Recapitulation

In the previous chapter it was suggested that God, out of the love that is her essence, created humankind. Her intention was to evolve a species that could reciprocate her loving, or, more specifically, be caught up into the energy of loving that is central to the society of the deity.

For us to be capable of loving, it was necessary that we be given freedom. We would be incapable of love unless we were given the freedom not to love. At its deepest level, this freedom is the freedom to say yes or no to God. It is a constitutive freedom. In flowing with the direction of this grace, we appropriate and construct a gifted identity. We become what God intended us to be. The direction of the flow of divine grace is consistent with the structure of Being, and of our being.

Having been given freedom it was inevitable that we would make mistakes. These mistakes, and our recovery from them, are necessary to our learning, to our growth.

We are consciously involved in the maturational process in our struggling to make sense of the world and in our learning to negotiate and cherish relationships. The process is two phased, involving human flourishing, that is, the development of latent capacities and identities that are socially constructed, and self-emptying. Transition between the two phases, which is continuous and episodic, rather than once and for all, is facilitated by our gradual dissolving of the boundaries between ego and shadow, self and body and body/self and cosmos. In the process we discover the Self that is the constituent reality of the cosmos.

The Focus

This chapter will examine the damage caused to ourselves and others by the misuse of our freedom. It will also consider the impact upon behaviour of internal and external biases for which others bear major responsibility. In other words, we will reflect upon the influence of unconscious motives. It would be remiss of us to consider the question of human sinfulness without taking account of insights deriving from Depth Psychology.

This chapter will be to look at the relationship between the unconscious and human sinfulness. While this narrows the focus of what is a broad inquiry, in which many themes are interlaced, it is manageable. This does not mean that the broader range of issues will be overlooked. They will, however, be viewed in the context of the connection between sin and the unconscious. [71]

Guilt and Shame

Perhaps we should begin by arguing that one consequence of the misuse of our freedom is that we feel guilt and shame.

Guilt stems from an awareness that we have contravened behavioural norms that we have internalized, or from recognition that one of the identifiable personalities within the psyche, usually one that prefers the anonymity of the shadow side of our reality, has seduced us into disregarding what we know to be the principled option.

Guilt can also be false, that is, unjustified by a sober estimate of the situation. It can also be free-floating, detached from the action that generated it, an action that can't be faced, and available to burden relatively innocent errors that we are more comfortable acknowledging. There is yet another form of guilt--existential guilt--which is the feeling that we are not what we could be, that there is something amiss. Existential guilt is responsible for us suffering a lack of integration or togetherness.

Shame is the sense we have that we are unworthy to be in the company of others. We see our own disapproval of ourselves reflected in their eyes. We retreat within ourselves and either avoid company or overcompensate with bluff and a false conviviality. Shame may also be the sensitive and painful fringe of existential guilt.

The experiencing of guilt and shame, which contaminate future action, lead to a lowering of self-esteem and to the feeling that one is undeserving of love. They make affirmation and love more difficult to receive.

In order to salvage self-esteem, the loss of which decreases our sensitivity to grace and our inclination to flow with it, we often unconsciously repress guilt, shame and our memory of what transpired. Alternatively, we repudiate responsibility for our action and blame it on others, more often than not on the person who suffered as a consequence of our angular or destructive behaviour.

Freedom Mismanaged

Let us look a little more closely at how we deal with the consequences of mismanaged freedom. We will briefly consider a phenomenon that can best be described as a descending spiral that leaves us increasingly out of touch with ourselves and at odds with others.

The Unconscious

Each of us has a positive and a negative side, a side of ourselves that we like and a side of ourselves that we don't like. They are the flip sides of each other.

When we attempt to live exclusively out of the positive side, because we need to see ourselves as successful, or moral, that which we identify as negative [72] is repressed. On the other hand, if our response to lack of self esteem is to identify with the negative side, it is positive potentialities that we repress.

We can, of course, interpret this situation differently and, instead of talking about positive and negative aspects, we can refer to that which is in the light and that which is in the shadow. The first is associated with the ego, the image of which we cultivate, as persona, to fulfil a role or to make a good impression on others. The second is that part of us that has been relegated to the unconscious. This is the part we do not want to know about.

The unconscious is the repository of many things. Jung, whose paradigm I find helpful, spoke about a personal and a collective unconscious. The personal unconscious contains material repressed by us. The collective unconscious, Jung argues, is layered into levels, like archaeological strata, that contain archaic material, which stretches back to our reptilian beginnings and beyond. Others see this deeper aspect of the unconscious as a physiological residue of our evolutionary history,¹ or as the manifestation of the depths of our common humanity.²

It is society that determines for us what is positive and what is negative, as comparisons between cultures indicate. Each of us, through a process of enculturation, in which our family, the local community and the wider society participate, will repress what is unacceptable. Western society, for instance, has repressed feelings, the body and sexuality.

It would also have to be admitted that individuals, who make up sub-groups within wider societies, in fulfilling specific roles in relation to each other, will develop or repress certain human functions. For example, in the West men are much more likely to develop their thinking function, while women will evaluate situations with their feelings. Each has repressed the capacity that characterizes the other. While brain circuitry and chemistry play a significant role in establishing perceived differences between the behavioural responses in men and women,³ sociological factors that promote repression of contra-stereotypical tendencies also powerfully influence the manifestation or repression of particular behaviours.

