The Shadow by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

God has taken you in. God embraces you as you are – shadow and light, everything. God embraces it, by grace. And it has already happened.

[Cont. from page 1] ... In contrast to some other traditions, Christians have not done particularly well in cultivating a practical method for integrating the shadow. This is part of the reason we have some of the problems that plague us today. In its enthusiasm for the divine light, Christian theology has not always done justice to the divine darkness. That has implications on the level of moral effort. If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on getting the right idea of what absolute purity and perfection mean. We tend to get trapped in the idea of a static perfection that leads to rigid perfectionism. Abstract speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. On the level of religious doctrine, it's a God that is totally purged of anything that we call dark. Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light and we can't handle the darkness within us. And because we can't handle it, we suppress it. But the more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it's not integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.

You can get out of that trap, if you come back to the core of the Christian tradition, to the real message of Jesus. You find him, for instance, saying, "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." Yet he makes it clear that this is not the perfection of suppressing the darkness, but the perfection of integrated wholeness. That's the way Matthew puts it in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus talks of our Father in heaven who lets the sun shine on the good and the bad, and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike. It's both the rain and the sun, not only the sun. And it's both the just and the unjust. Jesus stresses the fact that God obviously allows the interplay of shadow and light. God approves of it. If God's perfection allows for tensions to work themselves out, who are we to insist on a perfection in which all tensions are suppressed?

In his own life, Jesus lives with tension and embraces darkness. And as Christians we see in Jesus what God is like. That's really what Christians believe about Jesus: in this man who is fully human – like us in all things except our alienation, our sinfulness – in this human we can see what God is like. And that human dies, crying out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" At that moment darkness covers the whole earth, which is, of course, a poetic statement, not necessarily an historic account of what happened then. At that moment God reaches the greatest distance from God's own being and embraces the darkness of utmost alienation. If God's reality can embrace the one who cries out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" and is, for all practical purposes, forsaken of God, and dies, then everything is embraced – death and life and every tension between them. And that moment is, according to the Gospel of John, not the prelude to the resurrection, not something that is then reversed by the resurrection, but is the resurrection. Jesus says earlier, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all things to myself." According to the theology of the Gospel of John, the lifting up is the lifting up on the cross. His death on the cross is the moment of his glory; it's an upside-down glory. It's the ultimate shame for someone to be executed on the cross. But for the eyes of faith Jesus is "lifted up." That is the resurrection. That is the ascension. That is also the pouring out of the spirit: he dies with a loud cry – that means with power, not with a whimper – and he hands over his spirit. At that moment the whole world is filled with the divine spirit. The vessel is broken and the fragrance fills the whole house. It's all profoundly poetic. You cannot understand the Gospel of John without a sense of poetry. It is a poem from beginning to end. Because we have often failed to read it in that way, we get into all sorts of traps.

The moral implications of all this are deeply anchored in the Christian tradition from its earliest statements on. We touch here the rock-bottom of the Christian tradition. Yet this integration of light and darkness hasn't been explored properly. This is the problem. Traditions do not always develop evenly. We have only had two thousand years. There are much older traditions. Give us another two thousand years and we may catch up.

Right now we are at an important stage of transition. We are beginning to look at certain areas that we haven't faced for a very long time. This area of integrating the shadow is one of them. Martin Luther saw it and the Reformation was a period in which this area was bravely faced. (It's too bad that there were so many diplomatic mistakes made on both sides, that the whole thing didn't lead to a renewal of the Church, but rather to a split of the Church.) Luther stressed a key conviction of the New Testament with which the Catholic Church is only now catching up; that is, "by grace you have been saved." That's one of the earliest insights in the Christian tradition: it's not by what you do that you earn God's love. Not because you are so bright and light and have purged out all the darkness does God accept you, but as you are. Not by doing something, not by your works, but gratis you have been saved. That means you belong. God has taken you in. God embraces you as you are - shadow and light, everything. God embraces it, by grace. And it has already happened.

But where does the moral struggle come in? We all know it has to come in somewhere. St Paul, who says, "By grace you have been saved," encourages us in the next chapter, "Now live worthy of so great a gift." That's a totally different thing, however, from trying to earn it. Many Christians struggle to earn the great gift. How can you earn a gift? I'm simply telling you what Jesus taught, what Paul taught, what the Christian tradition at its core teaches.

Paul says, "Be angry, but do not sin." That has a contemporary ring for us. Sin is alienation. Do not let your anger separate you from others, but don't suppress your anger either. Be angry, all right. But "do not let the sun set over your anger." That is again a poetic statement. It may mean, literally, before evening, make up. That's one of the clearest meanings of it. But it may also mean never, not even at this moment when you are angry, let the sun set over this shadow. You see how beautifully it's expressed. Do not let the sun go down over your anger. Do not let your anger lead to alienation.

I can only touch upon these things, but I hope that it at least gives you a taste and makes you realize that when you go deeply into the Christian tradition, whether it is your own or not, you will find all these things. They are there. But then you ask, "Why don't we ever hear of it? Why hasn't it been developed?" Well, it hasn't been sufficiently developed yet. But you are there. You have your share to contribute. When you are through with your tradition, it must be different from what you found or else you have failed. It is your responsibility to make your religious tradition, whatever it may be, Christian or otherwise, more truly religious by the time you are through with it. That's the great challenge we face.

-- Br. David Steindl-Rast

Reprinted from The Sun (Issue 137, April 1987, pp. 20-23) and originally given as a talk at a 1986 Sufi retreat in Lebanon Springs, New York.