CALL TO WORSHIP

Come, come, whoever you are!
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
Come.
This is not a caravan of despair.
It doesn't matter if you've broken your vow a thousand times,
Still come,
And yet again come!

READING

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

By what rings of power are we bound in our own lands of shadow?

SERMON

[Luke 3: 21-22, then to Chapter 4]

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, "Thou are my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased."

Can you imagine what hearing such a voice and message might do for one's ego? I think that I might find myself feeling a little inflated by such a communication.

And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended he was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone.' And the devil took him up, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours." And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.' " And he took him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, 'He will give angels charge of you, to guard you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.' " (We have here a clever, well-read devil -- using scripture from the 91st Psalm in his argument with Jesus.) And Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'You shall not tempt the Lord your God.' " And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Several centuries prior to this legendary encounter, Siddhartha Gautama was led forth from his sheltered life of privilege, and his state of unconsciousness, to learn the facts of life … and death. As he and his companion Channa set out, the gods paved their way from the palace grounds with silence. But they did not go unnoticed - an apparition stood across their path. It was Mara, the lord of luxury, passions, and lusts, the purveyor of all impermanent delights. He addressed Siddhartha politely: "Sir, depart not. On the seventh day from now the jewel-wheel of empire will appear, and thou shalt rule over the four great islands and the two hundred small islands that surround them." Siddhartha ignored him and moved on. Mara let relax his veil of courtesy and uttered a vicious threat: "Very well, go your way, but remember this: henceforth, whenever thou hast a thought of lust or malice or cruelty, I shall know it." And seeking mastery over the mind of Siddhartha, Mara slunk after him "on the watch for any failing, cleaving to him like a shadow which follows the object from which it falls."

And Mara would indeed get another chance at Siddhartha. Years later, when Siddhartha had seated himself under the great Bo tree, determined not to rise until he had pierced through the world of illusion to enlightenment, Mara returned to offer him vast treasures and world dominion. Great armies paraded before Siddhartha. Siddartha did not move. Mara called forth his daughters, who danced and let slip their saris from their shoulders. Siddartha did not move. Mara called forth his captains: Selfishness, Hate, Greed, Ambition, Pride, Ignorance, Fear, and Lust. But they had to retreat, knowing Siddhartha to be their master. Mara tore mountains out of the earth and hurled them at Siddhartha, with floods of lava and molten iron spilling from their sides. From the deep abysses of the earth, unthinkable monsters rose shrieking and fell upon him in violence and wrath. Siddhartha saw these illusions for what they were, and with his right hand he struck the earth, calling upon it to bear witness to his realization of this fact - Wisdom exists. Wisdom exists! And the earth trembled in response, opening up and swallowing the monstrosities which had besieged him. Mara acknowledged, "The ascetic Gautama will escape my realm."

The Shadow -- that aspect of our individual and collective psyches which is, in some respects, our hidden twin. This twin carries those aspects of ourselves which, for the most part, we consider not-so-desirable. Archetypal stories of the Shadow are many and popular - Goethe's "Faust," Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," Ursula Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea," and "Star Wars," to name a few. And, of course, much of religious and psychological thought and literature revolves around this subject.

I am aware of two perspectives on the idea of the Shadow. One perspective is that the Shadow consists primarily of those negative aspects of ourselves which we have not incorporated into our consciousness. Erich Neumann, a Jungian depth psychologist, wrote in Israel in the late '40's: "This negative, unconscious part of the personality is archaic in the most negative sense, for it is the beast-man at bay. He becomes the shadow and dark brother of the ego only if, through a process of integration, the ego consciously descends into the depths of the unconscious, there to seek him out and bind him to the conscious mind. But when the reverse happens, when, that is to say, consciousness is overpowered and wholly possessed by him, we get the frightful phenomenon of regression to the mass man as manifested in the mass epidemics of recollectivization." This is a reference, I think, to what Neumann saw in the fascism and communism of those times.

A more inclusive perspective on the Shadow is that of thinking of our Shadows as allies which carry ALL aspects of ourselves which we do not carry in consciousness. In this perspective, the Shadow is the ally which constantly strives toward wholeness, acting as the passageway into the deeper personal psyche and the transpersonal self. Dr. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who did so much to open and explore the world of the Shadow, wrote "The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is."

Another way of thinking of the Shadow as an ally is this: If one thinks of each person having an inner, psychic template, or design, for one's life, the Shadow may be thought of as a counterbalance around that center, that design. The Shadow may constellate to re-establish a balance when there is too great a variance from the design.