This phenomenon, however, needs to be further explored. Stereotypes do not accurately represent reality, nor are those acting out of these stereotypes altogether comfortable in them. For example, there are men who will acknowledge that they judge the texture of reality with their feelings, rather than with their thinking, as there are women who evaluate reality primarily with their thinking. It is also the case that when our role in society dictates that we live out of our inferior function, we can develop this inferior function into what others may take to be our superior function. This also means that we will develop a phantom inferior function, which could well be our superior function in disguise, a function that is limping along, not because it is weak, but because it is bridled. [73]

Jung identified four functions and located them on two intersecting axes.⁴ The first two, thinking and feeling, are on the judging, or valuing axis. The second two, sensation and intuition, are perceiving functions. He argued that in each of us one of these functions is our superior function, which may be on either axis. He also contended that we have, on the alternative axis, an ancillary or sub-dominant function. The inferior function is opposite the superior function, on the same axis.

The inferior function, and that function opposite the sub-dominant function, are associated with what is repressed, or what has not differentiated itself out of the unconscious.

The unconscious, therefore, contains many elements. Aside from material that is part of the archaic layers of the collective unconscious, there are also important elements of the body/self that have been repressed because they are unacceptable to one's family, peers or culture. There is also material that has been repressed as part of the process of learning to responsibly exercise our freedom. Then there is the accumulated deficit of weak, or perverse responses that arise from these base distortions.

Jung argued that the material in the unconscious constellates around what he called archetypes. These pre-exist, according to Jung, in the collective psyche of the human race and manifest in dreams, in mythology, in religious symbols and other artistic productions. They furnish form rather than the content, though they are themselves part of the content of the unconscious, particularly the collective unconscious.

The more identifiable of these archetypes are the shadow, the anima and the animus.

The shadow often surfaces in dreams, usually as vaguely defined same-sex personalities that are sometimes menacing. It is made up of repressed elements of one's personality or life narrative as well as material from the collective unconscious. The shadow is nearer consciousness than the anima or animus.

Jung argued that men and women have what would be described in traditional Western culture as masculine and feminine elements. The anima, the female aspect of men, like the animus, the masculine facet in women, are under-developed, and, if forced into the open, will respond immaturely. In a moving passage in Aion Jung depicts a battle royal between a strident animus and a petulant anima.

I have to admit that I prefer the Confucian terms, yang and yin, to describe our potential androgeneity, because they are less gender and culture-specific than "anima" and 'animus." However, there are at least two advantages in using "anima" and "animus". Firstly, they can be teamed with eros and logos to highlight either the immaturity or maturity of our contra-sexual aspect⁵ [74] and secondly, they are associated, in their etymological derivation, with the eclipsed Western concept of soul.

The Shadow

When material is repressed it doesn't disappear. It is merely hidden from view. The fact that it is repressed means that we have lost control over it. What is even more disconcerting, is the fact that, the more strongly material is repressed, the more powerful it becomes. For example, the more an individual lives out of their persona, the mask that images the way they want others to see them, the stronger the shadow elements in the personality become. What is even more significant, and alarming, is the fact that there is a process within us that ensures that the different aspects of the body/self are in balance, a process of homeostasis. When part of the body/self is repressed it will correct this imbalance by causing the neglected facet to manifest, usually, however, in an uncontrolled or perverse and destructive fashion.

There are different ways in which this happens.

Repressed material can gas out. Repressed anger escapes our control as passive aggression, which can be recognized in non-co-operation, criticism or sarcasm. Repressed sexuality sometimes finds expression as voyeurism.

What has been repressed may also erupt. There is not one, but there are many different personalities within us, and sometimes an identity, that has constructed itself from what is repressed will take us over temporarily and we will act in a way that we consider out of character. Usually, these shadow identities influence us subliminally, like a power behind the throne. There are times, however, when their psychic energy is so strong that they emerge from the shadows and assume control. We will be confused by our behaviour, by what the Apostle Paul described as another law within himself.⁶

More often than not, however, we project what we do not like about ourselves onto someone else and criticise it in them. What we most dislike about ourselves we hate in others, without realizing that it is an aspect of ourselves that we hate. The more strongly we criticise others, the more likely it is that we are lacerating ourselves.

As was argued in an earlier chapter, material from the unconscious also surfaces in our dreams. This is possibly its most helpful manifestation, because the psyche, in presenting material from the unconscious, also indicates a way forward, a route towards integration.

The problem with repression, and particularly with projection, is that we give away, project onto others, that which we have rejected in ourselves. To be whole we need to re-own, reclaim and love that part of ourselves that we [75] have projected. Most of this material, while distorted, is positive, despite the fact that we can be depressed by what we find in the unconscious.

Part of what we repress is what Robert Johnson calls "our gold", the potential we have for fulfilment and for benefiting others. We generally project our gold onto people like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Fred Hollows, or people whom we admire, who are closer at hand. We make them into unreal super-heroes.

