It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly. – J.R.R. Tolkien
When someone calls us out for doing something we know is wrong, it hurts. It stings. It hits us where we live.
And the cognitive dissonance that erupts in that moment elicits action. The ego’s impulse? Defend itself with one of its all-too-familiar tactics against the voice of rebuke: muffle, muzzle, discredit, destroy.
In the rush to defend ourselves, however, we would be better served to harness our swelling psychic forces and use them in service of the soul’s deep longing to know truth – even when that truth wounds us.
A rightful rebuke exposes our inner darkness – whether buried unknowingly in our shadow or in plain sight but hopefully hidden from others by some cunning veneer.
And that darkness within us is the true source of the indignation we channel toward the rebuke. The very reason we have that reserve of repressed resentment at-the-ready is due to our extant spiritual dissonance over harboring the darkness in the first place.
And so we must choose. We can protect the ego with misdirected energies that assail the rebuke, which only tightens the noose of inner tumult, or we can let those striking words find their intended mark and bring about the illumination that leads to transformation.
Source Scripture
Who is Really In Prison? Matthew 14:3-5; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
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There is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place (in some cases, a particular person)—even though this is impossible. The boundaries of evil are blurry and porous, if they can be said to exist at all. Doug Dorst, from the book co-created by he and J. J. Abrams, “S”.
We all want to be rid of the evil in our lives. In some cases, an individual or entire groups of people define themselves by their singular devotion to locating a particular brand of evil and eradicating it.
The challenge, however, is isolating the actual location of evil. And in our efforts, it might go something like this. We see a person caught on video commit an indefensible and unspeakable atrocity. This person, we reason by the evidence, is evil. But the boundary cannot be contained to this one individual. No. We see that he has some characteristic that identifies him as part of a larger group. We detect some sort of “uniform” that indelibly marks him as part of a team. And that team must be held responsible for its team member’s evil. This team could be a race, an authoritative power, a political party, a religious organization, an educational institution, or any other identifiable group.
Once we determine that the entire team is evil based on one or more of its members being caught red-handed, we set our sights on a righteous quest to topple it in the name of defending the innocent and ridding the world of darkness.
The problem, as we will see in today’s episode, is that our quest to locate evil is sometimes greatly misguided. Rarely does the guilt of one imply the guilt of all, and often the apparent guilt of one may be misinterpreted by the limitations of our perspective.
Worse yet, we may define some person or people as evil solely to justify our own desires to obtain something we want or protect something we believe to be rightfully ours. This itself is evil, and eventually someone will see it for what it is and go on a quest to defeat it.
And so the cycle repeats itself.
How do we break the chain of evil? How do we identify and locate true evil and rid the world of it once and for all? Where is the compass that guides us on our quest?
Let’s find out.
Source Scripture
Eradicating Evil: John 1:29-34
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Carl Jung
The shadow is the darkest part of you that works against soul-centered living. Sometimes you are completely blind to it, and sometimes you turn a blind eye to it intentionally because to confront it – to confront yourself – creates too much unrest. Too much cognitive dissonance. And so you suppress, deny, rationalize, diminish, blame shift, judge – anything but confront yourself.
And so you live in the shadow, which inherently produces a state of being that the Hopi Indians sum up in a single word: Koyaanisqatsi. Life out of balance. Off center. The Scriptures also have a similar, single word to describe not only the life out of balance, but also the shadow that produces it: amartia – or missing the bull’s eye. This single, amazing word conjures the full scene of an archer selecting an arrow, drawing the bow, taking aim at a target, releasing the tension, and watching in dismay as the arrow fails to hit the center of its intended target. The result is that the arrow now rests off center.
The only solution is re-centering.. Not trying again. There is no try. You must re-center your life from the soul. There you will find light again, exposing the shadow and placing you perfectly in the bull’s eye.
This is called shadow work. And it’s not easy. But remember, we are on a hero’s journey to the center of the soul. And every hero in the making must face his biggest fear to continue.
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Joseph Campbell
Let’s begin the descent and see what we find.
Source Scripture
Expose’: Luke 2:21-40
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras