Shadow Dancing
“And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
My very first boyfriend was the school drug dealer. And if you are wondering how that ties into a verse out of Deuteronomy, stay with me, I think I will land it by the time you finish this piece.
One of the things that always puzzled me about Christians, was the demonizing of ‘the other’. I think it puzzled me because very early on, I got the message that at the heart of the gospel is the imperative to love the stranger. I didn’t get this message from the pulpit, though no doubt it was preached, I just wasn’t good at listening well, even back then. I got it by watching people and paying attention. I give full credit for this early cornerstone being laid so well to my parents, who did an incredibly good job of cultivating a rich and diverse community around my sisters and I. I grew up in a church, which later became the subject of a sociological study because it was so strange. The church was comprised of two main groups of people, skilled professionals, and their patients. You see, these beautiful, skillful and faithful people who were the bonus parents who raised, me, the ones who’s homes I did not have to knock to enter, the ones who scooped me up and taught me what it is to belong, they did not see any reason to exclude anyone. Ever. For any reason. This meant that on Sunday mornings, the congregation was a hot mix of mental health professionals, their partners and children, and their patients - who may or may not have remembered to take their antipsychotic meds. As a kid, I thought it was normal to have people yelling out in the middle of the service, or stealing our clothes while we swam in the waterhole, or waiting in the garden when you got home from church cheerfully calling out ‘I’m a treeeee blowing in the breeeeeze”. One year, when I was four, one of these very psychiatrically unwell people fed me some rotten chocolate milk on a church camping trip when no one was looking. I threw up for the entire ten hour car trip home. Nobody batted an eyelash.
If that sounds abhorrent to you, I also grew up thinking it was normal to have the world specialist in lung-related medicine stroll across the park in the middle of the night to sit me on his knee and listen to my wheezy chest with his stethoscope and proscribe me antibiotics at the kitchen table. To this day, my sisters and I will still call this lovely man, who is venerated in his field internationally and is like a bonus Dad to us all, and ask him for medical advice. My childhood was strange, indeed. So I never got the memo, which seemed to pervade the rest of the Christian community outside of my unique bubble, that there were ‘others’ to fear, scapegoat and make the subject of our pity or scorn, or evangelism. That violent stripe of evangelical culture would not find me until I was well into my university years, and by then, the die was already cast.
I never struggled with Jesus’s words about loving our enemies, turning the other cheek or welcoming the stranger. This was so beautifully modelled to me in my early years, that it never had to be spelled out. What I would later struggle with so much, was how to welcome the parts of myself that I had exiled, feared, hated or scorned. This struggle would nearly cost me my life.
Like any adolescent will, I of course pushed this mandate of unconditional acceptance to its very limit during my teenage years. I went to a private school, St. Stephens, in Duncraig. At that time, my Dad was one of the Deans of the school. In fact, he was the Dean of both my house, and of Pastoral Care. Which also meant that he was in charge of discipline. This made it awkward for his colleagues when I got suspended in Year 10 for smuggling alcohol into band camp. I guess he thought it might also be awkward for me, to be suspended by him, so he sent me to one of the other Deans, who was in fact, my Godfather. So I sat out my 3 day long suspension from school outside my Godfather’s office, instead of my Dad’s. This was somewhat of a dividing line between What Happened Before and What Came After.
Before this time, I had built up a strong reputation as a good student. I was diligent and smart, I got great grades and was fairly impressive. I liked the kudos that came with this goody-two-shoes image, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that there was something not quite honest about it. Enter stage left, Drug Dealer Boyfriend. He and I actually started going out in Year 8, when he was still so shy that he had to wear his school jumper over his face when he approached me out by the bike racks to ask me to be his girlfriend. Later on, he would grow into a full on delinquent, wagging, smoking, talking smack to the teachers, and dealing pot in tinfoil packs at the lockers at lunchtime which was sometimes smoked under three blazers on the school oval in the middle of lunch hour. We dated on and off for all of highschool and there was a part of me that relished the indignant looks the good church ladies who taught at the school gave my Dad, as if to ask ‘are you really going to let her date him?’. We even dated after highschool had finished, when all appearances of respectability were well and truly in the rearview mirror and he was living his best life as a drug dealing full-time surfer, who spent most of his weekends stoned in Margaret River. To his credit, he never tried to get me hooked on pot, he always saw me as being too pure for drugs, and I appreciated that about him. All the clever adults in my world knew better than to cause a fuss, so they just didn’t. Instead they did their best to hold a sturdy container around me and let me find my own way.
