{"id":28635,"date":"2022-08-31T22:01:54","date_gmt":"2022-09-01T05:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=28635"},"modified":"2022-08-31T22:05:22","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T05:05:22","slug":"our-collective-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/our-collective-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Collective Mirror"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage to plunge into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and the corporate psyche and face the enemy within.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– Sam Keen, The Enemy Maker from Meeting the Shadow<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>This quote from Sam Keen continues, [\u2026] Depth psychology has presented us with the undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self. Therefore, the radical commandment \u201cLove your enemy as yourself: points the way toward both self-knowledge and peace.\u201d (Keen<\/u>, 199) Though Carl Jung himself would not reduce evil to simply a psychological origin, this truth offers an incredible opportunity to explore the personal and collective shadow cultivated and perpetuated by systemic inequity and injustice.<\/p>\n

This blog post focuses on the idea the \u201cthird way.\u201d Desmond Tutu\u2018s book, No Future Without Forgiveness,<\/em> speaks of the ultimate aim forgiveness has of naming injustice while ending perpetual retaliation – ultimately, forgiveness is impossible to arrive at without naming and confronting injustice, the collective shadow.<\/p>\n

South Africa\u2019s National Party come to power and instituted Apartheid (Afrikaans for separation\/segregation) in 1948, which remained the rule of low until 1994. During that time, countless atrocities and massacres were institutionally committed and conspicuously ignored by the South African government. I was mostly unfamiliar with the history of South Africa, which could be an entire separate blog post, but it was clear that the era of apartheid was a mix of Hitler\u2019s Nazi Germany and the United States,\u2019 Jim Crow era from roughly 1866 to the 1960s.<\/p>\n

I knew nothing of the state-endorsed violence carried out by the South African police or how the institution of a state of emergency gave the police sweeping power to enforce racist laws and justify violence. I was born in East Tennessee in 1987, so I was old enough to remember being gripped by the death of Princess Diana, but I have no recollection of the name, Nelson Mandela, or the struggles of the South African people.<\/p>\n

This post is not enough to dissect the history or implications of Apartheid in South Africa, so I want to move to its implications for our cultural moment, and the sociological evolution impacting the church, and its collective shadow. Shadow work is often initiated by simple questions. So, for my minority yet powerful Christian leader collogues, I ask this simple question: who is separated, not allowed, and seen as second class, or outside? In my years of preaching I often asked this question when preparing my sermon: Who is not going to be at church on Sunday? If someone is likely to be consistently missing from the audience on a Sunday morning, then they likely carry a crucial, yet disowned part of the collective shadow.<\/p>\n

Jungian writer, Audre Lorde defines racism as, \u201c[\u2026] the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.\u201d (Lorde, 212). She goes on to define sexism<\/em>, heterosexism<\/em>, elitism<\/em> and classism<\/em> by the same terms. All of these isms<\/em> represent the extremism and the exclusion of opposites. The late Jungian analyst and episcopal priest, John Sanford writes, \u201cIndeed, if we strive to be too good we only engender the opposite reaction in the unconscious. If we try to live too much in the light, a corresponding amount of darkness accumulates within.\u201d 23. Is this not the story of apartheid? Of Jim Crow? Of the growing fundamentalism within MAGAism? Too much light, to the exclusion of shadow, leads to scapegoating, dehumanizing, exclusion, and oppression of the other.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m struck by life and story of Nelson Mandela and his spirit that was able to sustain so much injustice as an individual man. As I write this Jackson, Mississippi is without clean drinking water or air conditioning on a week when temperatures are to reach consistently into the 90s. Body camera footage from police shows the ridiculous arrest of a black pastor in Alabama, while he waters his parishioner\u2019s lawn. And, a black man is fatally shot while unarmed in his bed room. What are we do to as a culture? Are we to learn from South Africa\u2019s example? How are we to move toward forgiveness? Nelson Mandela knew South Africa could neither continue forward as the Western Allies did with the Nuremberg trials, nor could they simply forget, and further shadow the injustices of their past. Forgiveness was the only way forward.<\/p>\n

As I heard his story, I feel Nelson Mandela, embodied what I\u2019d call the archetype of forgiveness. How else could someone sustain decades of imprisonment, so much loss of his family and friends? He truly was a symbol for the South African people, meant to transcend the either-or paradigm of revenges or amnesia. I have questions more than answers at this point, but I am excited to see where this semester takes us, how being in Cape Town affects my soul, and the ontological grounding of our cohort. This is sacred ground during a sacred time in American and global history. I think we have an opportunity to investigate and integrate the collective shadow of racism in American Christianity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe heroes and leaders toward peace in our time will be those men and women who have the courage to plunge into the darkness at the bottom of the personal and the corporate psyche and face the enemy within.\u201d – Sam Keen, The Enemy Maker from Meeting the Shadow \u00a0This quote from Sam Keen continues, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2318,1098],"class_list":["post-28635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-desmond-tutu","tag-mandela","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28637,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28635\/revisions\/28637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}