Shadow, Repentance, and Confession

In the most recent post in this series exploring the idea of Christianity’s ‘shadow’, we looked at some of Carl Jung’s arguments that Christian teaching promotes the individual and collective shadow (those parts of us we reject and try to hide from ourselves and others) rather than dealing with it honestly. My problem with this claim is not that Christianity can’t promote the shadow — after all, the brighter the light, the darker the shadow it will cast. My problem is the suggestion that Christian theology leaves us without resources in dealing with it. In fact, I would argue that, albeit under different names, shadow work is an indispensable part of traditional Christian belief and practice.

Since we just talked about the ministry of John the Baptist this past Sunday, this seems like a great place to start. The core of John’s teaching was, “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven has come near” (e.g., Matthew 3.2). Jesus took on this teaching for himself (e.g., Matthew 4.17), and I am increasingly convinced that the rest of his teaching is just an expansion on this exhortation.

To step back a moment, we spend our childhoods surrounded by messages, whether overt or implied, about how to live. Our bedtime stories, proverbs, scoldings, and experiences all promote certain ways of being in the world at the expense of others. Some of these are positive — promoting truth telling, sharing with others, and so on — but most of these messages are more ambivalent, with a mixture of positive and negative impacts. Take the traditional injunction, “Boys don’t cry.” The goal of this is to promote emotional toughness, perseverance, courage in the face of adversity, and strength of character — all good things. But, at the same time, this message can leave boys disconnected from their emotions and reduce empathy; and by gendering toughness, it shames sensitive boys, connects sensitivity with weakness (thereby marking girls as weak), and leaves things that are beneficial for everyone as the purview of only one gender. To take a more subtle example, if a child’s trying is not rewarded, whether because they’re trying to do things too hard for them, aren’t given the supports they need to succeed, or their efforts are ignored, they can easily receive the message that they are helpless and there is no point in trying, a learned helplessness they take into their adult lives. The result of all this is that we all enter adulthood with an ingrained taxonomy of behaviours, emotions, and attitudes that we want to promote in ourselves and project into the world, and those we reject and either deny or want to hide from the world. Jung called these the persona and the shadow respectively, but they’re really nothing other than what Jesus called ‘the kingdoms of this world.‘ They’re the way the world works, how we have to adjust and acclimatize ourselves in order to function in the world. This is to some extent necessary, but it also leaves us partial and disjointed, especially in a fallen world that does not work as God intended it to.

But the Kingdom of God operates on very different principles. As Jesus expounded it in the Sermon on the Mount, it values those who are poor in spirit over the flashy glamour of the arrogant, it values genuine mourning over false bravado, generosity over self-protection and security, and on and on and on. Jesus pushed back even against the ‘religious instinct’ towards legalism, purity culture, and ritualism. ‘No,’ he said, ‘These are just silly projections we rely on to make ourselves feel good about ourselves, often at others’ expense. But, if you dig down deep enough, you’ll find that you’re right there with them: You may not be a murderer, but I bet you’ve harboured resentment towards someone. You may not be an adulterer, but I bet at least part of you has wanted to be. Oh, you love your friends and family? Could you aim any lower?’ This is why Jesus’ teaching against judgmentalism is one of the clearest articulations of the necessity of dealing with the shadow I’ve encountered:

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye. (Matthew 7.1-5)

What he’s saying is that judging others is just a way of distracting ourselves from our own issues, which are probably a lot bigger and more severe than theirs in the first place. So, if we really want to be right with God, we need to focus on ourselves and not what other people are doing. While he put it in different terms, Jung shared this sentiment. In that same text (which I’ve quoted several times) in which he pushes back against a politician’s statement that he had ‘no imagination for evil,’, he wrote that such a person:

does not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always ‘the other’ who do them. And when such deeds belong to the recent or remote past, they quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness, and that state of chronic woolly-mindedness returns which we describe as ‘normality.’ In shocking contrast to this is the fact that nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. … Man has done these [evil] things; I am a man, who has his share of human nature; therefore I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity and the inclination to do them again at any time. Even if, juristically speaking, we are not accessories to the crime, we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. (The Undiscovered Self 52)*

