The Shadow of the Cross

"It was now about noon, and darkness came over the land..." Luke 23:44-46 

In the Gospel accounts of Jesus' crucifixion, we are told it became very dark from mid-day until three in the afternoon. During the three hours leading up to Christ's death, the cross cast no shadow! So how can we speak of a Shadow of the Cross? What might that darkness be? Perhaps that darkness is our shadow, the collective shadow that is cast by all of us. 

The Crucifixion was human darkness made manifest, the culmination of a plot by religious leaders to turn public opinion against Jesus and persuade the political rulers to use the force of law to execute him. The religious leaders were envious of Jesus. They hated him. They feared him. But it the end, they came up with a pragmatic reason to do away with him:

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.” —John 11:47-48

They thought they were going to lose their temple and their country. (They lost them anyway). 

The desire to preserve an identity, a status, a way of life, and a social order can motivate human beings to take action. But the fear of losing these things can move human beings to do awful things and turn a blind eye to the suffering of others in the process. Fear drives the dark side of humanity. It is humanity's dark side. Humanity's shadow if you will. And the shadow is not just a general darkness of humanity, it is the dark side of each one of us!

We like to consider ourselves "good-hearted" and most of the time we are. However, we may carry a hidden and deep-seated resentment. Or more often, a deep seated sense of self-importance. It’s the kind of thing we slide through much of life not even noticing it until something brings it to the surface. We have a shadow, but it is hidden until something brings it to light. Often the trigger is something mundane. Someone cuts us off in traffic. Or takes too long at the self-checkout. Or disagrees with us in front of others. And then our "dark side" comes out. For me, impatience and anger are the shadows I know I've cast. But there are others: 

The Shadow of Misogyny The belief that the male is the provider and protector and controller of the agency of women whether they be his employees, his spouse, or his daughters. If there is an issue of his anger, his lust, his temptation, then fault must lie with the women in his life. The man projects the shadow of his flawed relationship with himself onto women.

The Shadow of Poverty The belief that I had complete agency over the station in life I inhabit. That my success had nothing to do with my birth, my upbringing, my race, my family's wealth, or that all these factors had nothing to do with my success. If on the other hand someone is poor, that is their fault. My shadow accuses poor people of making bad choices and ignores the environment in which they are forced to make those choices. Society's shadow is how wealth is built at the expense of the poor:

"The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you." —James 5:4

The Shadow of Racism This is really the shadow of our caste system as marked by race. We don't believe we are racist, claim people of other races as our friends, and we would probably vehemently deny it confronted. Yet we are quite comfortable at our place in the social hierarchy and more often than not, vote for people who promise to secure our place in it, even if it means oppression for others. Our shadow is the darkness we project on others:  

"The white man's unadmitted and apparently, to him, unspeakable private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro" —James Baldwin

The Shadow of The Market  The shadow of "the market" is its amorality. It is the economic framework of social Darwinism. The market assumes winners and losers and if you lose, too bad for you. The other shadow of "the market" is it's failure to account for externalities, the costs it keeps off the books. Things like damage to the earth wrought by extraction, industrialization, the discarding of waste to the damage done to humans by robbing us of the time we need for social reproduction, our capacity of "birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities" —Nancy Fraser 

The Shadow of The Valley of Death  Our shadow believes in "eye for an eye" justice. We may venerate the "Stations of the Cross" pondering the steps that led to the execution of Jesus, and yet support the death penalty and an ubiquitous gun culture which kills more children than any other cause. Our shadow enables a profit-focused agribusiness that drives family farms out of business, poisons land and water, and manufactures cheap, unhealthy food for the masses. Our shadow enables a for-profit healthcare system that charges exorbitant fees and denies care. If we are privileged with wealth, we can choose to eat healthy and exercise, shielded from the most pernicious consequences of this system, which fall like a consuming shadow on the working poor.

We are formed by these shadows, but we also form and reinforce them. Our shadows multiply as the sum of all of us into what we call "society":

"If you don’t know how your mind reacts, if your mind is not aware of its own activities, you will never find out what society is . . . because your mind is part of society; it is society. . . . It is not distinct from your culture, from your religion, from your various class divisions, from the ambitions and conflicts of the many. All this is society, and you are part of it. There is no “you” separate from society."  —Jiddu Krishnamurti [1895–1986] 

Society defends its image by punishing those who would make its shadow visible. The Roman Empire used crucifixion on a cross as both a punishment and a warning to would be disrupters. In those days Roman roads in Judea were lined with crosses on which hung malcontents, zealots, murders, and thieves. In an arid and sunny land the shadows of crosses testified to the brutality of men. The last thing the condemned would see was their own crucified shadow. But on the day the Son of Man hung on a Roman cross, there was no shadow. The darkness of what humanity had done was overwhelming. 