We also project our gold when we fall romantically in love. We fall in love, less with the real person, and more with our own potentially better self, which we expect the object of our love to live for us. This projection also involves the positive side of our anima, if we are men, or our animus, if we are women, that is, our eros or our logos. Once romantic love fades, however, it is usually the negative aspects of the shadow and of the anima or animus that we carry for each other. We were fooled, for the flip-side of what attracted us to someone is now that aspect of their personality with which we have greatest difficulty.

We need to reclaim our gold because we have given away a very precious part of ourselves.

Even what we regard as unlovely is the flip-side of positive potential. It is the inner urge towards wholeness, expressing itself perversely. For instance, we need a strong sense of self-worth in order to be capable of truly loving others. When we lack a sense of self-worth we crave substitutes, like praise. Because we do not feel self-accepted, we strive to achieve to gain the acclaim of others in the hope of eventually being able to accept ourselves. But acclamation is not affirmation. It is no sooner experienced than it vaporizes.

In what it promises it also plays us false. Achievement, by which we seek acclaim, is more likely to evoke envy than genuine praise. Furthermore, no-one can remain number one forever. Boasting, in the absence of real achievement, or after the memory of our achievement has faded, does not arise from strength, but weakness. Achievement, because it does not deliver what it promises, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Achievers, who, as they grow older, need to climb ever higher mountains to feel OK about themselves, advertise their deficiency. Their conversation, nauseatingly self-oriented, presents a pathetic spectacle. While they evoke our ire, they are really candidates for our compassion.

If distortions are the flip side of a potentially healthy and mature personality, which is trying to heal itself, like a beetle on its back trying to flip itself over onto its legs again, then the pain we experience as a consequence of our inner distortions is also potentially positive. [76]

Shadow and Sin

We must next ask what relationship the shadow side of our reality has with sin?

The most straightforward answer to this question would be that sin is largely generated by distortions in the unconscious that influence thought and behaviour. This in consistent with Jesus comment that sin arises from the heart, from within,⁷ and with Paul's confession that there was a perverse authority within that took him over despite himself. He was thwarted in doing the good he knew he should be doing and he found himself stumbling into doing what he knew he should not be doing.⁸

The Greek New Testament uses a number of words to probe the meaning of "sin."

The meaning of the most commonly used word, hamartia, is captured by the cameo of an archer aiming at a target and missing. It speaks of our failure to realize the potential of our humanity to live fulfillingly and for others.

Another of these words, adikia, is translated "unrighteousness." A righteous community was a peaceful and just community, where every person played their part for the benefit of the whole and in which there was no abuse of power or trust. The righteous individual was someone whose whole being functioned healthily, an integrated person, free of guile or duplicity, someone whose life benefited others. An unrighteous person was someone who was internally out of kilter with themselves, that is, controlled by perverse elements in the unconscious.

A third word, anomia, reflected a state of lawlessness, the condition of someone lacking self-control, who disregarded social or religious norms. This word also reflects a lack of integration or centredness.

Then there was kakia, or badness, the opposite of goodness. This word reflects, not so much the process of sin, as its consequence. It describes the condition of the person who is missing the mark, who is falling short of their capacity, who is torn between the conflicting dictates of the many inner personalities. It describes the person, who, to use Luther's definition of sin, is curved in upon themselves, someone who is unavoidably pre-occupied with themselves, with keeping the lid on the unconscious, with doomed attempts at eliciting praise and building self-esteem. It describes someone desperately in need of love and acceptance.

Sin results from disorganization within the self, from the setting up of boundaries between the ego and the unconscious, the self and the body and the body/self and the wider environment. It is also a consequence of influential forces in the unconscious which exercise power behind the throne, where reason is used to justify decisions taken in control centres in the shadow. These shadowy identities sometimes stage palace revolutions, where their energy becomes more blatant. [77]

At base, our destructive behaviour is a consequence of our inability to flow with the immanent presence of a transcendent God, whose intent is to mature us and shape us into her likeness.

Growing Pains

While misusing the freedom with which God has gifted us is par for the course, and an aspect of our learning, the process begins to go sadly wrong in the absence of the acceptance, affirmation and the love of others for us. Our perverse behaviour is both an angry protest at being denied these benefits, and, at the same time, a self-defeating attempt at eliciting them. Serious and debilitating distortions are largely the result of damage persisting through generations, related to psychological profiles, dysfunctional family systems, violent social contexts, or serious intrusions upon the sacredness of our inner space in which no respect is shown for personal boundaries.

The Demonic

From the period of the Babylonian exile onwards, the Jews, having encountered Zoroastrian dualism, began reworking their response to the question of the origin of suffering. They originally credited God with responsibility for both good and evil. Following the exile they made use of a newly acquired belief in a world of angels and demons. On the basis of this new view of the cosmos, sin, evil, physical affliction and mental disturbance, were viewed as the result of demonic possession.

Our current Western world view no longer accommodates belief in angels and demons, at least, not in the sense in which they were thought to exist in New Testament times. However, while discounting the archaic symbolism of angels and demons, we should be careful not to dismiss the phenomena these mythological figures identified.

I argued, in suggesting that we needed to develop an anthropology that took account of our connectedness with each other and with a wider environment, that we influence each other and our total environment powerfully at a subliminal level. This influence, which can be either negative or positive, is able to be intuited if we are practiced in discerning it. It was these positive and negative "spiritual forces", which other cultures identified as angels and demons.