This works on the collective level as well as the personal. Just as we are all too prone to casting ourselves as the ‘good guy’ in every situation, we do the same for our countries, our religion, and any other group to which we belong. This is a big part of the reason why it’s so hard for so many Canadians to accept the reality of our history with Indigenous peoples. We’ve bought into our own national mythology of being kind and polite peace-keepers to the extent that it’s hard to accept the darker parts of our history — which are very dark indeed. (On a similar note, just the other day I saw a clip from the 1970s of Jane Fonda talking about her slow process of becoming an anti-War activist, and she described this exact phenomenon: how when she first started learning about what was happening in Vietnam, her first instinct was to insist that if Americans were doing it, it had to be good; it took a lot of evidence she couldn’t deny to get her over that patriotic hump and accept the truth of that awful war.)

Faced with the generous, pay-it-forward, reciprocal and accountable life of the Kingdom of God, and how greatly that contrasts to the stingy, protective, selfish, and irresponsible ways that ‘the world works’, we are called to repent. Repentance has a bad rap in our culture because it’s been made out to be something superficial, little more than an intellectual assent to the proposition that we’ve done wrong leading to an empty apology designed to save face and little more. But it’s far more than that. As I’ve previously noted,

Repentance is more than an apology or a confession, no matter how heart-felt. It is about change. Change is built right into the word the New Testament uses for repentance, metanoia, not just ‘changing my mind’, as it is often interpreted, but changing my perception of the world — seeing it through God’s eyes and hearing it through God’s ears — and changing my attitudes and actions accordingly. This kind of repentance is costly and transforming, and it’s the kind of repentance that acts to restore right relationships.

So repentance is connected to perception, and seeing ourselves as we really are, and therefore by necessity involves a kind of shadow work, as we see and understand parts of ourselves we’d rather not. As J. Christiaan Beker put it, “Our dreams of perfection are our greatest sins” (cited in Walter Wink’s Just Jesus). There’s a saying popular in some more ‘woowoo’ personal development circles that says, “If it’s possible in the world, it’s possible for me.” It’s a lovely idea, but it’s true in the negative ways as much as the positive. Think of the worst possible sins and travesties you can imagine — those are possible for you too.

Repentance is not easy or cheap. That’s why for John and Jesus and the Church after them, the symbol of repentance has always been baptism, a ritual death and rebirth. And this is not just something that happens once. We are called to renew our baptismal commitments often. And that’s why confession, whether in the form of the the private sacrament of reconciliation or in the liturgical general confession, is so closely connected to that other great Christian rite, the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. The pre-Communion prayers have historically been particularly insistent on the acknowledgement of one’s sinfulness. As the Prayer of Humble Access articulates it:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, the comparable prayer goes:

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. I also believe that this is truly Your pure Body and that this is truly Your precious Blood. Therefore, I pray to You, have mercy upon me, and forgive my transgressions, voluntary and involuntary, in word and deed, in knowledge or in ignorance. And make me worthy, without condemnation, to partake of Your pure Mysteries for the remission of sins and for eternal life. Amen.

Such prayers are often viewed with distaste in our culture, people being put off by the ‘focus’ on sinfulness. But if we look at these texts, they are actually balanced: yes, they insist on our status as sinners, but they equally insist on God’s mercy and grace. We acknowledge our sin because we recognize the reality of our lives and the impossibility of doing right by everyone in every situation, but we do so not expecting divine wrath, but because of God’s love and mercy.

But if we take Jung’s insights seriously, such repentance will shed light not only on our sins, but also on those helpful parts of our self that have been thrust into the shadows. I experienced this in my own life, back in my Orthodox days. While preparing for confession one evening, I was exploring the idea of humility and was hit with the question of whether I was being humble or using humility as an excuse for timidity, a manifestation of my childhood shyness. Thinking and praying through this enabled me to unlock some confidence that had been mouldering in the dark of my shadow. This is just one example, but I think it’s instructive in how repentance and confession are supposed to work in Christianity and how they are effective means of understanding and coming to terms with some of the shadowy parts of our personality.

Next week, I’ll turn to some other ways we as Christians can actively engage with the shadow in helpful ways.

 

* See the bibliography for the series for full information.