Dealing With the Dark Side

November 10, 1963
Rochester

Sermon Series: The Free Church in the Changing World

III Education and Liberal Religion
8. Dealing With the Dark Side

Because commentary on our church school emphasis usually has much relevance to our adult values and perspectives, I want to speak to you today about "Dealing With the Dark Side." In the report on "Education and Liberal Religion," the following paragraph stimulated this sermon:

"We religious liberals have tended to ignore life's negative dimensions. But the behavioral sciences confirm what common sense has known all along, what our hearts have never failed to recognize though our heads have sometimes been reluctant to acknowledge: that the dark side of personality is just as real as the light — that mistrust, guilt, stagnation and despair belong to human experience just as much as trust, autonomy, intimacy, generativity and integrity."

Now if you have never distrusted anybody or been distrusted by another, this general subject will not reach you. If you have never been disturbed by guilty feelings or never have encountered a person ravaged by guilt, then this discussion will bore you. If you have never felt completely exhausted when there was every reason for you to be up and doing, then all this will seem trivial to you. If there never has been a time when you experienced moments of despair about the human situation, then I hope you will be patient until another occasion when the words may better fit your condition.

I readily confess that I experience these dark feelings. No minister can pass a day without the sure knowledge that other persons too are buffeted and weakened by the emotions that stir and erupt from the dark side of our personality. There is this dark side to our natures. In speaking about it, today's remarks are divided — recognition, understanding, improvement.

To be mature is to recognize that there is shadow as well as light in the complex pattern that comprises our humaneness. One of the most persisting characteristics of our liberal religion has been a strong and buoyant optimism about man, his nature and destiny. When defending points of view, because we tend to polarize our convictions, our optimism can become so naive as to represent illusion. We may fail to recognize that which is quite real.

Anecdote may make the point just as well as intellectual analysis. Carl Sandburg in his massive biography of Lincoln has included a rich variety of the Lincoln stories and legends. On one occasion, President Lincoln was confronting an organization which had plainly been guilty of sowing seeds of disaffection and dissension in the Union cause. After listening to their protestations of innocence, Lincoln was reminded "of a governor who visited a State prison. The convicts, one by one had the same story of innocence and of wrongs done them. At last the governor came to one who frankly said he had committed a crime and the sentence given him was just. 'I must pardon you,' said the Governor, 'I can't have you here corrupting all these good men."1 (THE WAR YEARS, p. 297-8).

Lincoln knew our nature. There is a darker side. The righteous face we present to society may cover all sorts of feelings of defensiveness, hostility or inner turbulence, as within us, self-centeredness does battle with the possibilities of the larger life. There is a partial truth in the old Garden of Eden myth which however, has been largely over-stated in theological doctrines of "original sin" and the so-called inevitable "corruption" in man's inner soul.

"When the Lord God asked of the man, 'Did you eat of the tree from which I had forbidden you to eat?' The man said, 'The woman you put at my side — she gave me of the tree and I ate.'"

One does not have to dismiss the bright side of man's nature to concede that we do have a tendency to use Adam's alibi: Blame others; pass the buck; get out from under.

Were it not for unselfishness, the human race could not have persisted. But this brighter side has its shadow, for we know that human selfishness has always been and is, responsible for injustice and woe. When the Romans invaded Britain, ca 55 a.d., they captured Caratacus, a great tribal leader and sent him to Rome in chains. The dignity and courage of this island chief moved Emperor Claudius to extend freedom in Rome, but would not permit his return to England. It was reported that as the English hostage walked the streets of Rome, he wondered about the magnitude and splendor of the houses and buildings, "why do you who have got so many and so fine possessions covet our poor tents?" (Leonard Cottrell, THE GREAT INVASION, p. 119-20)

If we would but recognize our shadowy side, that ancient sentiment could be said today, rather generally, could it not? Covetousness and acquisition for the sake of great possessions have never been confined to the Roman Empire. In modern times, Thorsten Veblen's critical analysis of our society, THE LEISURE CLASS, proposed that the accumulation of money and the display of acquisitions were not greatly different from the exhibition of scalps,capturing women or holding chiefs in hostage.

How wrong is this evidence of our darker selves? Look into the nature of the things for which you have a yen. How free are even our generosities from blatant self-satisfaction or subtle self-righteousness? In Jesus' parable the man turned sadly away because he had great possessions; and would not give these up, even for his own soul, was not this a candid recognition of our darker sides?

In King John, (ACT III, sc.iii), King John instructs Philip to get money from the monasteries and churches, "shake the bags of hoarding abbots." Philip replies,
"Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back
When gold and silver becks me to come on."

Do we deal adequately with this dark side of human nature in our religious beliefs, in our attitudes toward problems, in our program for education? Some would say that because we hold an overblown faith in man's ability to progress, that we do not face reality. Perhaps, as Emerson observed, (in his essay "Experience," p. 249), "that which we call sin in others is experiment for us."

Perhaps we do not recognize "life's negative dimensions" enough in our church school curriculum, although I have the impression that perhaps many critics are not familiar with varieties of story, legend and history that do inform the child and young person that life is not only sweetness, light and ease, but also life is sometimes bitter, shadowed and laborious.

In the material for the youngest children they encounter in story, death to animals, birds and a beloved grandmother. As they grow, they meet other strong strands of what human belief has woven into the tapestry of life. In BEGINNINGS OF LIFE AND DEATH, they deal not only with the story of the first forbidden fruit with its supposed consequences, but also with the Promethean achievement of stealing fire from the gods, with great resulting benefit to man, although with terrible penalty to Prometheus. The story of Pandora emphasizes that troubles are loose in the world but that we are of the stuff that has the power to deal with trouble because hope remained. In JESUS, THE CARPENTER'S SON, children learn that the good man cannot be measured by the comfort or success with which his efforts are rewarded. Jesus and other good men, time and again, had to pay with life itself, because the shadowy side of human nature of the persons they met gets the upper hand for awhile.