To encounter (perhaps voluntarily and perhaps otherwise) and embrace one's Shadow is to live an adventurous story. Therefore, let us consider one of the finest illustrations of a man and his Shadow in Western literature - Goethe's "Faust." We are all at least somewhat familiar with this story of a dissatisfied man who decides to cut a deal with the devil in seeking to satisfy a desire. I'll introduce Faust with a few comments from Jung's autobiography.

While he was still living at home, Jung's mother said to him one day, quite out of the blue, "You must read Goethe's Faust one of these days." So now from the autobiography - "We had a handsome edition of Goethe and I picked out Faust. It poured into my soul like a miraculous balm. 'Here at last,' I thought, 'is someone who takes the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him - with the adversary who has the power to frustrate God's plan to make a perfect world.' I regretted Faust's behavior, for to my mind he should not have been so one-sided and so easily tricked. He should have been cleverer and also more moral. How childish he was to gamble away his soul so frivolously! Faust was plainly a bit of a windbag. I had the impression that the weight of the drama and its significance lay chiefly on the side of Mephistopheles. It would not have grieved me if Faust's soul had gone to hell. He deserved it. I did not like the idea of the 'cheated devil' at the end, for after all Mephistopheles had been anything but a stupid devil, and it was contrary to logic for him to be tricked by silly little angels. Mephistopheles seemed to me cheated in quite a different sense: he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that somewhat characterless fellow, had carried his swindle through right into the Hereafter. There, admittedly, his puerility came to light, but, as I saw it, he did not deserve the initiation into the great mysteries. I would have given him a taste of the purgatorial fires. The real problem, it seemed to me, lay with Mephistopheles, whose whole figure made the deepest impression on me, and who, I vaguely sensed, had a relationship to the mystery of the Mothers. At any rate Mephistopheles and the great initiation at the end remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience on the fringes of my conscious world."

As Jung points out, it is often only through a deep experience of the Shadow that one may move beyond the fringes of ego consciousness, as our friend Faust is to learn.

Faust, a middle-aged college professor, has reached the pinnacle of his professional life. He has gone as far as his intelligence and discipline and self-consciousness can take him. But he has reached a spiritual dead-end, and despair yawns before him like the abyss. He has been keeping a vial of poison in his desk, knowing that its use may be his only way out of the despair. And, indeed, the day arrives when Faust takes the poison from his desk and is about to drink it when he sees and hears a vision of Easter music. Through his experience of this vision, Faust is refreshed and restored, and he returns, unfortunately, to the work and life which had led him to despair in the first place. As Faust and his assistant Wagner enter their study, a small black poodle which had attached itself to Faust scoots through the door. Because Faust refused the call of the symbol world wherein he may have experienced the rebirth which he needed, his Shadow has manifested and become a force in his life to bring about the movement toward wholeness. The poodle brings into Faust's life more energy and more paradox. The poodle brings so much energy into the room, in fact, that flames rise from its footprints on the stone floor. Faust is so energized that he returns to his old life, now more enlivened. He sets to work on a new translation of the Gospel According to John. He is dissatisfied with the attitude implied by "In the beginning was the Word." This academic man of words has had enough of words - he wants action! He prefers "In the beginning was the Act." When Faust makes this change, the poodle gets so excited that it races around the room, leaving flaming footprints all about. Then - the poodle disappears behind the stove and comes out again … as his dark lordship - Mephistopheles. Now, Faust will get what he wants - more action. But we shall leave the story now; I don't want to spoil it for any who may want to pursue it further.

However, we may consider a few comments about what is going on here. As I mentioned earlier, the Shadow carries that of our totality which we have not taken into our conscious selves, whether it be aspects which are considered negative and undesirable, or aspects which are considered positive potentials which we have not embraced and lived. Even trying to make a deal with the Devil is an attempt to bring into one's life something which is lacking. The unconscious demands that we face and handle the moral dilemma of balancing our light and shadow natures. Engaging with the shadow forces us into self-consciousness through a process of looking at our values, and it involves us in a process of redefining who we are and what we believe. Through engagement with our shadow and the resulting movement in self-consciousness, we come to realize that we experience the world through a haze of projections. The subject of projections is important in a consideration of the Shadow, but we will not pursue it this morning. Sufficient for now is this perspective from Jung: "… It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relationship to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into a replica of one's unknown face." (Repeat the last sentence?)

Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst and author, addresses the story of Faust in his book entitled Transformation. "Imagination and symbol make up a realm of experience in our interior lives where the ego is important but not dominant. Inner work requires that the ego consent to a subordinate, but still important, role. With inner work you take part in a process in which every element of life, including dark elements, has a place of dignity and worth. Without ego, chaos would erupt. With the ego in control, you are blocked by the egocentricity that marred Faust's life. Faust ran the show and made a horrible tangle of the process, as the ego always does when it is in control. When faced with this dilemma, people are tempted to adopt a new kind of egocentricity in which they use their powers of dominating the world for "spiritual" purposes. This is no less egocentric than any previous use of the ego, and it constitutes a particularly vicious trap on the path. Further progress is not possible unless you realign your ego's place in your life. Jung described this moment of realignment as the relocation of the center of gravity of the personality. This process is so painful, since it consists of dethroning the ego, that it is rarely done. The process requires that you give honor and dignity to every dimension of your life. The Christian version of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ provides a valid example of this. Though the fact is frequently ignored in our modern world, Christianity gives equal validity to the human and the divine dimensions of Christ. Any variance in this balance is fatal to spiritual growth and is also the basic definition of heresy in the Church. Most of us live in heresy, even if the concept is mostly discredited now, by giving dominance in our lives to one principle over all others. It is the unity of life, not the triumph of one faculty over another, that is the goal of imagination, fantasy, and ceremony."

Jung uses the term complexio oppositorum to describe the God-image in the human psyche. This image is not one of unity, but rather one of opposites. The most popular images of God are those of love, light, etc. But such images have their complementary opposites in images of darkness, which are projected onto God's shadow-twin - Satan, the Lord of Darkness. We must include this aspect of our individual and collective psyches if we wish to attain wholeness. We must not act out all the impulses of our Shadows, but as the Shadow carries unlived-out or unconsciousness aspects of our wholeness, only by paying attention to the Shadow, allowing consciousness and possibly manifestation of its imagery and creativity, can we expand the reach of our consciousness and self-knowledge. We are more than what we know about ourselves, more than our egos and personas and self-images. There's more involved here than wearing the everyday masks of husband and mother and bricklayer, etc. Who or what are we below or behind or beyond the persona roles? Rudolph Otto, a German Lutheran theologian wrote about this question in the early '20's in his book the Idea of the Holy. "So far we have spoken of the personal and supra-personal as applied to the supreme, spiritual Being. But what is true here is no less true of that which was created in its image, our own human soul or spirit. In us, too, all that we call person and personal, indeed all that we can know or name in ourselves at all, is but one element in the whole. Beneath it lies, even in us, that 'wholly other," whose profundities, impenetrable to any concept, can yet be grasped in the numinous self-feeling by one who has experience of the deeper life."

To continue with Christian imagery and language -- Through this process (that of expanding consciousness and self-knowledge), the myth of the necessary incarnation of God - which is the essence of the Christian message, according to Jung - can be understood as the individual's confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of the personality. Referring once again to Neumann - "… the self lies hidden in the shadow; he is the 'keeper of the gate,' the guardian of the threshold. The way to the self lies through him; behind the dark aspect he represents, there stands the aspect of wholeness, and only by making friends with the shadow do we gain the friendship of the self."

I return for a moment now to the world of story, this time to the legendary world of King Arthur and Camelot. Do you know the wizard Merlin's parentage? Again from Jung's autobiography: "Merlin represents an attempt by the medieval unconscious to create a parallel figure to Parsifal. Parsifal is a Christian hero, and Merlin, son of the devil and a pure virgin, is his dark brother. In the twelfth century, when the legend arose, there were as yet no premises by which his intrinsic meaning could be understood. Hence he ended in exile, and hence 'the cry of Merlin' which still sounded from the forest after his death. This cry that no one could understand implies that he lives on in unredeemed form. His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad. It might be said that the secret of Merlin was carried on by alchemy, primarily in the figure of Mercurius. Then Merlin was taken up again in my psychology of the unconscious and - remains uncomprehended to this day! That is because most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious. Again and again I have had to learn how hard this is for people."

Virtually no one, I think, comes to wholeness without coming to terms with psychic darkness. It is, or at least can be, a dangerous journey, this fabled night sea journey, this journey of the dark night of the soul. For some people, the journey takes them into what Joseph Conrad describes as "the heart of darkness." Not everyone who takes, or is taken upon, this journey completes it successfully and in wholeness. The ancient Hebrews provided guidance and reassurance for such a journey. In reading this guidance, I shall use a translation which is a little different from that to which we are most accustomed, but I think that these words and metaphors and images fit well with our subject.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want;
he makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the waters of rest; he restores my life.
He leads me on right paths for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of deep darkness, I fear no evil;
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.
Only goodness and kindness shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord as long as I live.

CLOSING

May the light around us guide our footsteps,
and hold us fast to the best and most righteous that we seek.

May the darkness around us nurture our dreams
and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world.

Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives,
the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.