Conversations with a Soul (29 page)

Like all men, acknowledged or not, I lived a good part of my life dragging the bag from one birthday to the next, doing my best to do what was expected of me and trying to be what others seemed to need me to be. Pastoring several congregations gave me ample opportunities to be what my parishioners, my colleagues, my superiors and the wider communities wanted me to be and do.

Few of them even guessed what deep anger raged within. The more I lived my life for others, the more I met their expectations, the angrier I became and the deeper the yearning to be free.

Thus I lived until what has come to be known as
the Men’s Movement
introduced me to others who carried the same burdens as I, and the poets who wrote about the imprisoned self that made sense to my inner yearning and raging; and some rare but deeply moving encounters with other men who allowed and encouraged me to take a journey into my shadow.

Suddenly there was hope for Hyde!

Slowly, bit by bit I made discoveries, I learned to befriend what had been imprisoned in the bag.

I had the opportunity to reach into my bag and remove some of the parts of me that were hidden en route to adulthood and away from childhood. All 'the bad things' that had been imprisoned in prohibitions and I discovered that they were not bad! They were just the parts of me now yearning for light and freedom.

Perhaps most valuable of all, I discovered that my persona doesn’t consist of a 'good' me and a 'bad' me but in essence, just me.

Robert Bly, amongst others, is convinced that it is not possible to engage the shadow on our own. We need others to help us open a conversation with the shadow self, yet at the same time no one can do it for us.

Opening the bag and acknowledging the parts of me that have been buried, and then allowing them to live again sometimes felt liberating, sometimes terrifying. Sometimes it was easy to explain to those whose lives would be impacted by my refusing to ignore my shadow any longer and sometimes it was excruciatingly difficult.

Jesus approached the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across it. "Take away the stone,” Jesus directed. Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, "Lord, it has been four days now; surely there will be a stench!"

Only four days! Hell, what about thirty or forty or fifty years that I have languished in this stinking dark place? The stench is that of anger turning to rage that for all this time I have been imprisoned. I have lost count of the number of times I surrendered my dignity and worth to some or other committee that assumed the right to sit in judgment over my needs as a human being. How skilfully you managed to plead the cause of reasonability, hid the barbs in flawless logic and kept silent while I sought a word of affirmation, teaching me to despise myself for being weak.

He called loudly, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out, bound hand and foot with linen. . . .

I don’t know any Lazarus but I know lots of Toms, Dicks, Harrys, Georges, Walters, and Peters . . . ., just ordinary guys who learned to bury their uniqueness because being extraordinary meant they were a danger to the status quo. Being ordinary meant you were predictable and would do what was needed. Being ordinary silenced the scream of denial. Only, the sacrifice of being extraordinary, to being domesticated was accomplished at great cost. Being bound for a long time means the muscles lose some of their flexibility, some even wither away, so be careful as I lurch my way towards the open door in case I crash into you, because I am going to have to learn some simple things all over again.

"Unbind him," Jesus told them, "and let him go free."

I guess the linen bandages help to hide the scars, but now it’s time for them to be removed so I carefully watch the eyes of those who help to un-bandage me. Will you still love me when my bandages come off? Will you still respect me when I flex my shrivelled muscles and set about learning to be my own person? So, I watch for signs of horror at what they see but also for signs of reverence for the creature that emerges.

Although, in reality, I am tired of watching your eyes for signs of approval. I long ago lost myself to the subtle lift of an eyebrow and to the glazed look of indifference and to the furrowed glare which screamed, “No you may not!” I guess I am through with watching for signs of how well I am meeting your expectations because learning to be free is learning to live my own life anyway and that takes time!

So how do you understand yourself?

The question sounded innocent enough and followed several ribald comments after watching a Rugby game. Then the probing started to go deeper. The game had been between South Africa and England and invited the observation;

Do you still think of yourself as African? That’s, where you were born and lived for many years; or after living in America for thirty years, do you think of yourself as an American; and I’ve also heard you talk about your Scots lineage which seems to have some fascination for you. So, how do you think about yourself? Are you African or American or Scottish?

This wasn’t the first time I had faced questions about my cultural identity.

I had long since learned that weaving its way through the words lay an assumption that after a certain period of time, I would have embraced the culture, norms, history and mythology
of one of my roots
and in that embrace I would have come to define myself.

