authentic. Immature spirituality does none of this. And the price of not seeing and working with the shadow is heavy, indeed.
In the case of Jesus, he is driven into the wilderness by a singular revelation following his baptism by John: the revelation that he is loved by God. The dawning of this truth activates the shadow within him, and the desert becomes the field on which Jesus comes face to face with his own darker impulses (personified as the devil in the stories). All of the temptations that Jesus faces from his shadow self really boil down to one critical choice: will he receive the revelation of his own divine belovedness as a personal possession that makes him special, or will he receive it as universal, the revealing of a truth that applies to all human beings everywhere and throughout time?
The temptations Jesus faces are all about taking this revelation as a truth about him and him alone, inviting him to revel in his own specialness and to exploit that special status to satisfy his own need, to aggrandize himself, and ultimately to command power and wealth. This is a temptation that is familiar to all of us — and in the history of Christianity, it is true to say that most people have chosen to see in Jesus’ divine belovedness a singular specialness that has been communicated to the Christian faithful — and only to the Christian faithful — in baptism. We have wanted to see ourselves as special, and the logical conclusion of that specialness is that Christians have a status with God that no other group of human beings possesses. We have made divine love our personal property.
This, of course, is not the choice that Jesus makes. He confronts his shadow self and the temptations that come from it, acknowledges that this shadow is there, and then chooses not to give it power. He receives the revelation as a universal truth available to all, not as a private thing to lord over the rest of humanity. And, I would argue, it is at this moment that Jesus becomes the Christ, the bearer of universal divine love.
Over the past few years, I have been on a journey to confront my own shadow self. For most of my life, my shadow self lurked within me as something unacknowledged and unrecognized. In retrospect, I caught glimpses of it out of the corner of my eye, but I could never bring myself to look at it directly. I would not see it for what it was, I would not engage with it, I rationalized it away as something that wasn’t really there. What we need to understand about our shadow, however, is that it arises from our own suffering, our own fear, our own trauma. These are things that are hard to come to terms with, and we would rather avoid their pain than come to terms with it. But our choice not to deal with it does not mean it goes away. That choice simply forces the shadow underground, as it were. Yet, the shadow’s deep desire for recognition — and the healing that follows from that recognition — merely grows in the dark.
In my case, the shadow began to run the show without my being able to realize it. Or sometimes without my willingness to realize it. In the end, my shadow became so desperate for recognition that it ran me off a cliff, manifested as financial misconduct that derailed my vocation as a priest, harmed the congregation I served, shocked my family and friends, and led to a complete implosion of my life. At that point, there was no longer really any choice to be made: I had to confront my shadow or die. I had to engage what I had long been unwilling to engage. That has been a multi-year process that has been painful, but also illuminating in helping me to understand myself, to understand what happened, and to become a more authentic person.
Lately, this confrontation with my shadow has taken an unexpected turn.
After my life blew up, I reached an agreement with the Episcopal Bishop of California as part of the church’s disciplinary process. That agreement required certain things of me (like payment of restitution and engagement in therapy) while also suspending me from functioning as a priest for a period of 4 years. That period ended 6 months ago, and that agreement called for the Bishop of California to make a decision about my status as an Episcopal priest at that time. Shortly after that decision point was reached, I was informed that a new agreement was being drafted, one that would apparently allow me to remain a priest but with some boundaries in place (which seems entirely appropriate). Since that notification, however, I have heard nothing about that work, and my attempts to learn more about it over the past 3 or 4 months have been met with unanswered emails and unreturned phone messages. My inquiries have been met with a deafening silence.
Initially, that silence — that refusal to respond to my emails and phone calls — was deeply hurtful. I have been rather angry about it. Very recently, however, it has dawned on me that I myself have now become the embodiment of some of the church’s own shadow.
While the Episcopal Church is very good at disciplining clergy like me who have descended into wrong-doing for one reason or another, and through that process also protecting itself and its people in appropriate ways, it has not been at all good at answering the question, “What’s next?” Once the disciplining has happened, the penalties assessed, and the corrective actions taken, where do we go from here? The Episcopal Church is committed to a set of values rooted in the Gospel and the teaching of Jesus that insists that there is, for every sinner, a path of repentance that leads to accountability, reconciliation, mercy, and forgiveness. But the task of applying those principles to concrete cases like mine is difficult. I have come to recognize that my desire to be in some way restored to the life of the church as a priest — and the explicit possibility contained in my original disciplinary agreement with the church that this could happen — means that I represent to the church the fact that it has not quite figured out how to do this. The church acts very much like a secular organization in its discipline, and the difficulty of finding a way to act like the church in cases like mine is part of its shadow. The silence with which my inquiries have been met feels very much like the shadow trying to speak and the body at large not wanting to recognize it or engage with it.
As a people and a nation, we are now experiencing what can happen when shadow parts of ourselves — both individually and collectively — are left unrecognized and unaddressed. Far more important than my confrontation with my own shadow or the church’s confrontation with its shadow is the collective shadow nightmare into which the United States has fallen.
For decades, Americans have been unwilling and unable to deal creatively with the shadow part of our identify as a people and a nation. The more liberal among us were convinced that somehow this had been done in a decisive way during the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They believed that the shadow that manifested as racism, sexism, homophobism, and the like had been integrated and resolved into our American consciousness and that we could now move forward to the next enlightened phase of our evolution as a people. Yet, this was not what had happened. The shadow had been pushed down and shunted aside, but it had not been creatively engaged or even really recognized for what it was.
As I said earlier, the shadow is born out of suffering, fear, and trauma, and to engage with the shadow means we must engage with the pain that lies behind it. As a people, we have never successfully engaged with the pain that has ultimately manifested itself in the MAGA movement and its leaders and acolytes. In fact, many of a more liberal persuasion are unwilling to even entertain the notion that at the root of the shadow that is MAGA is real suffering and real fear. We dismiss it as so much ignorance and stupidity, as we have for decades.
That dismissal, that unwillingness to recognize the shadow for what it is and engage what lies behind it, has led us to the place where we now find ourselves: the shadow is running the show. And with it, our worst human impulses toward self-protection, self-aggrandizement, and the exploitation of power and wealth in ways that benefit the few to the denigration of the many.
For me, it was the falling apart of everything as a result of my shadow running the show that ultimately led me to come to terms with it and, in doing so, to remove its power and recover a deeper, more authentic self. As a people and a nation, I’m afraid we will have to witness the falling apart of much that we had taken for granted in order to find our way into a creative engagement with our shadow American identity that will both relieve its fear and suffering and lead us to a deeper, more authentic way of being. I have no idea how this will happen, or the toll that will be taken during this journey we are all now on.
But returning to the story of Jesus in the desert confronting his shadow, suggests something that each of us can do: we can work with our own shadows, creatively engage our own suffering and fear, and move into a deeper, more authentic expression of our humanity. We can support this work in others. To do so will add more light to the world, to our country. And we are inheritors of a promise, of a conviction, that such light, in the end, cannot be overcome.
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