The Shadowland FIRMing is a three-day event designed for men who have experiened the Rites of Passage and who have participated in the follow-up process, Journey of Illumination. It is an intensive event containing solitude, ritual, and a 24-hour period of extended silence in the wilderness. It is intended for those who have already attended the MROP (Men's Rites of Passage) and have have engaged in an intentional journey of accountable connection with a Soul brother, working to develop spiritual disciplines in five areas: centering, gathering, connecting, releasing and serving. Belden Lane from St. Louis will be the weaver for this gathering, and Lou Flessner from Texas our ritual elder.
Applications are now open for this event. If you want to attend this event, you can get more details at the DC MALEs (Men As Learners and Elders) web site and will need to fill out an application form. For more information, contact Bill Casey at (703) 568-3438 (b13909@comcast.net).
Belden C. Lane is Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, a Presbyterian minister who has taught on a Jesuit, Catholic faculty for 30 years. In addition to being an avid backpacker and storyteller, he has served as an MROP Weaver with MALES and is connected with the Mankind Project in St. Louis. His books include The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford, 1998), Landscapes of the Sacred (Johns Hopkins, 2001), and Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford, 2011).
More about the Journey of Illumination:
Download the Inner Work Guidebook for the Journey of Illumination
We are pleased to invite you into this Journey of Illumination, a process for continued spiritual growth and transformation of men.
This process challenges you to show up and pay attention daily to the need to overcome the weight of your routine in order to realize a full, intense and well-grounded spiritual journey. Doing so is not easy, but it does involve clear elements:
- Show up and observe (Centering)
- Show up and get together (Gathering)
- Show up and share (Connecting)
- Show up and let go (Releasing)
- Show up and act (Serving)
By choosing to participate, you will enrich and enliven your existing spiritual practices, and create or restore balance in each step of your journey through a commitment to do the work that is the essence of spiritual discipline. What drives this process is accountability, both to yourself and others.
As the product of the collective efforts and consciousness of hundreds of initiated men, the Journey of Illumination awakens men to two essential challenges of the Journey—to choose a specific action (show up) and to be present (pay attention) in the body, the heart, and the mind.
Your personal investment in yourself and in the process is very important so that a group of elders can be raised up who live the values of Men As Learners and Elders and are not just into "joining" or "attending." While much of the "work" will be on your own, we will walk together in preparation.
We trust that many of you have already begun incorporating these disciplines into your spiritual journey.
This is indeed an exciting time and we trust that the Spirit has much to teach us and lead us into. Thank you for your willingness and openness.
Mentorship
We do not walk this journey alone! An important aspect of the Journey of Illumination (JOI) is the pairing of each man with a mentor. Your mentor will connect with you at different times of the journey to check-in on how things are going for you.
Your mentor is not your Spiritual Director or counselor but rather a man who can encourage and challenge you based on what you share is happening in relationship to the different elements of the Journey of Illumination. Check-ins can occur in person or by phone as your mentor might be located in another geographic area.
What Does The Journey of Illumination Invite You Into?
Choose at least one PRACTICE from each of the 5 Forms of PRESENCE. Be disciplined about practicing your choices at the frequencies listed in the Guide Sheet.
Journey of Illumination Guide Sheet
Reflection Spiritual Reading List
Encouraged Daily with journaling and/or spiritual reading, from the following:
- Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft
- Richard Rohr, Adam's Return
- Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
- James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere
Note: We encourage you to use the 30th of each month (M.A.L.Es day) for days of fasting, study, prayer, and/or service for yourself and other men.
More on the importance of Shadow Work:
Excerpted and edited from Chapter 11, "The Shadowlands" in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr.
"A light shines on in the darkness, a light that darkness cannot overcome." -- Prologue to John's Gospel 1:5
"Make friends with your opponent quickly while he is taking you to court; or he will hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and the officer will throw you into prison. You will not get out until you have paid the last penny." -- Matthew 5:25–26
By the second half of life, you have been in regular unwelcome contact with your shadow self, which gradually detaches you from your not-so-bright persona (meaning "stage mask" in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life. Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not "true." It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.
