The story of Barbudom wasn't just for the kids this morning. It was for all of us. I'll bet lots of us can identify with poor Barbudom's plight of finding a way to belong. Like Barbudom's scary monster he feared unseen in the world, the ghostly apparitions in our lives are often creations of our imagination.

Another kind scary monster for some Unitarian Universalists is the robed minister which is why I thought it appropriate to dress today as many other ministers dress every Sunday. Both Barbudom's howl and the robed minister can cast spooky shadows.

Shadows stimulate fear partly because they do not accurately represent the object which creates them. Think of walking at night along a lonely street with hardly a sound on a wintry evening. Tree limbs create fantastic shapes as they block the light of the moon. Their jagged lines seem to reach out to scratch or grab as a gentle, barely perceptible, breeze moves them back and forth. Then, suddenly, a shadow looms large on the sidewalk signaling a monstrous size person with broad shoulders and a huge head approaching from behind. A quick turn of the head spies a person's silhouette against a street light. Only then is the shadow's source revealed as only a boy hurrying to get home before curfew.

Shadows deceive us because they are two dimensional representations of a three dimensional world. They distort and mislead depending on the angle of the light and the surface onto which they fall. Our memories are like shadows because they also are two dimensional sensory representations which miss much of the essence of the subject and are distorted as they are filtered through the angle of our viewpoint and the fuzziness of our memory.

One of the Rorschach ink blot style tests of religious life are the reactions people have to religious leaders. We are probably the most examined, praised, analyzed, criticized, and judged member of any congregation. The role of minister allows each member of the congregation to project what they would like to see - to, in effect, shine a light on the minister which can then creates a shadow. These many shadows cast by many different projective lights can accumulate and create a fearsome overwhelming image if we concentrate on that shadow rather than the real flesh and blood person in the robe.

And sometimes ministers see that shadow and mistake it for who they really are.

One of my first memorable experiences of being a minister during my internship was the amount of appreciation I received from members of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester. How well today I remember, with pleasure, a comment made to me as I shook hands after my first sermon, "Top drawer!" Even with the current sour public mood of disaffection with leaders of all stripe, ministers still get a great deal of often well deserved positive regard. Receiving positive regard from several hundred people in one day was a heady experience for one who dreaded public speaking and trembled while standing before that large congregation in Rochester.

The praise we get as ministers can boost our confidence sometimes out of proportion to our talents and abilities. I found it terribly seductive to take the praise I received in my internship and confuse it with who I really was. All those lights shining in your eyes can blind you. Internalizing others appreciation indiscriminately can be dangerous for a minister. If the minister doesn't check their ego size carefully, the praise can actually begin to disconnect her or him from the congregation, breeding a feeling of superiority and feeding the delusion of elitism. Ministers can easily forget that their power and authority come through relationship with their congregation and fall prey to the fantasy that they have unique and special access to the realms of truth and good. Too frequently, often encouraged by a denomination's theological framework, ministers exploit their privileged role to satisfy their lust for power and glory.

Another way this plays out is the deference often given ministers because of their greater knowledge, understanding and therefore assumed wisdom. As Emerson so eloquently put it in his Divinity School Address, "The true preacher deals out to the people his life - life passed through the fire of thought." Even though we Unitarian Universalists have a long tradition of resistance to ecclesiastical power, members of a congregation often will defer to and take very seriously the minister's viewpoint. Combine this with the enjoyment of the esteem with which we are regarded by the congregation and the ego starts packing for a power trip. When lots of people are putting their faith in your judgment, it is very tempting to sit in the judgment seat and to manipulate rather than to persuade the congregation and point them where you think they should go.

Another ministerial shadow can be cast in relationships within the congregation. A great privilege of being a minister is being present during the joys and sorrows in people's lives. The rituals of child dedication, marriage, memorial services, the crises which call for support, and the celebrations which call forth joy, bring the minister into contact with the full range of human experience. In those times, when there is deep and uninhibited honesty, truth telling and connection, intimacy grows and love connects. For all the times our sermons are criticized, our leadership ignored or challenged, our heart broken as someone leaves and our hopes encouraged as a new face appears, what keeps many of us going is treasuring these moments of intimacy with members of our congregation.

And this intimacy has a shadow side. The immature minister can confuse the affection they receive from a member of the congregation with sexual attraction and assume the intimacy they are experiencing is an invitation to the bedroom. Every year or two we hear about a minister who succumbs to this temptation. These ministers are seduced by what is known in the helping professions as "positive counter transference." They confuse the spiritual energy flowing through their ministerial role with their personal identity.

The minister's difficulties here are linked to the intangible nature of our work. Our self image is greatly shaped by others perceptions of us. When people give us power, it is quite easy to imagine that its origin is within us and they are just recognizing how great we are. The dilemma really worsens when the minister acknowledges only these good, appreciated sides of themselves and completely rejects the other side as evil. Such is the great danger of this kind of dualistic fundamentalism which tries to split the human organism into two parts and bury the one less socially acceptable.

And we are metaphorically reminded at this enchanted time of year, the dead do not stay buried but can arise to walk behind us as our shadow.