What I knew, however, was that
all three
informed who I am and how I think about myself, and more importantly, how I see and respond to my world without a conscious internal debate.

Some of my roots go deep into the African soil. Much of South Africa’s history is written in oppression and tragedy, and sometimes I could see the judgement in the eyes of my interrogators.
Never trust a white from South Africa
! And I was white! Yet it was here that I met some of the bravest, most compassionate human beings and their influence lives on within me, part of my personal community of Wisdom Keepers. Here I was exposed to the rigors of critical thinking and started a love affair with the wonder of learning; here my children were born and I started the long journey into fatherhood, determined not to repeat the same mistakes made by my own absent father; here I learned to confront my prejudices and racial assumptions, a learning that continues almost every day of my life.

America welcomed me and my family and generously shared with us opportunities we would not otherwise have had. Sometimes it feels as if America is populated by a community of adolescents but most of them are warm hearted, generous adolescents and I have come to love them! Bighearted beyond reason and materialistic beyond explanation, there is no place in the world where I could have been exposed to such wild swings between cruelty and compassion. Here is a nation that defines itself by its love of freedom yet at every level seems convinced that if only the right laws are passed everyone would be happy.

Scotland most often addresses my wild yearnings and touches those parts of me that love the mysterious and mystical. My Scottish roots refuse to yield to a world in which there is no place for myth or story in the quest for truth, or where reality is always packaged in the language of empiricism. My Scots ancestors have a habit of appending “
nevertheless”
whenever an argument or proposition reaches a conclusion, thereby opening the door to unanticipated possibilities while, at the same time, locking the door to fatalism.

Sometimes I am acutely aware of the differences between these different influences and when that happens I am thrust into a complex inner turmoil. I grow impatient with those who seek simple answers to complex issues. I become suspicious of any who cannot or will not broaden their horizons and give credence to other points of view, even if the experience occasionally feels like a swim in the ocean of contradiction. At other times the cultural differences enrich my self-understanding and bring me face to face with my uniqueness.

Although I have written in terms of cultural influences, the issue is far more complex than merely a snapshot of me taken through the lens of national identity. This is no mere history lesson but underscores the profound difference between our
history
and our
story
and opens the door to ask,
Who are these strange and sometimes contradictory persons who share my one life? So different from each other and yet I am at home with each.

Elizabeth O’Connor echoes my experience of the many selves when she writes:

It was during a time of painful conflict that I first began to experience myself as more than one. It was as though I sat in the midst of many selves. Some urged me down one path and some another. Each presented a different claim and no self gave another self an opportunity to be fully heard. In quiet meeting with friends I would often be made aware of conflicting voices within. When it was my turn to join in the talk or initiate conversation, I would miss the opportunity. I would think, “I will say this,” and another self would intrude and have a very different subject for which it demanded attention. And when I assented to speak for it, there pushed to the fore still another self with another claim. While I listened to one and then another, the conversation outside me went on to other things, and none of my selves found a spokesman in me. To others I seemed sometimes far removed, and it was true. I had been called away to attend to an inner clamour – the voices of my own many selves.
⁸²

Another model for crossing the bridge and beginning a dialogue with others!

Another model for engaging and honouring the many selves that live within.

Another model to help me to understand and work with the beings that populate my shadow self.

I believe that Elizabeth O’Connor’s experience of her many selves is by no means unique and that with greater or lesser clarity we have all experienced that internal community and been forced to listen to a cacophony of competing voices.

Popular Psychology has espoused a philosophy of integration in which maturity demands that all the contrasting and disparate parts of the personality become consolidated into a single, unified being. Likewise, much popular religion proclaims the ideal of a self that is unified and reborn around some religious ideal.

However, I have come to believe that there is
no singular, real me
but that I am the product of multiple
me’s
and that the journey towards maturity is to accept and synthesize a host of characters who live together, not always harmoniously, within me. Were it not for the legal and medical usage of the term, I would opt to describe myself as
a multiple persona
, one which includes a character called Dr. Jekyll and another called Hyde.

I’ve already alluded to an angry self, one of the characters who make up my corporate being. Another character is a
Wounded self
. I want to ask my father a series of “why” questions. “Why did you abandon me and in that abandonment leave me without a person who should have been a pillar of security? Why did you go away leaving only the silence when I needed to share what was happening within?”