Dear friends in Christ,
The late poet Mary Oliver, popular with priests and preachers, frequently wove themes of death and grief into her poetry. Perhaps her most remembered passage on death, in her poem “The Uses of Sorrow” Oliver writes:
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
I confess that like the poet, it took me a while to understand what this passage could mean– that darkness, grief, and pain might be a gift. Then I read Robert Johnson’s Owning Your Own Shadow (see Craig Lemming’s blog post on the Lenten Read). We all have a shadow self, a product of forces without and within that we believe we cannot fully share. As I’ve written and preached already this season, this shadow is a potent force. The shadow self draws much of its power from the grief and pain we’ve endured. To highlight this point, Johnson writes,
“Parrots learn profanity more easily than common phrases since we utter our curses with so much vigor. The parrot doesn’t know the meaning of these words, but he hears the energy invested in them. Even animals can pick up on the power we have hidden in the shadow!”
Mary Oliver was acquainted with grief and she was no stranger to the pain of betrayal, having been sexually abused by her father as a youth. In a poem titled “Rage” she describes this experience, the source of a lifetime of hurt,
“you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
…
leaving your bitter taste.”
What do you do with that kind of hurt? No one should have to hold such a box of darkness. Johnson might counsel us that “our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise.”
To get here we have to touch the shadow, acknowledge it, the parts given to us and the parts arising from within, and with time and tenderness we can even claim that darkness, and see it as gift.
This summer I had the strange experience of running each morning past my 
father’s headstone in the small community cemetery on the edge of my hometown in Alaska. On the first morning I went on that route, it was the first time I had been to this spot since the months following his death almost a decade prior. I could sense the ocean of grief welling up within me, the shame over the last years of his life, his mistakes and his death by his own hand, and I pushed it all down and kept running. For a month I ran past that spot each day, and each day the powerful feelings surged just beneath the surface.
On the last day we were in town, I sensed that it would be healthy for me to visit his grave one last time with intention, not just jogging past. I took the boys, and prepared to say goodbye again to my dad, not knowing the next time I’d be in that space. We gathered flowers and laid them on the headstone, and finally, an experience familiar to many, the dam burst and all the feelings came pouring out. I had a moment of conscious hesitation, as if I might be able to stuff it all back down, and no doubt I could have. But I chose in that moment to embrace the grief, to share it with my boys. It was a powerful moment, one I won’t soon forget. It opened up deep connections with both children and far from pushing them away in fear or concern, it drew us closer together. When we left the cemetery I recall a feeling of balance and centeredness that had not been there all month. It is that feeling of balance that I brought back with me into my ministry here at St. John’s, a groundedness that continues to root me more firmly in my vocation as priest, father, and husband. Such is the power of touching and embracing our own shadows.
I hope you will join us in reading Owning Your Own Shadow and explore ways that your own shadow self is a source of power and transformation in your life too. I also hope you will join us in a deeper look at the issues that surround death and grief in our Sunday forum series. Blessings to you in Lent and look forward to spring and new life. I will see you in worship!
Originally published in the March-April 2019 Evangelist.