What complicates all of this is the necessity to be split apart to build a cooperative society. And the more complex the society, the more restrained our lives become. The desirability of this personality splitting is easy to see in our most unsocialized members: our children. My son Andy, when he was three, was happy to take anything he saw and once it was in his hot little hands it was, "Mine!" Toddlers push each other out of the way to get what they want. I had forgotten how hard it is to take turns until we took Andy to the water park where he had to stand in lots of lines. And when the little tike gets angry, watch out! Thank goodness they start out small otherwise parents would probably suffer a lot of black eyes and broken bones. Being a parent really helps one to see just how much of who we naturally are must be controlled before we enter society as adults. Over and over again, the good traits, characteristics and behaviors gain praise and the bad ones punishment. Our society - ANY society - has no interest in celebrating our wholeness, only the parts which serve the survival and development of the society. The parts of us that don't fit, slip into our shadow... but they don't disappear.

Jungian student and author[1] Robert Johnson accepts as necessary this task of splitting the personality into good and bad traits. He notes that as people grow older (and some of us long before that), they become dissatisfied with their well socialized lives - but often don't realize the huge price we have paid for social acceptance. The price we pay is the repression into unconsciousness of our antisocial nature which becomes our shadow self, the source of our guilt and shame. And sadly, as seen in the ministerial pitfalls, when our shadow self is deeply hidden and overlooked, it can blind-side us when we least expect it, jumping out of the shadow to embarrass us.

Probably the most common place we encounter our shadow side is in our dreams perhaps as a tiger which stalks us unseen in the jungle, a dark skinned figure who threatens us or a critical, sometimes comical figure who mocks or teases us and sometimes in a figure of the opposite sex. Usually encounters with these figures in one's dreams stimulates anxiety and fear and can wake one with a start.

Johnson asserts the call to religious life is a call to recover the whole self through an inner exploration aimed at reclaiming the lost part of our personality. The intention isn't finding the blanket permission to act out these traits but rather to recover that part of our identity we have rejected, our anger, our rage, our selfishness, our vulnerability, and redirect it in socially neutral or affirming ways. For example, rather than use our anger inappropriately hurting our loved ones, we can redirect it into changing the world and healing the injustices which are the social diseases which afflict us. The most fruitful part of the religious endeavor is the re-discovery of the parts of ourselves we have lopped off to make us fit the social mold. And sometimes that mold needs to be changed. Where these repressed parts come out of hiding and challenge us are in our shadowy nightmarish figures.

The Semoi, a nomadic band of the Temiar tribe from the Malay Peninsula, are a tribe who find much wakeful value in their sometimes scary dream life. They are reputed to have been the "Dream People" because they made most decisions -- from the personal, to the family and the community levels -- based on their dreams.

When a child would report a dream of being pursued by a monster and of awakening, frightened, the parents would ... inform the child that, the next time they have a dream of this nature.... to become aware that they are dreaming.... to recognize that their "dreambodies" cannot be hurt.... not to run away from the monster/beast.... but to turn and confront it. To ask it what it wants. To do battle with it, if necessary. To demand a gift of it. [2]

The shadows which haunt us both day and night have hidden gifts, clues directing us toward our true self.

For ministers, in the shadowy nature of ambition, power, and desire are the perversion of the gift of love and positive regard we receive from our congregations. Our challenge is not to reject these qualities but rather to transform them and give them back.

The transmuting energy of ministry comes through giving power away - not accumulating it. Unlike popular media icons, a good minister does not become a superstar entertainer or performer soaking up people's love like a sponge and wringing it out into their bank account. Ministry, first and foremost is finding ways to give back to people the love, appreciation and deference they offer. My ministerial success will not be my fame and fortune but the ways each of your lives is positively transformed. It isn't something we ministers do by ourselves but by being open, responsive and encouraging to the creative interchange which is our congregational life.

So perhaps this dark robe indeed casts a shadow, but a shadow worth finding a way to integrate better. My first ministerial mentor, the Rev. Robert Eller-Isaacs who serves in co-ministry with his wife Jan, the Oakland Unitarian Church in California, told me of his experience of speaking in a large Black Baptist church where the ministers were deeply revered and catered to before the service. As a guest speaker, the deacons prayed with him before he spoke and a member of the congregation washed his feet. He realized that all this overwhelming praise and appreciation was not for his ego. It came with the expectation that when he preached, he would touch their spirit and connect them with God. When they felt that presence, they responded with shouts of praise. The spiraling circle of energy lifted both the minister and the congregation together. There can be benefits to elevating your preacher if she or he remembers who is really in charge - the Love which brings us together in the first place.

Perhaps in the end, this is what "the Shadow knows." He seems dark and mysterious but this secret knowledge may not be so secret. The dark forces at work in us are universal and centered in fear. Those dark figures of our dreams, if engaged, are also bearing gifts. When Barbudom finds the gift of his voice, he discovers his identity and his meaning.

May the Barbudom's howl in all of us be transformed into a lion's roar of truth that changes the world.

Closing Words

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows -

and is willing to tell if we are willing to receive the gift.

Copyright (c) 1997 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Robert Johnson is author of Owning Your Own Shadow (Harper/SanFrancisco 1991) and was interviewed in the Summer 97 issue of Parabola.

[2] http://www.hmtp.com/new/gather/dreama4.html (and other sources)