To See One's Shadow

Today I was going to go to an Anglo-Catholic church to celebrate Candlemass – the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. I’ve never actually observed it before, so I was exited. From what I overheard yesterday, it actually involves candles! I love candles from church services: I like to take them home and use them to light other candles.

Anyway, what happened instead is that I started going there after evening prayer and then realized that I actually wasn’t feeling very well and that it was cold. I really wasn’t looking forward to walking back alone in the dark. So I took the train home instead.

Since I don’t know anything about the celebration, I’ll do what I always do when I don’t know what I’m talking about: talk LOUDER. Just kidding, I mean I’ll talk about Mary. After all, it’s the Purification of Mary as well.

I have to confess, I find the notion that a woman is ‘unclean’ after childbirth distasteful. Ergo, I like to re-imagine what this ceremony means, even though my meanderings are basically groundless.

I imagine that, somehow, formally thanking God for your child and praising Him in an established ritual completes the process of giving birth to a child. That giving birth is as much a ritual as it is a physical process. That it’s a sacramental, like chrism or folding your hands reverently in prayer. Something inward, accomplished by and joined to an outward sign.

I think I read once that what happens with firstborn boys is that they actually belong to God, and that you sacrifice at the temple in order to buy them back or something. So Jesus belongs to Mary (and Joseph), not to God. Maybe that’s how she makes him turn the water into wine?

But enough of this. Today marks another holiday as well, one that seems to have far more bearing on our immediate lives. I mean, of course, Groundhog Day. All three groundhogs I know about saw their shadows today, so we’re in for a cold spell. Curses!

C. G. Jung understood the Shadow to be an archetype, a universal psychological construct containing all the things about ourselves that we try to repress (it’s something like the Freudian unconscious, composed of basic drives and desires). Our opposites, if you will. We tend to think of the Shadow as a negative splitting off (violence, hatred, etc.), what has been expelled from the Self. However, I think it’s more nuanced than that, more blurry, more individualized. The archetype is like a standard coat hanger that everyone has, upon which we place our individual and varied jackets. Even when we all have the same coat, they're all in slightly different shades. Maybe there’s someone out there who’s completely repressed their shyness. Whoever that it, is ain’t me.

Like all Jungian archetypes, the Shadow is part of a complex in which one part is dominant (for example: the Anima and Animus, male and female, also known as Soul). Total dominance is unhealthy: what’s necessary is the proper balance and integration. Professor Zuroff from the Psychology department says that the reason Luke Skywalker is so bland is that he’s over-repressing his shadow; Han Solo, who’s more vibrant, is doing it right.

Trying not to see your shadow, to block it out or cover it up with searing bright light, only makes you blind and unable to function (like Captain Kirk in that episode where the transporter splits him in half and neither the totally good Kirk nor the totally evil one can do anything useful).

We, like the groundhogs, are naturally scared of our Shadow, because we find it to be troubling, wild, threatening, unknown and uncontrollable. But being totally terrified by it isn’t useful either: then you just run away in fear back to ‘safety,’ freezing everything, pushing back the spring and the possibility of new life, leaving everything brittle and fragile and trapped beneath the perfect ice. I sometimes worry that’s what we’ve done to Mary: purified her.

What we need to understand about her is what we need in our own lives: to integrate the various aspects of ourselves and become the Self, the whole person in relationship with God, the Self as an intermeshing with both one's full humanity and the Divine, like perichoresis in the Trinity, around and in and through, together.

I think we’re not so much to be perfect as to realize that we are ransomed as Jesus was ransomed, free to return to God on our own, travelling through both the shadow and the light.