I went on to work in bars, and in a drop-in centre for traumatized child soldiers who had miraculously survived the war in the former Yugoslavia, and began a lifelong journey of finding those who had been excluded or hated or reviled by the power bases in my world, and aligning myself with them. I worked with kids in jail, with drug dealers, with abuse victims, with young women who had been forced into prostitution. I sat with people in alleyways at 3am vomiting into the sewer, in visiting rooms in jails, in fetid apartments with no furniture. I sat with pregnant teenagers who had been raped and left by their abusers, with Muslim prisoners of war and Indigenous kids who had been the targets of the most atrocious systemic racism still operational in the world. I talked kids out of suicide, and sat with parents at their last wits end, and in emergency rooms with overdose victims. In short, I spent my earliest years of independence chasing down the broken hearted and figuring out how to bind them up. There was never any sense for me, that these people were out of God’s reach. To me, they all wore the face of Christ. I never once saw them as being ‘other’. Not for a second. In fact, the things I learned from listening to them and walking with them were the greatest education I ever received, my richest learning, my most treasured memories. During these years, the teachings of Jesus became dearer and stronger and more potent to me than they ever had before. They made sense. They resonated with truth and life and hope and I held them out, whenever possible, to those who needed them. This whole idea that God might hate or judge or exclude others because they knew him by a different name, or did not know him at all, never occurred to me.
“I thought that maybe I had been spared this work, the work I saw others so earnestly doing. Trying to work out how to love their ‘enemy’. I didn’t have any enemies. I was friends with all the people that all the evangelical people in my world feared or hated. To me, these ‘others’ were easy to love. My own enemy was far closer to home than I had realised.
It was myself that I hated.”
For a long time I kept this hatred at bay by following the rules, same as I had before that fateful highschool suspension triggered my first public shaming experience. I made good choices, I went to therapy. I finished my first degree. I married someone sensible. I birthed two beautiful boys. I earned the approval and embrace of the community that I had made a home in. I finished another degree, and began to build a life for myself in a world I loved and was passionate about.
But I harboured a terrible secret.
There were parts of myself, parts of my story and who I was and who I had become that I could not accept. I could not reconcile. I felt deep down that I was shameful and dirty and rotten to the core. In my mind, I had rationalised myself out of this deep mistrust of my own soul, and because I had a sharp mind which had begun to earn me a whole new set of accolades, I sunk gratefully into the mental grasp I had of what was going on, and parked my deepest knowing in the abandonment place. In the shadow place. In the place we put things that confront us so deeply that we cannot reconcile them. I never ‘othered’ any ‘others’. I never needed to. I had carefully othered myself, and filled that place in every human heart which is reserved for projection and denial with my own story, my own selfhood, my own truth.
Anytime my body or my heart would tell me a truth that my mind did not want to believe, I just shut it down. I turned it off. I denied and repressed and silenced myself over and over and over again. I did this because very early on I had learned that it was the best way for me to survive, and because I earnestly believed it was the right thing to do. And so from this place where I sit now, I finally have no judgement left even for this.