Persona and shadow are correlative terms. Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see. The more you have cultivated and protected a chosen persona, the more shadow work you will need to do. Be especially careful therefore of any idealized role or self-image, like that of minister, mother, doctor, nice person, professor, moral believer, or president of this or that. These are huge personas to live up to, and they trap many people in lifelong delusion. The more you are attached to and unaware of such a protected self-image, the more shadow self you will very likely have. Conversely, the more you live out of your shadow self, the less capable you are of recognizing the persona you are trying to protect and project. It is like a double blindness keeping you from seeing -- and being -- your best and deepest self. As Jesus put it, "If the lamp within you is, in fact, darkness, what darkness there will be" (Matthew 6:23)
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it. In my position, I have no other way of spotting both my well-denied shadow self and my idealized persona. I am actually surprised there are not more clergy scandals, because "spiritual leader" or "professional religious perso"‖ is such a dangerous and ego-inflating self-image. Whenever ministers, or any true believers, are too anti anything, you can be pretty sure there is some shadow material lurking somewhere nearby.
Your persona is what most people want from you and reward you for, and what you choose to identify with, for some reason. As you do your inner work, you will begin to know that your self-image is nothing more than just that, and not worth protecting, promoting, or denying. As Jesus says in the passage above, if you can begin to "make friends" with those who have a challenging message for you, you will usually begin to see some of your own shadow. If you don't, you will miss out on much-needed wisdom and end up "imprisoned" within yourself or taken to "court" by others; and you will undoubtedly have to "pay the last penny" to reorder your life and your relationships. Think of our many politicians and clergy who have fallen into public disgrace following sexual and financial scandals.
The "opponent taking you to court" is for me a telling description of what we allow inner story lines to do to us. In ten seconds, we can create an entire and self-justifying scenario of blame, anger, and hurt -- toward ourselves or toward another. Jesus is saying, Don't go there! or the judge, officer, and courtroom will quickly will take over and have their way with you. Buddhist nun and writer Pema Chodron says that once you create a self-justifying story line, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples! She is surely right, yet I still do it every day, and become my own worst, judge, attorney, and jury within ten seconds of an offending statement.
Your self-image is not substantial or lasting; it is just created out of your own mind, desire, and choice -- and everybody else's preferences for you! It floats around in Plato's unreal world of ideas. It is not objective at all but entirely subjective (which does not mean that it does not have real influence). The movement to second-half-of-life wisdom has much to do with necessary shadow work and the emergence of healthy self-critical thinking, which alone allows you to see beyond your own shadow and disguise and to find who you are "hidden [with Christ] in God," as Paul puts it (Colossians 3:3). The Zen masters call it "the face you had before you were born." This self cannot die and always lives, and is your true self.
As Jesus put it, "You must recognize the plank in your own eye, and only then will you see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother or sister's eye" (Matthew 7:5). He also said, "If the lamp inside you is, in fact, darkness, what darkness that will be" (Matthew 6:23). Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing; and full seeing seems to take most of our lifetime, with a huge leap in the final years, months, weeks, and days of life, as any hospice volunteer will tell you. There seems to be a cumulative and exponential growth in seeing in people's last years, for those who do their inner work. There is also a cumulative closing down in people who have denied all shadow work and humiliating self-knowledge. Watch the Nuremburg trials and see Nazi men who killed millions still in total denial and maintenance of their moral self-image till the very end. I am sure you all know examples of both of these types.
Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not "eat" such humiliations with regularity and make friends with the judges, the courtrooms, and the officers (that is, all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults) who come into your life, you will surely remain in the first half of life forever. We never get to the second half of life without major shadowboxing. And I am sorry to report that it continues until the end of life, the only difference being that you are no longer surprised by your surprises or so totally humiliated by your humiliations! You come to expect various forms of half-heartedness, deceit, vanity, or illusions from yourself. But now you see through them, which destroys most of their game and power.