Dealing with the darker side is a lifelong task. Whether or not we deal adequately with this in religious education, there is little excuse for adults to slough off the realities. Some of you may infer that I am on my way to a more conservative theology, re-asserting the doctrine of "original sin" and conceding that the nature of man is inevitably corrupt.

Not at all. If I did not believe that the light overbalances the shadow, I might be tempted to take refuge in some orthodox theological shelter. But I am willing to permit some astringent realities to clear away some of the naiveté with which we liberals sometimes deal with life and society.

No one's inner garment is either a seamless robe of purity or a bedraggled rag of immorality. We are persons who never are wholly identified either by unblemished virtue or irredeemable vice. The outlaw victimizes his fellows; society must protect itself by imposing restraints. The difference between the prisoner and ourselves is measured by culture, conscience and self-control — and sometimes, luck. This we should recognize.

Dealing with the dark side is not so much a matter of theological complexity, but more realistically, constant understanding and improvement.

We must try to understand that part of our self that lurks in the shadows. In ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, (p.417), Richard Hofstader comments, "The tragic predicament faces any man who is in one way or another caught between his most demanding ideals and his more immediate ambitions and interests."

Should we not admit that when we insist upon putting "first things first," much of the time we are putting self things first? Is there any reason why we should not be willing to recognize the thin barriers that divide acquisition from greed, generosity from self-righteousness, ambition from lust for power, affection from jealousy? May we not come to understand that the balance for inner wholesomeness is fragile, requiring the constant vigilance of both a good look and a good laugh at ourselves?

These mixed feelings are part of our human nature in human society. When time is measured in long reaches of geologic change, man has been but a few minutes on the earth learning to be human. A million years are but a day in the vast measure of the time that the world has been forming and life has been emerging. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in THE PROPHET, "And you who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light? Only when you shall know that the erect and fallen are but man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self."

I suggest to you that it is not enough to recognize and understand our darker side and interpret it theologically, culturally or psychologically. The real task for people struggling to become persons is to use this understanding for improvement, We must illuminate our darker side with the light of accomplishment.

This effort for improvement is singularly appropriate for the liberal faith. Although we are much more reticent than our forbears were seventy-five years ago about the matter of automatic progress — the millions of dead piled up by ghastly 20th century wars are unanswerable rebukes to any notions about the inevitability of man's progress — we still find the justification for religion in the ability of man to choose the more righteous alternative. More than that, not only the competence of our brighter side to make the more correct decision, but also the will of our brighter side to perform the right act which is demanded, if one fulfills the obligations of the right choice.

Whatever reservations the skeptic might make about man's real freedom, improvement of our darker side rests on the belief that the ounces of our weight, however puny, can be measured on the scale of achievement of some good for the human enterprise. In the long run, the improvement we accomplish because we have understood our shadowy side will prove more enduring than all the dark tendencies which inflict us all individually and socially.

The life of Florence Nightingale was a prime illustration. Her biographer, Woodham-Smith (FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE) describes how Florence Nightingale became conscious of the dark side of life: "She had become conscious of the world of misery, suffering and despair which lay outside her little world of ease and comfort.

"1842 was a terrible year for the people of England. The country was in the grip of what has passed into history as the 'hungry forties.' In villages, as in towns, there were starvation, sweated labor, ignorance and dirt. Diseased scarecrows swarmed not only in the airless, undrained courts of London, but in the 'black filth' of the rural cottages; workhouses, hospitals and prisons were overflowing. In the summer of 1842, Florence wrote in a private note, 'My mind is absorbed with the idea of the sufferings of man, it besets me behind end before....all that poets sing of the glories of this world seem untrue. All the people I see are eaten up with poverty, care or disease...."

But Florence Nightingale did not rest or retreat because she recognized and understood the abysmal conditions which surrounded her. Her life was one gigantic effort to improve the darker side she encountered in society.

Whether one comes to grips with the dark side of self, or the dark side of society,, can we not echo Browning when he said,
"What are temptations, but for man to meet;
To grapple with and trample under feet,
And so be pedestaled in triumph."
(Quoted from memory, may be inexact)

Yes, there is a shadowed side of life. Light and shadow are as inseparable from living as they are from photography, art or a walk in a sun-drenched forest. We deal with the dark side not by the muttering frustration of retreat from difficulty; not by escape into a theological system which either removes our responsibilities or supposes that our responsibility is heaven-remote or hell-distant.

We deal with the dark side by understanding and improvement. I hope that passing years have created a sufficiently mellow historical acceptance so that one can tell a story about Franklin D. Roosevelt without losing one-half of one's congregation immediately and transporting the other half to uncritical adoration. Anyway, I shall try, because the way FDR handled a very dark side should be example for us all. On a panel this year, (see SR 4/6/63), his son, James Roosevelt was answering a question as to whether polio had given his father strength he would not have otherwise. The son answered, "Well I suppose there's no question about it that his problems in walking — and it was real physical effort to put on those heavy braces and move around — must have created within him a capacity, a reserve capacity. Again, probably to feel that if he could get along with this, he could get along with anything."

This is instructive and from it we can learn. We do have our shadowy self. If we can recognize it, understand it and constantly try to improve it, we can get along with anything.