I have always loved stories, the way they can capture human experience, characters and settings imagined by us, but often tell us so much truth about our own reality. Harry Potter, a fictional wizard, teaches us about the reality of classism and racism. Elsa and Anna, fictional sisters, teach us about the healing power of loving relationships. Even stories about real, tangible events can be told in many ways, family anecdotes that grow more exciting and elaborate with each telling, but each holding an element and essence of the truth. From beginning to end, the Bible is a story about God – but it is not God’s story about God. It is a collection of some of humankind’s accounts of their experience of and with the divine – lived out, for better or worse, in community. Each story, woven through time and interpretation in telling, but still alive with truth about our humanity that lives through, (and often in spite of), change and tradition. A book of timeless stories, stories about relationships and yearning, of healing, and of growth.
Take the story of the birth of Jesus. Besides the two drastically different versions we read each year, Jan Richardson reminds us that: “We can tell it as the story of an unwed mother who dares to enter into partnership with God; as a political story about the birth of a revolutionary; as a tale about a love that longed so much for us that it took flesh, formed in the dark womb of a woman who shared her body and blood to bring it forth. We can tell it as a story about darkness giving birth to light, about seemingly endless waiting, and about that which lies at the end of all our waiting.”
The darkness is a character in the story, an energy with loving purpose, cradling life into being. The darkness is not evil or something to be feared, it is the life-giving nurture of the womb, the peace and energizing force of rest, the creative imagining of not knowing what lies just beyond our fingertips. Without the darkness, there is no light – and the mystery that they create together are the shadows.
We do not have to think very hard to call to mind events that plunge us into Shadow; moments that I would call “shadow moments,” when I pull in and pour out and try to find some stillness and focus in a too-full mind amidst a too-full world. I find myself emerged in shadows when I am stopped in my tracks by horror and violence, by what this country is willing to allow happen to our children. But, before the shadows, there is the bright oppressive glare of the computer screen, of my phone as I fail to pull my eyes from updates and details and outrage and grief. The shadow time comes later, when I am finally able to turn it off and put it down. When I allow myself a moment to bring the harsh light of the horrible truth into the darkness of my innermost being and let my mind linger in the shadows that they create. What will emerge? How will I emerge, because the light of day cannot be avoided forever. I was blessed with some shadow time in this space on a day it was desperately needed, spending Wed. evening in candlelight and chanting, walking side by side, remembering the blessings of a final meal with friends, the arrival of precious art on loan from new friends – and, finally, having Shelly gently press ashes into my forehead and on a night where death hung heavy around us, reminded me that for now, we live. The key, I think, to moving forward is to bring some of the shadow space with you.
To allow that womb-inspired creative energy for life and birth and healing to intersect with the garish light of day. I think you have to step back into the shadows sometimes, allow yourself to be taken, or how else will you be able to move forward?
Psalm 139 is an exception to a lot of the Hebrew Bible because it speaks so highly of the individual… and I think a paradox lies in the fact that the psalm is primarily about an invasion of privacy. More than one writer calls Psalm 139 a creation psalm, but not one about the vast mysteries of the heavens and earth or even the marvelous workings of nature around us. Rev. Kathryn Matthews writes that “this creation is the Spirit’s own ongoing work in bringing the human person to fullness of life, unwrapping the mystery of us and loving us all the while. While much of the Bible is about “the people,” this one is about a person, each one unique and of immeasurable worth.” Walter Brueggemann recognizes the beauty of the psalm, too, not as a scientific text but as “a dazzling affirmation about the mystery of life” as it speaks of the “inscrutability of the human person.” A mysterious shadow Psalm about the holy dark moving, continuing to shape and mold us, the incarnate love from which we cannot escape.
It may seem cliche to say that we are “works in progress,” but it’s true anyway. It is also true that it’s usually easy for us, as parents, grandparents and loving friends, to see beauty and wonder when we look at a child, or when we take the time to stare up into the vastness of space and let the stars shine down us, or when we walk along an unexplored trail and see trees and stones, earth and roots, side by side. What seems to be harder is for us to look at ourselves with quite the same enthusiasm. Here’s what Peter Gomes says about that:
“Well, there is good news, and that is why they call it the gospel. The news is not that we are worse than we think, it is that we are better than we think, and better than we deserve to be. Why? Because at the very bottom of the whole enterprise is the indisputable fact that we are created, made, formed, invented, patented in the image of goodness itself…”
So, do we enter into the shadows to hide who we are, to deny reality and avoid responsibility? Or, do we take time to become more fully us, emerging having grown closer into our called out and mysteriously, lovingly knitted selves? We need the shadow time to reflect, so that we know who we are when we step into the light. We do not know where the journey will lead us. When we step out from the shadow land, how will we have been changed?
Last Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we began the season of Lent, the 40 day journey (not counting Sundays) to the tomb of Jesus. While Jesus lay in darkness, so did the disciples – Hiding, pondering, wondering how to go on… Until the women stepped into the shadow space, the garden, the empty tomb, and allowed themselves to sit with the mystery and the pain and the fear…and they found their courage and they found their hope and they found their faith. We bury the Alleluia today so that we too can gather our pain and our sorrow and our fear and allow ourselves time to sit in the darkness, to allow it to heal us, to stir our imagination, and then to bravely step into the shadow space, to see the places where our deepest knowing meets the light of doing, so that when we dare to proclaim Alleluia again, when we shout it into the bright morning sunshine, we can proclaim it with conviction, with power – because we know the truth that there is not a force in this universe that can stop the power of love.
May we have the courage to dwell in this shadow land and in these shadow times, knowing that the story never ends at the tomb, that the shadows hold the tension between who we are and what we are called to do.
As Jan Richardson writes, our work is to name the darkness and to find what it asks of us: whether it is darkness that asks for justice to bring the dawn of hope to a night of terror, or for companions to hold us in our uncertainty and unknowing, or for a blanket to enfold us as we wait for the darkness to teach us what we need to know. Having faith, always, that the sacred presence is there, breathing in the shadows.