There are numerous personal and corporate phenomena that could be described as "demonic."

If we feel negatively towards someone, or if we are angry and withdrawn, others sense our mood. They can identify it from our asides, our body language or from the atmosphere. We pollute our common space. [78]

The unconscious sometimes erupts, when one or a number of personalities that have formed from the repressed material in the unconscious surface. Some, finding themselves doing things the ego or persona abhors, describe the experience as possession. Some people are taken over by personalities, energies, resident in the shadow.

It is also possible to be so contaminated by another person's shadow that we assume it as a personality and live it vicariously for the other. Children sometimes do this with parental shadows, especially when the parent, in an attempt to be good, is living almost exclusively out of their persona. The tragedy for the child is further exaggerated because, by living the parent's shadow, they provoke the parent's anger and hatred. The parent despises in the child that part of themselves that the child is living out. The child manifests the shadow before their eyes. It is interesting to note that one study discovered that a high percentage of German terrorists were the children of Protestant ministers.

The community, like the individual, also has a shadow side.

The demonic is evident, at the communal level, in a range of phenomena. These include group think and the build-up and explosion of negative communal energy, which could lead to mob hysteria, violence and murder. The demonic was also evident in the seductive oratory of Adolf Hitler and in the predisposition of many to flow with his rhetoric.

The church's repression of sexuality, which blighted the West with a persisting sexual neuroticism, surfaced in voyeuristic comment in the writings of some of the early Church Fathers, celibates forced to deny their sexuality conjugal expression. It also erupted in the Middle Ages and in Puritan America in witch hunts, which were exercises in projection and scapegoating.

The emergence of elements of the archaic unconscious was evident, during Hitler's rise to power, in the Phoenix-like resurrection of Wotan, the ancient Germanic god, who had been relegated to the unconscious of the national psyche. As the thin veneer of civilization began to crack, Wotan emerged in the dreams of the people and in the mythology of the Third Reich.

Shadow projections, reflected in sexism, classism, racism, become institutionalised in social and political structures that enshrine them. Institutional evil, a further instance of the demonic, perpetuates alienation, inhumanity and violence and renders its victims helpless and impotent.

The Biblical writers highlighted the two sources of human evil that have been mentioned. On the one hand, they saw clearly that evil arises from within, from the matrix of the unconscious, as well as from personal decision. They also recognized that, being human, we can no more avoid making mistakes than we can avoid the consequences of the mistakes that we make. On the other hand, they also identified the presence of a demonic [79] element in society. We are born into a society which is laden with factors pre-disposing us to evil, an evil which society perpetuates.

Both were aspects of what was described as original sin.

Original Sin

The traditional explanation of original sin argued that the fall of Adam and Eve blighted the human race. The guilt and consequences of that first disobedience were passed on at birth to every person. However, while this perception is historically and morally indefensible, the phenomena that the original myth sought to explain were very real.

There is no one authoritative, comprehensive explanation of original sin. Original sin is an aspect of what we experience in being human. A range of explanations are, therefore, appropriate.

Several explanations I find helpful.

Sebastian Moore argued that the original sin, that ground from which all of our maladaptive behaviours arise, is the belief we acquire, in separating from our mothers, that we are unloved and unlovable. This message is later reinforced by society. Our perversity stems from not feeling loved and the consequent lack of self-esteem and security. Strategies we develop to overcome these deficiencies often lead us further in the direction of despair and disintegration.

The next explanation is personal.

From observing my own behaviour, and that of others, I have to conclude that motivation stems more from the unconscious than the conscious, without being wholly determined by the unconscious. It is inner distortions that are responsible for our angularity, our cussedness and, sometimes, our sheer bloody-mindedness. Our perversities relate to the capacities we have repressed, but which refuse to lie quiet or silent.

It is with the antennae of the unconscious that children discern the unlived shadow of a parent, slip it on and live it. It is at the level of shadow that we most powerfully engage each other. It is shadow projection that stirs up strife. We attack, with venom those who carry our shadows.

It would not be difficult to argue that original sin stems from the division between the conscious and the unconscious, and from burdening the latter with what we have repressed.

In arguing that sin and the shadow are closely connected, however, I am not wanting to suggest that the unconscious is wholly dysfunctional. It is an important survival and maturational mechanism. Without this division between the conscious and the unconscious, human maturation would be [80] impossible. The development of the unconscious is a necessary consequence of our freedom and repression is a safety valve essential to our psychological survival. We repress what we cannot cope with. Without the process of repression life could be intolerable. In order to repress material, the ego needs to be sufficiently differentiated out of the unconscious. Lack of such differentiation can result in psychoses or borderline dysfunctions.⁹

In the second phase of our maturation this split is overcome. The shadow side of our reality is recognised, owned, loved and begins to be integrated into the conscious part of the personality, a process, which, while enhancing, is never complete. When this occurs, development has come full circle.

Original sin could also be seen to reside in what Langdon Gilkie has called our destiny, the circumstances in which we find ourselves when we are born, which reflect family circumstances and cultural inheritance which powerfully influence us at the deepest level of our subjectivity.