The ultimate evidence of our shadow is our denial that we even have one. Western civilization tells a flattering story about itself that lists its achievements in the arts and sciences, technological prowess, but downplays and denies its darkness. If the darkness is not denied outright, then it is spun into something good. The annihilation of the indigenous becomes "discovery." War becomes "liberation." Separation becomes "equality." Religion is particularly adept at this. The Crucifixion of Jesus becomes our salvation. Baptism becomes our citizenship. Confession becomes absolution. But none of these things, nor our beliefs about their efficacy, confront our shadow. The only solution is to admit to our shadow. But our ego gets in the way:

“We can patiently accept not being good. What we cannot bear is not being considered good, not appearing good.” —St. Francis of Assisi

In order to appear to be a good person to others, we deny, suppress, and try to hide our darkness:

“Abstract speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. . . [A God that does not contain our shadows.] Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, and we can’t handle the darkness within us. And because we can’t handle it, we suppress it. But the more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it’s not integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.” —Bro David Steindl-Rast, The Shadow in Chrisitanity

We cannot purge out all our darkness. The best we can do is humbly admit that we have it and integrate it into the wholeness of our being. 

“Consider Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, Martin Luther King Jr. Add to them Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Óscar Romero, César Chávez, and many unsung leaders. Their inspiring witness offers us strong evidence that the mind of Christ still inhabits the world. Most of us are fortunate to have crossed paths with many lesser-known persons who exhibit the same presence. I can’t say how one becomes such a person. All I can presume is that they were all called.

They all had their Christ moments, in which they stopped denying their own shadows, stopped projecting those shadows elsewhere, and agreed to own their deepest identity in solidarity with the world.” —Fr Richard Rohr

So when will we stop denying our shadows? And the shadows of society? Because when we do, we will have our “Christ moment” and a true salvation will be at hand.

.

 

What is Truth?

"Pilate asked Jesus, 'What is Truth?' "  John 18:38

I have to admit that lately I have been perplexed and saddened by the amount of lying going on in the world around me. At the highest levels of government, lying is the order of the day. Not that lying politicians are anything new, but the brazenness with which they do it now is over the top. I think we are all reeling from the unprecedented levels of mendacity and corruption we are witnessing. As we are being constantly gas-lighted and worn down, we too slip into a denial (lying to ourselves) believing that this level of mendacity is benign as long as it doesn't affect our daily lives.

I have also observed that lying is quite common in everyday life. I do not limit lying to telling a falsehood. I also include the failure to fully disclose the truth. By failing to fully disclose a truth, we lead people to believe a false narrative about a situation, which reduces to a lie. Decisions are made based on this information, which may have some seed of truth, but because salient information is not disclosed, the situation implied is nowhere near the truth of it.

We expect that a lie is admitted when confronted by irrefutable evidence. Now the highest levels of government, lies exposed are answered with even bigger lies. Having to push so hard to get at the truth is exhausting. It wears us at down. It tempts us to accept the liar's narrative. The status-quo. But going along to get along eats our soul, one bite at a time.

"Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites... It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged..." -James Comey

In the presence of a liar we may find moments of strength to say "We will not cover for you". Many more times we quietly go along with the bullshit. More typically we practice denial. We don't want to believe something, so we tell ourselves it isn't so. We don't want to believe someone is addicted, embezzling funds, take sexual liberties with someone in their charge, or cheating on their spouse. It's risky to the status quo, to our station in life, to challenge the lies. The cost to challenge a lie is high. But the cost of living with a lie is even higher.

Every lie told, every lie believed borrows from a future reality. Life has a way of being real. We can deny (lie) that the science of human-induced climate change is true, but mother nature is having none of it. We can see that with our own eyes. We are experiencing back-to-back weather extremes that should be once in a hundred or five hundred year events. Because we have been in denial, lied to ourselves for so long, we aren't prepared to respond to the immediate consequences of reality, much less mitigate it in the future.

