Anyone else longing for the time when Rs and Ds have become reconciled to one another?

[summer_in_TX]

In our book club we have just begun reading Richard Rohr's The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. This week I read a quote that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Rohr says "The French anthropologist and literary critic René Girard wrote that the Bible is unique in all world literature in spotting this universal human avoidance of your own dark side." That boggled my mind. Wow.

But isn't that exemplified when Jesus says in Matthew 7:1-5:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."

The story of the woman taken in adultery, where the men wanted Jesus to condone their intention to stone her, but Jesus simply wrote in the dirt, then stood up and said "Let you who is without sin throw the first stone," – isn't that another case of Jesus challenging people to look at their own dark side?

It's been awhile since I read Carl Jung so I looked at an AI summary. He had much to say about our shadow side. We all have it, those things we are unconscious of and don't want to see about ourselves, including negative traits like anger, fear, and repressed impulses, and surprisingly als positive potential such as creativity and untapped strength. It's a moral issue for our ego, formed from social conditioning and personal experience. Confronting and integrating the shadow (a process called shadow work) is essential for personal growth, self-knowledge, and wholeness. Unacknowledged or repressed shadow aspects can lead to destructive behavior or projection onto others.

It occurs to me that social groups (like Republicans and Democrats) collectively have our own shadow side. Neither of us is dealing with it either, so we are projecting more and more things on the other side that are traits we don't like about ourselves. Bitter contempt is the result, on both sides.

The Bible is big on repentance and reconciliation. So is the 12-Step Program. Many people recognize, as Jung and other psychologists have, that healing of ourselves and of our relationships with others is key to moving toward wholeness. It occurs to me it's true at a societal level too. Maybe it holds the key to turning things around in our country?

Shadow work individually starts with self-examination of our own behavior and motives. A fearless and searching moral inventory, if you will. Then acknowledging it to ourself and at least one other person. What would happen if we could then see some of the poorer choices we have made with regard to those who don't think like us on a variety of issues? Maybe, just maybe if we begin to recognize them and understand why we did them, and even start to our collective shadow and how it hurts others, maybe we can be part of repairing the breach.

Because we are in a very dark place now. Yes, a great deal of it was done by the Right. But some of it almost certainly was a reaction to stuff enough of us on the Left did and said.

If we demand the Rs take the first steps and abase themselves, we will never get there. We have a lot of stony hearts on both sides of the divide. I can't count the number of times that has been made crystal clear here on DU.

I for one long to come through this bitter hyper partisan divide and find a place of healing, of mutual forgiveness, and reconciliation. We may say it's impossible. But the Iron Curtain fell, without war. And Apartheid ended without violence. Truly a miracle, both of them.