Shadow and Sacred Practices

In Thursday’s post, we saw how the general Christian call to repentance, which is embodied not only in conversion, but also in the rituals of baptism and confession, is a call to address the shadow — those parts of ourselves we reject or deny as being ‘us’. Today I’d like to explore how other sacred practices from our tradition may help us engage with the shadow. But as the saying goes, the brighter the light, the darker the shadow it casts. So even as we think through the contributions of our sacred practices, we also need to be mindful of their own potential for casting their own shadows, and reinforcing the walls between our shadow and persona instead of breaking them down.

As we saw here on the blog way back in 2018, sacred practices can really be anything that we set out to do intentionally with a purpose of tending to the soul’s needs. Those needs can be as varied communion with God (as in prayer), ensuring how we use our time and money aligns with our values (as in volunteering or charitable giving), or inner work. Jung was unsurprisingly largely concerned with the last of these, and indeed that will be the focus of today’s post as well. As Gary Bobroff summarized it, Jung “saw inner work as a kind of internal gardening, a furthering of the natural process of personal development inside of us.”* It’s a helpful metaphor and it works for a lot of the disciplines we’ll look at here. It also fits in well with the biblical image of ‘bearing good fruit’, particularly if we think of fruit in a more general sense of a bountiful harvest. We can’t reap what we sow if we don’t continually get our hands dirty and do the work. In Jung’s mind — and I think it’s consistent with Christian teaching — this isn’t just about healing ourselves and fulfilling our personal potential, but also, in so doing, doing our bit to heal our broken and bruised world.

Let’s look at how this might play out in a few different types of practice.

‘Prayer’ is a broad category. It can be petition (asking for what we need or want), intercession (asking for God’s blessing on others), praise (acknowledging God’s greatness and goodness), thanksgiving (expressing gratitude for what we have), confession (acknowledging our faults and sins), meditation (focusing one’s mind), or communion (resting in God’s presence). It can also be personal or communal, or spontaneous or following a set order. All of these in their own ways can be a kind of shadow work. But they can also, if we’re not careful, reinforce the shadow too. For example, petitionary prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, can all be helpful for those who struggle to accept their own dependence and the natural limits of finite human existence. And, as we saw last time, prayers of confession involve an acknowledgement and acceptance of the myriad ways we “all fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23). But since this series is about ‘the Christian shadow’ and not just the ways Christianity deals positively with it, we also need to be aware of the ways our prayer practices can reinforce the shadow instead of dealing with it. As wonderful as they are, petition and intercession can reinforce a sense of helplessness and deflect responsibility over things that we have capacity to change. (Politicians’ messages of “thoughts and prayers” without legislative action come to mind here.) Prayer and trusting in God is certainly not doing nothing, but when we are actually in a position to act, we are called to pray with our hands and feet and policies and votes as much as our thoughts and voices. Turning now to the kinds of prayers we pray, spontaenous prayers have the advantage of expressing our immediate thoughts, anxieties, and feelings, but generally leave the shadow untouched since we often cannot see what’s in the shadow. Liturgical prayers on the other hand can certainly shine light into our shadowy places if we’re paying attention, but can also easily become rote and not really prayer at all.

Practices of self-discipline can work the same way. If we’re intentional about them, things like acts of service, charitable giving, and fasting can be a powerful way of confronting our relationship with our time, resources, and food or sex. I for one have never been more aware of my own weakness of will than when I’ve craved a cheeseburger in the middle of a fasting season! But, like anything, these practices can also get away from us by strengthening our persona and ego. Such practices can easily lead to self-righteousness and an inflated sense of one’s worth. This is why Jesus spoke of not wearing any signs of fasting, like wearing sackcloth or ashes (Matthew 6.16), warning against public displays of piety (Matthew 6.5-7), and advised that when giving, one’s ‘left hand should not know what the right hand is doing’ (Matthew 6.3).