In fact, I had become arrogant. I became so convinced that I had fully grasped the core value at the heart of the Christian tradition, this welcome of the stranger, this full inclusion of the exiled and marginalised, that I began to judge those who didn’t see it like I did. I became just like the Pharisees I had caricatured as blind and lost in my own examination of Scripture. I was blind to what was right in front of me, just like they were. I did not, in fact, have the opportunity to really learn what the full embrace of God feels like, until I was finally forced to confront this self-hatred, this denial of my shadow-self, once and for all. In the end, this battle took into terrain there are no maps for except in the most esoteric mystic traditions. There, I learned about the annihilation of the soul, the mysteries of union and separation and the alchemical grace available to anyone living in a human body.
There I learned about the power of living archetypally, of moving beyond dualism into unity consciousness. I learned about how the apertures that the exposure of my shadow-self had opened were not in fact, design flaws as I had firmly believed, but were actually the portals by which I could finally enter into an entirely different operational system for life and love. They were the mouth of the great fish that swallowed Jonah, the gaping hole to the tomb where my Jesus lay. They were the brutal invitation into the way of the Phoenix, which comes into fullness of its own beauty the minute before it combusts into painful immolation and returns to the ash, before being born again.
I am good at speaking in metaphor. I realise this. I also realise that because of this, it may appear that I have lost the capacity to think with my logical mind and have escaped into some sort of fantasy parallel universe where I sit around all day cross legged singing Kumbaya and waiting for the dawning of the Age of Aquarius to enlighten humanity. While that sounds like a fun way to spend an afternoon, I assure you I have not lost my mind entirely. Or rather, I did, and then it was given back to me at the end.
Here is how that went down:
The bald facts are that when the rubber hits the road for most of us, our logical mind will trump our deepest intuitive knowing, when the two are at odds. This is in fact, a very sensible survival strategy. When we stay in the mind, we stay in control, which is itself highly addictive. When we stay in our logic we remain masters of our own fate and destiny and we know that if we just follow the things we’ve learned, the teaching we have received, the wisdom others have leant us, that we will be able to make the next right choice with our rational decision making and our willpower and that will eventually lead us out of the murky water and back onto solid land. This sounds on the surface of things, like a very sensible way forward. The only problem is, it doesn’t work. It is a circular path, which allows us to stay looped into the seduction of the mind. To borrow the Biblical metaphor of two roads (just for a moment), I believe it is the wider of the two roads we can take. The narrow goat path which The Christ invites us onto is one where our rational mind cannot take us. And there is also a very good reason for that.
The wide road is the one where we stay in control. We control the narrative, the outcome, the decisions. We control the risks, we mitigate the disasters, we retain the delusion of mind over matter and count it to ourselves as righteousness. We get the kudos for being clever and thinking things through carefully, for making good decisions. When we stay on the wide road we tell God that we will encounter the Divine Mystery on our own terms, thankyouverymuch and then we wonder where our miracles are. We wonder why our blessings don’t come rushing in, why we stay stuck in fear and aggression and passivity. We wonder about this power that our holy text speaks of, and project it onto the Divine rather than undergo the initiation necessary to wield it for ourselves. We stay stuck because we have decided we remain in control. Whoever we have ‘othered’, remains ‘othered’, in this land where we can stay safe. The only way the ego feels safe, is if someone else is finally agreeing to be scapegoated. Even if that ‘someone else’ is our own true self. The wide road is paved with mimetic violence. And if we find that our hearts have become softened by attending to the glimpses we get of the Christ, we will find that we cannot exclude anyone anymore - but we will always be able to avoid the Shadow Dance, where we keep ourselves in the place of schism. The wide road can easily accommodate our many faces. The one we show the world, the one we show our friends, the one we show our intimate partners and children, the one we show on the internet. There is plenty of room for our multiple selves, on the wide road.
