A Reflection/Poem for 8th Sunday after Pentecost Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant
The Church of the Holy Trinity, Hertford, N C July 23, 2023
Genesis 28:10-19a Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23 Romans 8:12-25 Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Hide and Seek With Our Shadows
In the Hebrew Testament Lesson for today we have a story about Jacob who comes to rest dropping to the ground. He has been running for his life, away from his past where he had swindled a blessing meant for his brother, Esau, by lying to his father with his mother's help. Esau, wants to kill him.
Jacob is a mama's boy and she sends Jacob to hide out with her brother Laban, the boy's swindler Uncle. The next chapters of the book will have the Swindler, Laban enter into a series of dueling swindles with his nephew Jacob. That is the thing about Grifters and Swindlers, no matter how often they are caught in a lie, they are set up to do another grift. The story will continue to Jacob's children who will turn against one another. Jacob was what we in the business call an “NDG”, “No Darn Good” I cleaned it up a bit since this is a church service after all.
Yet, Jacob, the grifter, is the Hero of this story. He is the one who God blesses. For those of us who want the Heroes to be good guys, this story is a problem. In fact, many of the stories of the Hebrew Testament are about those who are not straight and narrow kind of people. These “heroes” are not the kind of people whose resume would make a Rector's Search Committee shout for joy.
Most of the time, in our view of the world, God blesses Good People and curses Bad, Boo-Hiss, People. This is what we learned in our homes in which we were nurtured. However, in the Epistle for this Day from Paul's Letter to the Romans, Paul remembers that God's blessings extends to even people like him, who early on did evil to the church of Christ and bad seed that he was, was still adopted by Christ's Spirit.
When we grow up in our faith, we learn the world is not so easily divided between the bad and the good. Take for example the stance of Jesus to the “good seed and bad seed” growing together in Matthew's Gospel. The Good and the Bad are nurtured together until it is time for the harvest. How do we deal with people who have what we would see as bad seeds in them and we have to share blessings with them until the harvest, when we all die and it seems like that that harvest is a long time in coming?
When I was a child, in the summer of 1956, I was 9 years old, there was a movie called “The Bad Seed”, which I was not allowed to see. It is about an 8 year old manipulating sociopath child who kills people. It is revealed that her parents are not to blame because the child was adopted, and the birth father was a psychopath; the source of the bad seed. It was a remnant of an echo of the Eugenics craze that swept America in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The craze died down after we saw what Nazi Germany chose to do in getting rid of what they saw as Bad Seeds. The movie had a problem with the censors, in that in the Prize winning Novel and Play of the story, from which the movie was based, has the blameless adoptive mother killed and the bed seed is unscathed. Warner Brothers solved the problem by having the movie end with the mother saved and the Child with the Bad Seed is struck down by God's lighting hitting a flagpole. The movie did very well at the box office because people liked the idea of getting rid of Bad Seeds is what God in his heart of hearts had to say despite what Jesus said.
12 years later, after graduating from college, I spent 13 years, before I went to Seminary, working as a Social Worker, Teacher and Therapist dealing with families with problems, I had situations where parents who had seen the movie would wonder if their problem child was a “Bad Seed”, or if they needed to “Beat the Devil” out of them.
I have the sense that we all have bad seeds within us. Some good and bad seeds are implanted by our societies in which we grow, some come from behavior which we determined is unhelpful and some from behavior which is condemned but attractive. We are all born with the ability to make decisions and learn consequences of our behavior as we develop. Carl Jung said that we have an ego that helps us develop, and as we grow we develop a shadow within ourselves of those parts of us that our egos had pushed out of the conscious mind so that we can “fit in” to our culture.