Few practices are as powerful in addressing the shadow as journaling, along with related practices of intentional self-examination and -exploration. As Susan Tiberghian put it:

A journal is a journey, a journey to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Journaling is a spiritual practice. With our words we give life to what we see, what we touch, what we hear. We bridge the visible world and the invisible world.” (Writing Toward Wholeness 24)

This process of bridging the invisible world of our hearts and the visible world of our experiences is really the heart of shadow work. Jung described this process in terms of the traditional steps of alchemy: Entering into the darkness (nigredo), distilling what we find there (albedo), and then expressing what arises from that process (rubedo). Again quoting Tiberghian:

Enlightenment can come from the dark place, but only if we direct the ray of consciousness upon it. If we warm it by our conscious attention. Authors become alchemists as they write from darkness to light, as they go into the dark, into the unknown, and bring out what they encounter into the light, into the known. (149)

I can’t help but think as I write this of Olivia Rodrigo’s wonderful song “Scared of My Guitar,” in which she sings of just this capability of journaling (or in her case song-writing) to bring out hidden and inconvenient truths:

But I’m so scared of my guitar
‘Cause it cuts right through to the heart
Yeah, it knows me too well, so I got no excuse
I can’t lie to it the same way that I lie to you

The immediacy of journaling can also help address the shadow simply by not reinforcing it. If I write exactly how I’m feeling about a situation in the moment, without time for reflection or reframing (what Brené Brown has helpfully termed our “shitty first drafts”), I’m acknowledging those feelings as a legitimate part of me and my experience. There may often indeed need to be some contextualization and reframing that needs to be done to emerge into a healthier and more mature understanding of that experience, but those feelings are still a genuine part of that experience, even when — especially when — they don’t put me in the best light or aren’t reflective of my highest values.

I can’t leave this post on practices of shadow work without talking about Jung’s favourite, dream work. Dream work has held a weird position in Christianity, as our Scriptures are quite high on the power of dreams, yet Christians have generally been strongly dissuaded from engaging with their own dreams, since they are so unreliable and inconsistent. (Interestingly, the other two major Abrahamic religions have had no such compunctions, and have been traditionally receptive to dream work.) As Jung wrote in his own dream journal:

I must learn that the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. (The Red Book 132)

Jung understood dreams to be compensatory. That is, they are a way our psyches attempt to restore balance to our otherwise imbalanced, persona- and ego-driven waking thought life. (For a more thorough discussion of dream work, please see my post on this topic from my Growing with Intention series.)

But, crucially, dreams are symbolic and therefore need to be interpreted in the waking world carefully. This is the traditional concern Christian authorities have raised about them, and it clearly leaves a lot of room for misinterpretations, including self-indulgent ones that reinforce the shadow and persona instead of breaking down the barrier between them. So, this just requires a lot of care, time, patience, effort, and ideally an informed and neutral guiding hand in the process.

Sacred practices, then, are a great way we can do shadow work. But, as with everything, we need to be aware and careful about the risk of deluding ourselves, not taking them as seriously as we should, and reinforcing our existing psychological, emotional, and spiritual states instead of healing them. At worst, this can result in the phenomenon of ‘saints behaving badly.’ Great spiritual masters have advocated for inhumane policies, guru-student relationships have often sunk into abuse, and the list of spiritual masters who were also sex offenders is long. Being good at sacred practices does not make one holy. Nor does it automatically mean that the person has successful integrated their shadow. The problem here has two sides. First, great success in spiritual practice can engender arrogance and false feelings of spiritual grandeur. And, second, growth on one line of spiritual development does not always lead to growth in others. This does not in any way suggest that such practices are bad or unhelpful, just that they are like the proverbial rowboat we use to cross to our destination, not the destination itself. Playing with this analogy more, we need to be mindful that our rowboat is solid, waterproof, that we have our destination in mind, know how to read and navigate the currents, and build up our stamina and rowing technique. If any of these things fail us, we could easily find ourselves off course.