The narrow road is the one that leads to death. That leads to uncertainty. The narrow road leads us away from all known reference points and asks us to gamble on the power of love to resurrect the dead. The narrow path cannot accommodate our ego, or our compass, our wayfinding devices. It is not interested in our safety or security. It only promises one thing: union with the Godself, from which all other authentic union flows. The narrow path promises the downward descent into annihilation, it promises alienation from the powerbases, exile, temptation to turn and run the other direction, and most of all - and this is important: it promises to be lonely. I can tell you this from both deeply studying the life of Jesus and from brutal experience: it doesn’t matter how many Good Friday sermons you heard about ‘its Friday now, but Sunday is coming’, when you are on the narrow road you begin to wonder if some delusional idiot invented the resurrection as a mean trick. It only made it into 75% of the gospel accounts. That’s not a High Distinction, in my books. On the narrow road there is hopelessness and despair and darkness. No wonder its narrow. Almost no-one goes on it.
I sure wouldn’t have.
I will confess to you the one thing that flung me onto the narrow road where I met my own death in the end. It was not my clever mind which I had hoped would steer me clear of my own Shadow-Dance. It was desperation. It was the guttural keening of the soul split into two longing for reunion with itself, knowing in some animalistic part of my body that the narrow road was the only hope I had of finding a way to marry up the bald facts of my life (that I had begun to hate myself with unmatched fervour) with my deepest intuitive knowing (that God loved me and would not allow me to remain in the scapegoated place forever) which were so totally at odds with each other. That work took me into the place of death and beyond, into the place where I lost my mind and had to sit in the darkness of not-knowing, not-understanding, not-seeing. In this place, in the catepillar goop of my own chrysalis, I was re-made. This is the mystery awaiting the initiate who will surrender to this kind of brutal process. Once you go through it, you begin the slow process of taking your rational, logical mind out of the drivers seat of your life and learning the way of surrendering to your deepest intuitive knowing.
For a while, on the narrow road, you have to let your intuition take the lead. This is highly discombobulating, and is the bit that felt like death to me. I had been taught to fear and mistrust my own intuition through a long and brutal program of conditioning which had begun when I was two years old. I had to quite literally, allow my mind to unspool and trust that the narrow road would return it to me in the end. I fought this over and over again. I jumped off the narrow road and ran back to the entrance hoping to find my way back onto the wide road many, many times. My terror of it was deep and wide. But there was something even deeper and wider which sang to me underneath all the panic and worry and terror. It was the song of Love, the kind which calls us into our own death just so it can show us its own power.
This is not a piece about what I learned on that road. I have been writing about that for long enough now.
It is about how I found the courage to take it in the first place, and about what happened when I finally allowed my deepest intuitive knowing to steer me onto the road to death, and about what happened when I finally learned the steps to the Shadow Dance and began to love and retrieve the parts of my own soul I had split off from in order to survive. It is about the power that arrived for me once I stopped ‘othering’ my own self, and began to love myself truly. Without denial, without scapegoating, without the appeal of martyrdom.
It is about what is happening right now.
When I gave up everything, my hands were empty. And from that place of absolute impoverishment, abundance began to flow. Now I live in an abundant universe.
Once I loosened my grip on my tiny piece of security I had eked out of my existence and allowed the freefall to happen, I was caught. I was held. I was seen and known and embraced and brought into a wide and spacious land. Now I live in a fruitful universe.
Once I allowed the death and rebirth to take place, I began to love the parts of myself I had hated, and I began to welcome love into my life. Now I live in a loving universe where love trumps all, and my ego no longer feels the need to try to keep me safe from it.
I own less and I have more. I used to own a house with a swimming pool and once upon a time a caravan, and then a boat, I used to have a truck. Now I own no property, and the only vehicle I have is a gift, given to me by a generous soul who loves me and believes in my work and what I am doing. The house I live in belongs to someone else. And I just get to enjoy it.
Each season for the last year, I have observed different plants springing up in my garden. My tree out the front is a Lilly-Pilly and is dripping with bright red berries that my boys love to eat. Every time something else pops up from the ground to surprise me with beauty, I think to myself “When the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your soul would be waiting for you at the end of the narrow road, with a cozy home that you did not build, and a car that you did not buy, and a business that grew because you took the narrow road, and a garden for your children to play in with trees that you did not plant. When you eat and rest and play and are deeply satisfied, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the Kingdom of Empire, out of slavery.”