Let me give you an example. When we are dragged kicking and screaming out of the womb; which, at that stage of our development, is a natural thing to do when we are having our environment change. Over the next couple of years, we learn that screaming is not acceptable everyday behavior. So we push it down, but the behavior stays under the surface with us, becoming part of our shadow; only becoming aware of it when light shines on it. When we get in complex situation with a lot of energy connected to it, like going down a Roller Coaster or facing an obscenity in our life; we might find ourselves screaming as a way of getting rid of the tension.
We learn that crying is not an acceptable way of social discourse, and when tears start to come, the first thing we do is apologize and feel guilty if we cry. However, often some kind person will say, “I understand, go ahead!” No matter how old and strong we are, we are always one day, one situation, away from crying; even when, as the saying goes,” it hurts too much to laugh and we think we are too old to cry.”
We learn that it is not appropriate to kill as a way of dealing with anger. Yet, we also learn that we think killing might be appropriate in certain causes like war. Yet, when all the cemeteries fill up with walls of names coming back, we reflect on our readiness to leap into slaughter. We also learn that one way to deal with all that frustration is to watch movies where the good guys slaughter the bad guys ,and laugh and clap when the villain gets slugged by Dirty Harry. The popularity of violent movies is shadow work of reclaiming in play our underlying anger.
One of the things that my wife and I used to do is to study dreams using Jungian Psychology. We find that Dreams are messages from our shadows, helping to point out, by the use of symbols, of what is bubbling up inside us. We learned how to pay attention to our preconscious and share it as a way to avoid it blowing up, and as a way of getting closer to each other. When we would honestly share our shadows with each other than the Song “Me and my Shadow/ all alone and feeling blue,” was no longer true. Also. what we learned was that unless we dealt and recognized our shadow, we had a tendency to project that negative shadow on to someone else.
An example: when I am upset I tend to “stuff it down” and often will literally swallow it with food. I feel guilty doing that, and in my guilt I will look at an overweight person and project on them my shadow and condemn them in my mind as being a “weak” person, so I don't have to deal with what I am already doing. In the midst of my Bad Seed moment, I am called to remember the words of the Psalm for today:
Search me out, O God, and know my
heart; *
try me and know my restless thoughts.
Look well whether there be any wickedness in me *
and lead me
in the way that is everlasting.
Jesus looked at the “Good” Seed and the “Bad” and said we had to learn how to live together, for he loved them and as the song goes; “Red and Yellow, Black and White/They were precious in his sight/Jesus loved the little children of the World.”
He loved, but had trouble with, professional “good” people, what he called “whitewashed tombs full of dead people's bones” with no heart for the neighbor. The “Good” people of the community called for his death. Jesus loved the sinner who came to him for healing and turned to one on the next cross, saying, “Today you are with me in Paradise!”. Notice, he said nothing to him about being thrown into the fiery pits of punishment. He understood that we seeds are all works in progress, with blessings offered to all.
For pleasure, I read mystery novels and the latest was dropped off when a friend and former Parishioner came by. One part of the story has a Priest tell about a old man of the streets telling him about how he talked to God every day. When the Priest asked about what God said, the old man: “Well, Father, I'll tell you. I never understood a word because He always talked in Hebrew.” The Priest continued: “God's presence is manifested in acts of love, in selfless acts of courage, in everyday human compassion”. When I read that last week, sinner and saint, Good and Bad Seed, that I am, I realized I needed to get busy as the prophet Micah suggested in “doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbling with our God.”
So, what is your shadow telling you?
Hide and Seek With Our Shadows
In Cosmic game of Hide and Seek, saying
To God, “Ready of Not. Here I come”!
Hoping that I won't appear too dumb,
Closing my eyes, starting with the praying.
Listing all those things that I couldn't hide,
then asking strength to enter my shadow,
into where my ego pretends not to know;
secretly always allowed to come for a ride.
Divine laughter surrendering a Hiding Place,
chuckling; “My beloved; there's no part,
of you beyond my love to place in heart
of the Universe, in center of a Sacred Space
between you, ME and every neighbor,
Good or not, to all I'll give my favor.
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