Life As Performance Art 160

The shadow is problematic, primarily because we can never quite get rid of it. It is always there, always present, squatting over us from behind, tinting our sunlight in sombre, often subtle shades of grey and umbre. During the era of self-help and psychobabble, in the eighties or so, they used to say that the problem was fear. John Bradshaw wrote and published his famous book, "Healing the Shame that Binds You", which is a very good book, where he talks a lot about fear and its indelible relationship to shame. Christian worship songs at that time were rapidly substituting the word sin with fear. It seemed somehow less blameworthy, less stigmatizing, less blaming. Also less stereotypically silly for some of the backward and ass backward Christian stereotypes we were all wanting to leave behind. I am not arguing with any of this. We were no longer going to see ourselves as being nasty reprobate sinners who just wanted to have our own way, like naughty children throwing tantrums whenever we don't get our own way. And of course all the fun, enjoyment and pleasure of sin, and it was really a very nasty and dictatorial old English schoolmaster kind of God that was going to call us to repentance, the consequences being getting caned and bonked on the head. Our images of God, in the Anglican Church anyway, have quite changed, leaving behind patriarchy and the masculine references to the Almighty, to referring to her as a nurturing mother, always there to protect and nourish and console and love us. No fear of punishment. No sin. Just getting over our fear. Lovely. Tempting kind of rebranding and in many ways I endorse it. However, not even that kind of rebranding or changing of language is going to erase the shadow. I have seen and experienced this in so-called progressive parish churches, where I myself have been stigmatized for asking uncomfortable questions that challenge some of the fatuous and flabby thinking that often is part and parcel to that sort of sacralized politically-correct rebranding. I was impacted by their own shadow, of fear, exclusion and intolerance. They excluded me, shunned me and slandered me without making even the remotest effort to engage me in dialogue. This is now being addressed, and I feel that I can begin to move forward again, but there are still going to be obstacles and I would be an absolute fool to assume that the collective shadow of the Anglican Church, the collective shadow of my parish and my own personal shadow along with the personal shadow of each individual parishioner is not going to be somehow, at times, problematic. No matter how hard we try to be better, our progress is always going to be slower than glacial. Right now the shadow, our collective shadow, is really taking full rein, especially with the rise of right wing populism in the US, Russia, Brazil and in many European countries, and this also raises from its crypt that particularly nasty shadow of fascism. The shadow we can never quite get rid of. No matter how hard we try, no matter how nice and kind we try to be, it is always there waiting to taint and spoil all of our lovely basic human goodness. What I am saying here is, yes, let's keep trying to move forward, let's try to make ourselves better people. That is our part. And if we are not moving forward, no matter how glacially, then we are condemned to fall backwards and fester in the very barbarism that is always nipping like rabid rottweilers at our heels. But let's not delude ourselves that we have arrived there. If we can remain conscious of our shadow, our individual and collective shadow, seething with fear, rage and resentment and unquenched desire, then I think that we will do okay. The only thing is that we have to remain aware, awake and constantly wary and vigilant, without turning into hand-wringing neurotics, because we are all flawed beings, we are all still hobbled by the same crap filling the same trash bags, and that we have to keep identifying and throwing out the garbage. This requires of us a constant discipline and a constant effort because there is always going to be trash to throw out.