Shadow work

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Shadow work

And Mary said: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.”

Breakfast at the newest rendition of Urbana Gardens, now named Maple & Yoke, we sat in the sudden sun after a few days of clouds and rain. We tried the maple (waffle and French toast) and we tried the yoke (poached and over easy), and it was all good, but more expensive than we expected. Austin prices here in central Illinois? Oh, well. We shared good conversation, planned a few outings and visited with Shelby, our server, about nearby museums.

Our favorite breakfast in Austin is the one we share after devotions in our own Evolve apartment, while we watch Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Miss Fisher or a TCM classic. Second is the nearby “Another Broken Egg” eggs benedict, where we ate last year on our 45^th anniversary. Breakfast, as we all know, is the most important meal of the day. At least it is if you eat breakfast, and I know many folks who don’t.

Later in the day the sun stayed bright, the temperature stopped rising in the mid-70’s, and a breeze blew softly across our backyard table under the red umbrella. Margaret spent awhile with our refurbished weed whacker, and I mostly sat still, reading and writing, listening with half an ear to the Cubs first home game with the Reds, which they eventually lost. I am moving slowly through a book about West Kentucky heroes, Flames in the Wind. I thought about Flannery O’Connor, sitting outside in the Georgia sun watching her peafowl, hoping to visit her old Georgia homestead in February next year. My friend wore a t-shirt from Savannah, Georgia while we talked under that same red umbrella. I’d love to see Savannah on that trip, too.

Here’s a tidbit from Flannery’s often profound religious-social commentary:

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violence which precedes and follows them (from “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”).

I think immediately of Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr’s appreciation for his spiritual father Francis of Assisi, and how we so easily become addicted to a relentless race for success, while St. Francis chose the downward path every time he could:

“I will delight in powerlessness, humility, poverty, simplicity, and failure.” Francis lived so close to the bottom of things that there was no place to fall. Even when insulted, he did not take offence. Now that is freedom, or what he called “perfect joy”!   

Roberto Rossellini’s Flowers of Saint Francis: God’s Jester is occasionally shown in the US with subtitles. In one of the film’s nine “scenes” a fellow brother asks Francis how to find perfect happiness. Francis points toward “suffering and bearing every evil deed out of love for Christ.” The two brothers try several times to share the gospel with a cantankerous villager, who eventually throws them down some stairs into a muddy road. Standing together covered with mud, Francis looks at his friend and laughs. “Yes, this is truly perfect happiness!” The two walk off through the mud, singing at the top of their lungs.

Rohr continues:

Our shadow is often subconscious, hidden even from our own awareness. It takes effort and life-long practice to look for, find, and embrace what we dismiss, deny, and disdain. Just know that it is the false self that is sad and humbled by shadow work, because its game is over. The true self, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3), is incapable of being humiliated. It only grows from such supposedly humiliating insight. 

One of the great surprises on the human journey is that we come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing our own contradictions, and making friends with our own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than appreciate them because they have little to communicate and show little curiosity. Shadow work is what I call “falling upward.” God hid holiness quite well: the proud will never recognize it, and the humble will fall into it every day—not even realizing it is holiness. 

Paul understood this and wants his Roman reader (and us!) to get it too. As Rohr invites us, not in despair or resignation, but with joy: “Get so close to the bottom of things that there is no place left to fall.”

Rejoice in hope,

endure in affliction,

persevere in prayer.

Contribute to the needs of the holy ones,

exercise hospitality.

Bless those who persecute you,

bless and do not curse them.

Rejoice with those who rejoice,

weep with those who weep.

Have the same regard for one another;

do not be haughty but associate with the lowly;

do not be wise in your own eyes.

(Zephaniah 3, Romans 12, Isaiah 12, Luke 1)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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