There is a sense in which we are blighted, predestined, by circumstances predating our birth, that have more influence on our behaviour than do our own actions or their consequences. We enter a world, as Rahner argued, that is burdened by the guilt of others. The guilt, the shame and the psychological and social distortions to which they give rise, influence us, and not merely through the behaviour of others. They are internalized and become part of our inner geography. We do not merely suffer because of the guilt of others, we actually inherit it. Its influence is powerful because it is present in our personal and collective unconscious.

Of particular interest in exploring the essence of original sin is Wilber's suggestion that there are two falls, a theological fall and a scientific fall. In Up From Eden he argues that the evolution of human consciousness was preceded by an involution, or a creative outflow of the unitive energy of God into the diversity of the material world. He suggests, in terms which are reminiscent of Bohm's distinction between the implicate order of unity and the explicate order of diversity, that the theological fall was divine Spirit forgetting itself at lower levels.¹⁰ The scientific fall, for Wilber, was the dawning awareness, in the development of human consciousness, of our separation from the unitive Spirit that bore us. This awareness related to our emergence from what Wilber called our Ground Consciousness, those strata into which potential for evolution were laid down, or compressed, in the original involution. Until we began to emerge from an embededness in the material world, and to distinguish ourselves from it, we were unaware of this loss of an immediate connectedness with Spirit. The awareness of this fallenness, however, became acute in the Mental Egoic era, when, as a species, we became acutely self-aware. This process began around the second millennium BCE.

If Wilber's hypothesis is enhanced by Rahner's perception of an immanent, transcendent Grace, it furnishes a highly suggestive paradigm that is not [81] inconsistent with Christian theology, particularly when the latter functions at Schuon's esoteric level of religious expression.

A Developmental Perspective

It could be argued that the ultimate source of human fallenness was the divine act of creation, in which God went out of herself into creation, an action which was the pre-condition for our self-constitution in co-operation with this immanent deity.

The process of individuation, as a race and as individuals, necessitated an emergence from our Ground Consciousness and a knowledge of our fallibility and mortality. It also involved a loss of awareness of the givenness of our immortality.

To cope with a world that we increasingly experienced as distant from us, we gathered together in communities that bequeathed to us traditions which were increasingly laden with distortions and which encouraged us to repress what was too threatening or painful to entertain. This, in turn, resulted in a widening of the division between the conscious and the unconscious.

Hominoids initially lived out of the unconscious, and then out of the subconscious. The emergence of the conscious ego, and the development of a separation between the conscious and the unconscious, began to be evident in the Mental-Egoic era. Separated from the numinous experience of Spirit that we had intuitively known when we lived in the unconscious and the subconscious, we discovered an atrophying of those capacities that enabled us to recognize this Presence and forfeited, not only a consciousness of this Grace, but also the experience of the love that was its essence.

We are fortunate, however, that we have been so structured that self-healing is built into our psyches, as it is into our bodies. The unconscious, when we learn to pay attention to it, will not merely diagnose our psychological/ spiritual illnesses, but will indicate to us what we need to do to participate in our healing. The more we journey within, the more we discover the God who is our ground and the foundation of our healing and development. The more we contact this presence, the more we realize that it is Love that holds us in existence.

Love

The difficulty is having the courage to face ourselves. Only love, the experience of an accepting, forgiving, non-judgmental love, can enable us to do this. This love not only helps us face ourselves but also facilitates the process of integrating the unconscious into the conscious.

Love is experienced in the strong, but non-possessive, love of parents or significant others, who give us permission and space to be ourselves, who provide disciplinary boundaries against which we exert ourselves in order to [82] become individuals. This is also encountered in those who uniquely incarnate this love. However, for many, a lack of familiarity with this love precludes them from beginning this inward journey and robs them of that which is able to sustain their progress. Other help is needed, particularly for those whose experience of life has taught them that they cannot trust others, or for those whose unconscious is so distorted and unruly that they dare not travel through its territory alone.

Jesus

Wilber has argued that a Mental Egoic era, a form of consciousness focusing on individuality and rationality, began to emerge around 2500 BCE. It was ushered in by what the philosopher, Karl Jaspers, called the axial period of human history, which saw the emergence of such significant religious figures as Buddha, Lao Tzu, Shankara and Jesus Christ. It was Jesus who uniquely incarnated the love we have been talking about.

Observation of the way Jesus dealt with people indicates that he encouraged them to acknowledge their shadow reality, but in such a way that they could respond without capitulation. His gentle, non-judgmental approach, which did not involve a loss of face, resulted in true repentance, in people's ability to perceive themselves in a new way. It was his acceptance of people, in his loving of them, that helped them face themselves. It was also this love that changed them.

The record indicates that different people responded to Jesus differently. The pariahs--the publicans and prostitutes--had no image to preserve. They had no difficulty acknowledging their faults. Society forced them to live what they were labelled. In accepting them, Jesus transformed them. This was evident from the change in Zacchaeus the moment Jesus publicly identified himself with the tax collector by inviting himself for a meal.

The Pharisees reacted differently. To maintain an illusion of purity, they repressed and projected what they didn't like about themselves. They criticised in others what they couldn't tolerate or admit to in themselves.