So what are the cost of lies? Belief in others. Belief in ourselves. Belief in objective truth. A completely lost ability to recognize truth itself. Our brains rewire themselves into a state of cynical distrust. Distrust is the PTSD response of having been lied to. This leads to cynicism, the terminal stage of distrust. At that point, we trust no one and no thing.

We may try to maintain a cognitive dissonance that lying in a broader or higher context is benign. That the lying is so far out of our scope that it won't affect us. However life, being real, will smack us back to reality. Ask top career officials in government who thought they could ride out the Trump administration. They were hastily promoted to cabinet offices as their predecessors quit or were fired. They thought they could hide, but now they are exposed. They have to either have to live the lie to preserve their careers or resign to keep their integrity intact.

The truth is always dangerous because it challenges the status-quo.

"Our environment lacks truth. And when truth is spoken, it gives offense, and the voices that speak the truth are put to silence. " - St Oscar Romero

"No person is more hated than one who speaks the truth" - Plato

Yet the truth must be faced, accepted, and ultimately spoken. First, we have to speak the truth to ourselves. This risks the death of our ego. Speaking a truth to others can result in the death of a relationship or even, as in the case of Romero, actual death. But the alternative, though it seems safer and easier, is bleak. To continue living a lie borrows (or perhaps steals) truth and reality from the future. When we eventually arrive at the future, we find we have borrowed against what is true and real and now there is nothing left to live on.

So back to Pilate's question: What is truth?  The answer was standing in front of Pilate in the person of Jesus. Not only in a mystical, metaphysical way, although I'll leave space for that. Truth resided in the earthly person of Jesus because his life and his words were consistent in every context of his life. What you saw is what you got, no matter what the setting. He embodied truth because his life was fully integrated. There was no distance between his life and his words. Those in power recognized the threat Jesus posed. Here was a person of such impenetrable integrity, whose words, life, and being were so unified that no carrot or stick could corrupt him into complicity or silence. Jesus had to be eliminated. Jesus knew the cross was where this would end. That is the challenge and the model for us. 

A Gospel of Which I am not Ashamed

Periodically, I am challenged to "like", "honk" or otherwise acknowledge that I "am not ashamed of the Gospel" (St. Paul's quote). As I thought about it, I realized I might just be ashamed of the Gospel. So what exactly is the "Good News" I should not be ashamed of? Was it the Evangelical "Roman Road"? Getting people to "accept Jesus"? Or were these classical definitions in fact not the good news at all? Perhaps these definitions represented religious ideology.  Was faith was reduced to a past sacrament or agreeing to a list of assertions? The definition of the "Gospel" was critically important to answering this question. Whether or not it was "good news" depends upon how it would be received by its' hearers.

Is it good news only to those with wealth, status, or those of a certain ethnicity? Is it more about being right rather than compassionate?  Is it about hate rather than love? Is it concerned about being "left behind", but not about those being left behind by inequality and injustice? Is is about the Kingdom of God in the here and now and not just in heaven?

In Evangelli Gaudium, Pope Francis described a Gospel which is indeed "good news." It is a message that can be claimed by all Christians. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone. It expresses the full scope of the Gospel to meet all human needs, emotional, physical,  and spiritual. It is the Gospel that I have been looking for and longing to hear expressed so clearly.

Evangelli Gaudium is a scathing criticism of the current economic order where the preeminence of finance, profit, and trade are assumed. Destructive side effects are accepted without question. It is a system of economic Darwinism that knows only the survival of the fittest and destruction of the weak as the cost of doing business. A human person is only a consumer or producer, an object to be discarded when they are of no further value. It is a system that American believers bought in too easily; it was a system that I had accepted too readily.

The Gospel, the "Good News" that Jesus' disciples were instructed to share was the nearness of the Kingdom! The proclamation to the people was that the "Kingdom of God is Near". It was embodied. First by Jesus himself. Then by his disciples. The message was not a definition of the Kingdom; it was the presence of the Kingdom! Embodied first in Jesus, then by His disciples, and ultimately those of us who have chosen to be His followers.

A Gospel of which I am not ashamed, thereby one I can be "proud" of, is one that is embodied. It is made near by my presence as I follow Christ. It must be radically inclusive, radically accepting, and radically gracious. Since I cannot be perfect, it must be radically honest, quick to accept the blame for failure, and even quicker to apologize and ask for forgiveness. Since others cannot be perfect, it must readily accept that imperfection, whether accompanied by an apology or not. It must forgive because people do not realize what they are doing. It must manifest love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. It must be radically generous. That is the Gospel of which I am not ashamed.