“Finding and Embracing Your Shadow”
One of my richest childhood memories was having “Peter Pan” read to me at bedtime by my mother. Childhood imagination soared into bedtime images of fairy dust and children flying off to Never-Never Land. One of the scenes early in the story pictures Peter trying to catch his shadow, which is forever giving him the slip. Wendy, upon seeing the problem, offers to sew the elusive shadow to Peter’s stocking feet.
There is an ancient mystical tradition among the Kaballah that speaks of the first human Adamah (Hebrew: child of red earth) in the presence of the living God. God is described as being composed of ten sefiroth, or powers, that are perfectly harmonious and balanced in the Almighty. God is not fashioned in the likeness of Adam, but is pure Spirit, and the Lord’s glory is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. Therefore, Adam, when he beholds the glory of the Lord, throws the harmony of the Almighty out of balance, and brings about the destruction of paradise (that place where God and Adam lived in agreement). This, the Kaballah says, was the birth of troubles by the entrance of chaos into creation.
In some sense, the world, and all in it created in God’s image, is at war with God. We don’t want to acknowledge our warfare against God, but the deepest truth about us is that we routinely strive against the Spirit in whose image we are fashioned. God weeps because God sees in us God’s shadow. Even though we alone are responsible for our conduct and our choices in exercising the free will that God has granted each of us, the source of that free will, the risk of that free will, is the work of God.
Charles Hartshorne, a theologian I greatly admire, explains the necessity of evil, the result of free will, by saying that God took the risk of creating us with free will because no other creation was “good” in God’s sight. Hence, even though God’s goodness gave us the free will that results in our badness, God is not responsible. We are, because the only alternative God had was to create nothing, while the alternatives we have are enormous and complex. We can actually choose to love our neighbors as ourselves; and we can choose to forgive as God forgives us.
We are all of us Peter Pans who wish never to grow up into the image of God. God has wept for us. Christ’s death (Adamah’s crucifixion of love) was the work of our hands. Yet, God chooses to love and forgive us. The flesh and blood of God’s love was broken and poured out for us with God’s tears. God’s grace moors our shadows at the feet of God’s glory. While the character of such love reads like the happy ending of a fairy tale intruding on the harsh reality of reality, it is, nonetheless, God’s bedtime story for us, spoken to Adamah in love, inviting us to repair the damage we still do to God, ourselves, and neighbors.
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