There were at least two different sorts of responses to Jesus among the Pharisees. There were those conscientious souls, like Paul in his pre-conversion days, who, because of the compulsive intensity of his quest for acceptance from God, repressed knowledge of his other self, a self that, nevertheless, came back to haunt him in reflective moments. There were others, quite different to Paul, who blocked acknowledgment of their shadowed selves by denial or distraction, because such acknowledgment threatened their status, privilege or power.

Because the only way they could be healed was for them to confront what they had repressed, and to begin the process of re-integrating it, Jesus continued to confront them. To have done otherwise would have been to have given up on them and to have been untrue to himself. [83]

The scene in which Jesus was confronted by Jewish leaders with a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, a circumstance designed to trick him into incriminating himself, beautifully illustrates his approach.

The woman was standing in silent defiance within a circle made up of Pharisees and doctors of the law, who were jabbing their fingers in her direction and taunting Jesus with the question, She was caught in the act of adultery and the law says she should be stoned. What should be done? He was silent and wrote with his finger in the ground. They continued to badger him with the demand for an answer to their query. He finally raised his eyes to meet theirs, and, looking around at faces that betrayed satisfaction at his discomfiture, said, The one of you who is faultless shall throw the first stone. There are those who argue that Jesus, in this comment, was referring, not so much to sin in general, but to this sin! that is, adultery. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the woman's clients were among her accusers!

The learned rabble feel silent. They began to depart one by one, beginning with the eldest. Finally, the woman found herself alone with Jesus. He approached her and said, Where are they? Has no one condemned you?. No Sir, she replied. Jesus continued, Nor do I condemn you. You may go; do not sin again.¹¹

In this encounter Jesus forced the woman's accusers to lift from her the shadow material they had projected onto her. They were not comfortable with the strength of their sexuality and the fact that it was sometimes uncontrollable. They projected their discomfort with themselves onto this woman in a vicious exercise in scapegoating.

The Pharisees and doctors of the law, to be healed, needed to confront, own and integrate their shadows. So Jesus handed them back to them. The woman needed to be released from the weight of their imprisoning projections that kept her trapped in a lifestyle that was destructive. Jesus, by asking each of her accusers to identify and take back their shadows, removed this accumulated weight from the woman and freed her. Also, in accepting her, he returned her gold, her belief in herself and a confidence that the future could be different. He said, in effect, there is no longer need for you to live as you have lived in the past, living out, living vicariously, the shadows of those who have used you. You do not have to live that way any more. Go and sin no more.

In the early days of his ministry Jesus was gentle with the Pharisees and showed enormous patience with them, despite the fact that they were reluctant to own their distortions, which he kept handing back to them after lifting them from those they were scapegoating. In time, motivated by the need to be seen to be righteous, or by the desire to retain power, they became increasingly angry with him. Rather than accepting, owning and integrating the returned shadows, they threw them back at him. He is a drunkard and mixes with the wrong people, said the moralistic Pharisees.¹² [84] This was classic shadow projection that revealed far more about the Pharisees than it did about Jesus. The secret, repressed desire of the Pharisees to be released from the need to be good was clearly evident in their criticisms of Jesus.

Jesus, for his part, kept returning the ping pong ball to the other side of the table. He was unwilling to be scapegoated and knew that if the leading personalities of the Jewish nation were to be healed, and to give effective guidance to ordinary people, they would need to confront and own their shadow projections. It is little wonder that, over time, opposition to Jesus from the Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians increased.

At the same time as he was dealing in this way with the political and religious leaders, Jesus was returning to the common people the gold they had projected onto those they admired. Many were wanting him to live their gold vicariously. Jesus refused to do this. As long as he carried their gold, they could not be healed. He was as determined in this as he was that he would not fulfil their expectation of him as a political Messiah. Others are disappointed when we refuse to live their gold for them. They are usually the sort of people of whom it is appropriate to ask the question, Do you really want to be healed. Some of these may have been among those who later called for his blood.

It was obvious that the authorities were pushed by Jesus beyond what they were able to tolerate. It is little wonder that they decided to be rid of him. The later comment, respecting Jesus' death, that he bore our sins in his own body on the tree,¹³ takes on a different perspective when seen in the light of his unwillingness to compromise his loving of the common people and of the leaders by pulling back on his re-presentation to them of their shadow material.

In handing them back their shadows Jesus presented people with a gift, because, without accepting their shadow material and working with it, they could not become whole. Superficial behavioural change does not alter inner structures, though it may ease tension in social relationships. It is only as the core of who we are becomes integrated that real change occurs. Others can tell the difference between a superficial persona and someone, who, because they know and accept themselves, can offer others heart hospitality and healing.

Identifying with the poor, and accepting their brief, led Jesus to accuse the Jewish leaders of discrimination and injustice. This accusation also arose from his concern for the authorities, because it would have been unloving of him not to challenge their inconsistency, hypocrisy and indifference to injustice. This action, however, further politicised his ministry. His death was, therefore, the inevitable political consequence of the way he lived.