Odysseus had to face his same poor judgment again and again; he and others suffered much because of it, yet he usually seemed to learn from his shadow side too. Some call this pattern the discovery of the "golden shadow" because it carries so much enlightenment for the soul. The general pattern in story and novel is that heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do. Invariably, the movies and novels that are most memorable show real "character development" and growing through shadow work. This inspires us all because it calls us all.
We all identify with our persona so strongly when we are young that we become masters of denial and learn to eliminate or deny anything that doesn't support it. Neither our persona nor our shadow is evil in itself; they just allow us to do evil and not know it. Our shadow self makes us all into hypocrites on some level, Remember, hypocrite is a Greek word which simply means "actor," someone playing a role rather than being "real." We are all in one kind of closet or another and are even encouraged by society to play our roles. Usually everybody else can see your shadow, so it is crucial that you learn what everybody else knows about you -- except you!
The saint is precisely one who has no "I" to protect or project. His or her "I" is in conscious union with the "I AM" of God, and that is more than enough. Divine union overrides any need for self-hatred or self-rejection. Such people do not need to be perfectly right, and they know they cannot be anyway; so they just try to be in right relationship. In other words, they try above all else to be loving. Love holds you tightly and safely and always. Such people have met the enemy and know that the major enemy is "me," as Pogo said. But you do not hate "me" either, you just see through and beyond "me." Shadow work literally "saves you from yourself" (your false self), which is the foundational meaning of salvation to begin with.
I am afraid that the closer you get to the Light, the more of your shadow you see. Thus truly holy people are always humble people. Christians could have been done a great service if shadow had been distinguished from sin. Sin and shadow are not the same. We were so encouraged to avoid sin that many of us instead avoided facing our shadow, and then we ended up "sinning" even worse -- while unaware besides! As Paul taught, "The angels of darkness must disguise themselves as angels of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14). The persona does not choose to see evil in itself, so it always disguises it as good. The shadow self invariably presents itself as something like prudence, common sense, justice, or "I am doing this for your good," when it is actually manifesting fear, control, manipulation, or even vengeance. Did anyone ever tell you that the name Lucifer literally means the "light bearer"? The evil one always makes darkness look like light -- and makes light look like darkness. Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. So watch for any overreactions or overdenials. When you notice them, notice also that the cock of St. Peter has just crowed! The reason that a mature or saintly person can be so peaceful, so accepting of self and others, is that there is not much hidden shadow self left. (There is always and forever a little more, however! No exceptions. Shadow work never stops.) This denied and disguised self takes so much energy to face, awaken, and transform all one's life that you have little time to project your fear, anger, or unlived life onto terrorists, Moslems, socialists, liberals, conservatives, or even hate radio.
As the shadows of things continue to show themselves (shadow, even in the physical universe, is created by an admixture of darkness and light), you lose interest in idealizing or idolizing persons or events, especially yourself. You no longer "give away your inner gold" to others. You keep yours, and you let them keep theirs. That does not mean you stop loving other people; in fact, it means you actually start. It does not mean self-hatred or self-doubt, but exactly the contrary, because you finally accept both your gold and your weaknesses as your own -- and they no longer cancel one another out. You can finally do the same for others too, and you do not let one or another fault in a person destroy your larger relationship. Here you understand the absolute importance of contemplative or non-dualistic thinking, which we will talk about in a bit.
The gift of shadowboxing is in the seeing of the shadow and its games, which takes away much of the shadow's hidden power. No wonder that Teresa of Avila said that the mansion of true self-knowledge was the necessary first mansion. Once you have faced your own hidden or denied self, there is not much to be anxious about anymore, because there is no fear of exposure -- to yourself or others. The game is over -- and you are free. You have now become the "holy fool" of legend and story, which Paul seems to say is the final stage (2 Corinthians 11), when there is no longer any persona to protect or project. You finally are who you are, and can be who you are, without disguise or fear.