Minding the Gap

With a traditional church potluck to send me on my way I waded into the Post-Memorial phase of my life on October 25. What better way to mark such a transition than to spend three days in Santa Fe with Thomas Moore....no, not the Thomas Moore of Henry VIII, but the contemporary writer/post-Jungian/mystic known for many books including Care of the Soul. It was an intriguing mental journey into shadows and archetypes, drifting past many themes that have been so much a part of my personal spiritual journey for these past four years. It's pretty nice to be able to do it in Santa Fe, as well, albeit the weather in Wisconsin was much nicer than in New Mexico for most of the days we were there, but the sun shone bright as Denise and I had the opportunity to crawl around the cliffs of Bandelier National Monument, and I climbed into the darkness of the Kiva at the top of the climb at the end of the trail.

Shadows figure prominently in Jung's thought, and for Moore, too. As I wrestled with what to make of the rich mythological imagery that Moore uses to illustrate his understanding of the soul's journey, I realized how much of my personal journey for oh these long years has been a wrestling with shadows, mostly to the end of keeping them in the dark. "Be perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect" is without a doubt one of the most troubling sayings of Jesus in my book, and it has brought me to my knees more than once. In the last few years it is a saying that has been illumined by the story of Jacob, preparing to be reunited with his brother Esau, who spent the night on the far side of the Jabok, wrestling with an angel. You remember how Jacob fought all through the darkness, until that sneaky angel touched his hip and dislocated it, leaving Jacob holding on for his life, but still pleading for his blessing. He got it--but he limped away.

Shadows, it seems, never go away, at least not in a three-dimensional world. You wrestle, and stuggle, and limp away, but the depth and truth of a soul is not measured by the shadow's vanquish, but by its marks, carried, and forgotten only at great peril. So, yes, I bought Moore's book, and yes, I asked him to sign it for me, and yes, I have the requisite picture of me and him smiling at a camera. And in the book I read more about his understanding of those critical archtypes that shape our soul...Mother, Father, Child...and the disturbing possibility that the telos of this existence is not to wrestle yourself free from your past, but to find the ways in which shadow and light, good and troubling, gentle and hard, are woven of steel cords in order to provide the skeleton on which God's image is hung in mortals. You cannot run from your past, it seems, but if you carry it gently with you, maybe you can make some peace with it.

Darkness and light, gardens of good and evil all growing like wheat and tares, are not the fault of human nature, but the nature of human fault. As we closed out the seminar, we did the unthinkably oogly, holding hands and sharing how what we'd experienced in these past days might filter into our lives, and I found myself thinking of that voice that fills the stations in London as trains come and go: "Mind the Gap." That, it seems to me, is the work of the next months for me, and I find myself wondering if it is not a part of what the church needs to wrestle with as it continues to limp into the 21st century. It's in the shadows, the gaps, the nights of wrestling that our true identity will begin to emerge.