Jesus didn't give up on the Jewish leaders, even at the end. He did not step back from his commitment to either. The volley of woes he hurled at the [85] Pharisees in the final week were an attempt to break through to them. The love, evident in his life and teaching, glowed with brilliance in the ignominy of his death. Whatever you do to me, he was saying, I will not cease to love you.

In the first Christian sermon, following Jesus resurrection, Peter, newly sensitized by Jesus forgiveness of his betrayal, and motivated by the implosion within of a Spirit-gifted love, re-presented to the Jews their shadow material with the challenge, When he had been given up to you, by the deliberate will and plan of God, you used heathen men to crucify and kill him.¹⁴

Beyond Projection

Through his life, teaching and death Jesus did what the Jewish sacrifices had been unable to do.

The Jewish sacrificial system had its origin in a broader mythology of sacrifice common to the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. The suggestion is that it developed initially to ensure the fruitfulness of the land and its people, to almost magically control the Great Mother and to compensate this Chthonic Mother, this earth mother, for the emergence of the solar ego and its escape from her embrace.¹⁵

The Israelites adopted the practice of sacrifice to encourage their sky God, Yahweh, to forgive their sin. The moralism of the Hebrew tradition, reinforced by prophetic denunciation, induced a deep sense of guilt. The sacrifices were intended to wipe the slate clean.

At the psychological level, however, the sacrificial system was a ritualization of the process of projection. It was the institutionalization of a very human response to guilt. It was helpful, but only up to a point. It did not deal with the split within that generated perverse behaviours. It provided for the gassing out of guilt-ridden energies but it did not heal the distortions that produced the destructive responses and the guilt that trailed in their wake.

Jesus, on the other hand, confronted individuals with their shadow Material--energy-rich, content-laden structures that were the originating ground of their sinfulness. By facilitating an integration of this material and by convincing them that God accepted them in their totality, he effectively promoted radical transformation.

Jesus brought people into contact with that which had the power to transform them, to re-integrate their centre. He incarnated the love that sourced their being and their maturation. This love, of which they had a powerful hint in the engrossing attentiveness and love of a mother in the early weeks after birth, had been overlaid with messages of their unacceptability and with experiences of rejection. These messages were a consequence of their growth towards individuality, of the damaging use of [86] their freedom and of the overlay of the guilt of others that impregnated their pre-history. Jesus helped them appreciate that they were loved by God and made it possible for them to accept his acceptance of them.

God's healing of us, through a love that was uniquely manifest in Christ, is cumulative. We are taken by the hand and led down the darkening steps into the upper layers of the unconscious. He takes in the vista before him and encourages us to do the same. Once we have overcome our fear of what we will find, we look up and our eyes alight upon features that change as we continue to look at them. His gaze heals distortions. Emboldened, we no longer draw back as strongly as he leads us further down the stairwell. The further we go the more confidence we gain and the more we recognize in these labyrinthine passages the stuff that is more truly us than the smiling persona we present to the world.

The Grace that we have known insubstantially in our reflective moments, has, in Christ, brought us full circle. In the early stages of our developing individuation, the shadow archetype began filling with repressed material and began separating from the conscious to the degree that we became vaguely aware of a primordial split within us. Christ effectively facilitates the reverse process of reintegration and a reconnection with others, with our environment and with God.

As a result of the change the love manifest in Christ effects in us, we discover that our most basic relational needs for self-acceptance, self-esteem and security are on the way to being met and we no longer feel the same need to control ourselves, others or God. We have a sense of place, a sense of being rooted in God, the God in whom all the families of the earth are named.¹⁶

We also experience a new connection with our feelings and our bodies and find a freedom from the unpredictable demons of the unconscious, a freedom to flow with Grace in the direction of our humanity and our healing. We release the deep freedom, the freedom to say yes or no to God, that is the foundation of our humanity and its fulfilment.

We also discover a capacity for healthy self-denial and for love, measured by empathy and the ability to give others space to discover and be themselves, a space in which there is neither threat nor judgement. In addition, it frees us sufficiently from our own neediness to be concerned for others. It gives us a discernment capable of identifying the real issues beneath their presenting problems and the courage to name and oppose prejudice, dehumanisation and injustice. It gives us the ability to address social issues without contaminating our responses with our own distortions and agendas, to deal with our own violence before addressing violence within the community. [87]

Holiness An understanding of the way Jesus lived, and the manner in which he dealt with people, gives us insight into the essence of the biblical concept of holiness.

We have most frequently conceived of holiness either as a negative abstention from evil or as the imposition of a super-spirituality. The first leads to a selfish pre-occupation with ourselves, with the state of our holiness. This arises from the fact that we do not feel accepted by God. We try to be perfect, because we imagine that if we attain the ideal God will have to accept us! The loving kindness of God has no place in this sort of transaction The second notion of holiness increases the strength with which those elements that do not conform to our view of spirituality are repressed. It makes it more likely that the shadow will take us over. We will be driven by unconscious personalities in the shadow.

Holiness does not consist in our presenting a sanitised religious persona to the world, but in living who we are with honesty and integrity. There is a sense in which there is no absolute state of holiness.

