A brief meander through the thicket of religion in search of the shadow reveals some interesting perspectives, some profound and some very, at least potentially, confusing. From the perspective of Simple Reality all stands revealed.
Sin is “Self-Imposed Nonsense.” In other words, sin is projecting one’s shadow onto oneself. “Much of what has traditionally been described as sin is really guilt-ridden exaggeration held in the mind of some emotionally disturbed church authority [e.g. St. Augustine]. Adherence to the admonition, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,’ would silence all these misappropriations of spiritual truth.” David Hawkins has revealed the hypocrisy of judgmental religious authorities.
We all have those intuitive insights that reveal truth in a flash but don’t often realize the full implications of those glimpses of wisdom. “But originally the Christian tradition recognized that one carries the opposite (the shadow) within oneself. St Paul said, ‘For the good I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ That’s the statement of a depth psychologist. He knew he had a “shadow” and or a false self, and he thought only God could save him from such a condition. But knowing what his condition was sort of held things together.
“Later, that in-depth perspective was lost and people simply felt compelled to identify with good, or at least the pretense of being good. Doing that, you will quickly lose contact with the shadow. Also, somewhere along the line—it became obvious by the Middle Ages—the church made a very bad mistake. Now not only were some actions evil, but fantasies about evil; adultery was a sin, and thinking about adultery was a sin, too. Both had to be confessed and forgiven. As a result people began to deny and repress their fantasy life, and the shadow was driven underground. The split became greater.”
Robert L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written before psychology could explain the quasi-schizophrenic behavior of an apparently “religious” man. “We must assume that Jekyll’s devotion to religion means that he went through formal religious observances, perhaps joining a Church of some kind. We know, of course, that Jekyll’s religion is not sincere. He knows nothing of God, but is hoping to find in formalized religion and in his own religious pretensions a defense against being overcome by Hyde. No doubt many of us today are using religion in this way, especially those religious creeds that decry man’s sins, threaten the sinful man with punishment, and encourage good deeds as the sign of salvation. This kind of religion tends to draw as members those persons who are consciously or unconsciously struggling to hold in check their shadow personalities.”
“Jung believed that God, the living God, could be found only where we least want to look, the place we have the most resistance to exploring. This living God is entwined with our own darkness and shadow, woven in our wounds and complexes, laced with pathologies. On the other hand, the God of Belief, the god removed from creation and from everyday life, frees us from our imperfections, ultimately cleanses us of all worldly contamination and gets us off the hook as far as dealing with the most difficult aspects of the human dilemma.”
“We need crooks in order to have someone to get caught other than ourselves. We prefer someone out there in the mine fields, someone desperate, to be our scapegoats, guinea pigs, volunteers, and sacrifices. It is little wonder our culture embraces the Christian religion so fundamentally, it espousing a theology which sacrifices having someone else (Christ) doing the most crucial task for us, dying for our sins. This creates yet another avoided crucifixion, aborting the alchemical work before its completion, preventing the deepest transformation.”
“Envy, lust, sensuality, lies, and all known vices are the negative, “dark” aspect of the unconscious, which can manifest itself in two ways. In the positive sense, it appears as a “spirit of nature,” creatively animating man, things, and the world. It is the “chthonic spirit” [pertaining to the gods or spirits of the underworld]. In the negative sense, the unconscious (that same spirit) manifests itself as a spirit of evil, as a drive to destroy.
“As has already been pointed out, the alchemists personified this spirit as “the spirit Mercurius” and called it, with good reason Mercurious duplex (the two-faced, dual Mercurious). In the religious language of Christianity, it is called the devil. But, however improbable it may seem, the devil too has a dual aspect. In the positive sense, he appears as Lucifer—literally, the light-bringer.”
The dark side of religion is most present in the so-called fundamentalist institutions. Among its more objectionable traits there are what Vernon Grounds calls “fundamentalism’s tendencies toward cultural separatism, anti-intellectualism, and lack of love toward those outside its opinions.”
“The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident,” Bertrand Russell once wrote, “but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend.” We naturally project our collective shadow on our god(s) and do not find it hard to imagine that they have human attributes including a shadow.
“God is stronger than the devil, or, if you will, God’s bright side is stronger than his dark side.” “Thus, in Genesis 6:5-8, the Lord is embittered, and it is out of this bitterness that the destruction arises: ‘I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created—men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky, for I regret that I made them.’”
The collective shadow of the church has been caught of late wandering abroad, sneaking about in the dark alleys of the false self. “To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away, he [Oklahoma governor Frank Keating who resigned as chairman of a board of lay Catholics looking into the child abuse scandal] wrote to Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, ‘that is the model of a criminal investigation, not my church.’” Oh, but governor Keating, it has always been this way in your church, you are only now seeing what has hitherto been cleverly hidden.
The emerging shadow has been hard on the patriarchal church and caused the hierarchy to “circle the wagons.” But the church of late has been caught time and again with its “pants down” so to speak. “Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahoney and a top adviser discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday [January 21, 2012].”
Often the first reaction when an unpleasant reality begins to emerge is one of “denial.” When Monsignor Peter Garcia, who admitted preying on children for decades in Spanish-speaking parishes in Los Angeles was discharged from a New Mexico treatment center for pedophiles, Mahoney ordered him to stay away from California. Mahoney had to have known that wherever Garcia ended up he would resume expressing his addiction but for Mahoney at least, out of sight was out of mind.
Recently released files reveal Mahoney’s exact words and the second coping mechanism of the false self, that of keeping “secrets.” “I believe that if Monsignor Garcia were to reappear here within the archdiocese we might very well have some type of legal action filed in both the criminal and civil sectors.” The church thinks itself above the law that the rest of us feel obliged to obey so they just won’t tell anyone what’s going on. It worked for a while—a very long while in fact. But remember, the shadow will have its say—ultimately and forcefully.
Denying the problem, like any act of repression merely delays its inevitable reemergence stronger and even with arrogance. Lies, denial and secrets only strengthen the false self. Garcia returned to the parish that same year (1986) refusing to take his medication to suppress his sexual urges. He left the church in 1989 and died in 2009. The recently released files, which the church fought to keep “secret,” reveal that Garcia admitted molesting boys for a period of 20 years.
The church hierarchy and at least some parishioners, who must have known what was going on, enabled the many priests who used their position as a cover to prey on the young and vulnerable. They got away with horrible crimes which would not have been possible in the society outside the cathedral walls.
Garcia knew the church would keep silent. “He assured church officials his victims were unlikely to come forward because of their immigration status. In at least one case, according to a church memo, he threatened to have a boy he had raped deported if he went to the police.” Now we can begin to see why Bertrand Russell was outraged. But it is not God the creator who is a fiend, it is the repressed shadow of the false self.
“Lewis Mumford excoriated his fellow secular liberals for being ‘unaware of the dark forces of the unconscious,’ and declared, by comparison, that ‘though the theologian’s view of the external world might be scientifically weak, his view of the internal world, the world of value and personality, included an understanding of constant human phenomena—sin, corruption, evil—on which the liberal closes his eyes.’” Mumford, an American author and critic, should have confined his judgment to the arts because the theologians he seems to be enamored of know nothing of sin, corruption and evil much less lies, denial and secrets. Religion and the shadow have made good partners in aiding and abetting the expression of the human false self.
If we are to have any hope of understanding this tragedy, which will continue to unfold for quite some time, we have only to look at the principles of Simple Reality.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