We all live with a certain degree of integrity, that is, we all live that which we are capable of living. For example, if I am collapsed in upon myself, because I have been physically or sexually abused, I will have little energy to give to others and will be consciously and unconsciously pre-occupied with myself. I will not have the capacity for being other than self-absorbed. If I live as well as I am capable of living, allowing for the necessity of my self-pre-occupation, I will be living with integrity. I am living, as Paul suggested, up to the level of my insight, up to the level of my understanding of myself and my situation, up to the level of my capacity. I am addressing each situation as positively and lovingly as it is possible for me to do.

This definition of holiness can be taken one stage further. While it is important for us to live who we are with integrity, we should not stop at this point. It is important for us to be increasing our capacity to live our full potential, that is, to live, not only with integrity, but in a manner that reflects our commitment to an increasing integration of the separate and sometimes warring aspects of our selves.

It is when we are aware of the immanent grace that is fostering this integration, and when we are committed to the long and difficult task of acknowledging and loving the shadow aspect of the self, that we realize that we are on the way to a more comprehensive holiness.

The further we progress, the more we realize that the whole phenomenon is ultimately a work of grace and the less we are concerned about being holy! We long to be ourselves, free of pretence, and we long for others to find the same freedom, or, to use Merton's terminology, to exchange the false self for the true self. [88]

Self-Love The continuing irony of this situation is that, in order to ultimately free ourselves from the false self, we must give attention to ourselves. For many Christians, this concentration on the self is difficult, because they have been taught that it is sinful to be concerned with their self-development. The reality, however, is that, unless we can exercise compassion towards the beggar, or the fiend within, we will not be able to express a genuine or appropriate compassion towards the beggar or fiend without.¹⁷ It is by paying attention to the needs of the soul that we can free ourselves from the demons within, demons that need to be acknowledged and befriended, demons that reveal themselves in uncomfortable symptoms.¹⁸

The Church's Role?

To what degree does the church help or hinder the maturational process about which we have been speaking, a process facilitated by the life, teaching, death and resurrected presence of Christ?

The church can, and sometimes does, play a highly significant role by making people aware of the inner grace of the Spirit

1. by helping them acknowledge and accept their shadow side,
2. by teaching and incarnating the love of God,
3. by offering Christ,
4. by preaching forgiveness and the possibility of new life,
5. by encouraging openness, or faith,
6. and by challenging our idolatrous self-deceptions.

The church, however, does not always realize this ideal. Its ministry, unfortunately, is sometimes exercised dysfunctionally. It often sabotages the potentiality it was intended to nurture. Much preaching has encouraged, not openness, but denial, repression and projection. Rather than co-operating with universal Grace, in helping us love, accept and integrate the shadow side, it has exaggerated the distortions of the unconscious by rounding on the symptoms of our psychological and spiritual pain. It has also made us feel guilty about its manifestation. In this way, it has increased our bondage, rather than released us from it.¹⁹ While the damage it causes is more inadvertent than intentional, the result is no less serious.

Much damage is done through preaching. Spiritual or moral ideals are held up for emulation that have not been road-tested by the preacher and that are impossible to put into practice. Not wishing to admit to a failure to achieve them, many Christians secretly castigate themselves for non-performance and pull back from honest sharing. This style of preaching encourages pretence and a dishonesty with oneself.

Ministers are in a particularly difficult situation. They carry the projected gold of many in the congregation, with the expectation that they will live this gold vicariously for those to whom it belongs. There is often considerable anger, as well as disappointment, when the clergy are discovered to be [89] human. No wonder Jesus refused to wear the gold others projected onto him!

But this is not all. The minister is in a double bind. Not only is he, or she, a popular projection or transference object, they are also more prone than many others to being overtaken by alternative shadow personalities. They are rarely permitted to express powerful negative emotions, like anger, or to explicitly acknowledge their sexuality. But neither facet will be denied. A symbiotic balancing will cause these important human characteristics to manifest in some way, often unhealthily and sometimes perversely.

The denial of the richness of strong emotion also robs them of vitality and creativity. They cease to be interesting people. There is a potential destructiveness, associated with human emotions. The potential for destructiveness is inseparable from the positive potentiality of our emotional responses. This is best addressed, not by denying it, but by transcending it in creative responses.²⁰

The church in the West has also had difficulty helping people feelingly appropriate God's loving of them.

Because we live out of our thinking function, and repress our capacity for feeling, our minds grab onto the idea that God loves us, but we do not experience that love with our feeling selves. The fact that our parents produced in us a repertoire of behaviours, considered by them appropriate, by withdrawing love when we did not meet their expectations, contributes to this difficulty and also leaves us with the impression that God's love is also conditional.

There are many church people whose Christian service, while commendable in other respects, is little more that an attempt to recommend them to God and to gain his acceptance and love.

Our difficulty in accepting God's acceptance of us is further frustrated by a theology that argues that in God's sight we are miserable sinners who are totally undeserving of his attention. Add to this a vision of a God, totally external to us, onto whom we project our compulsive guilt, our self-depreciation and our self-hatred, and it is little wonder that we regress, rather than progress, in our maturational journey.

The church needs to rediscover its mission to its own members before it harnesses their energies for mission. If this doesn't happen, then their missioning will be just one other attempt at gaining God's acceptance, an acceptance that, ironically, is given before it is asked for. [90]

[FOB 71-90]