Spiritual writer Ruth Haley Barton explores the necessity of doing our shadow work through the story of Moses, who was born into a Hebrew family and raised by the Egyptian pharaoh’s daughter (see Exodus 2:1–15).
As an outsider both among his own people and among the Egyptians who had raised him, [Moses] probably wrestled every day with issues related to his identity. Should he fit into the environment in which he had been raised and follow the path marked out for him there? Or should he identify with his own people and try to make it by those rules instead?…
We can be fairly certain that Moses developed some pretty good coping mechanisms for dealing with the pain of his situation, as all human beings do. All of us develop ways of adjusting and staying safe in the midst of whatever danger or difficulty is present in our environment….
It appears that one of Moses’ coping mechanisms was to repress his anger since he had nowhere to go with it…. One day his anger—anger that had probably been building for quite a long time—got the best of him and everything exploded…. When he saw an Egyptian abusing a Hebrew, his anger overwhelmed him, and he killed the Egyptian. Then he tried to hide his sin by burying the body in the sand. This reactive and out-of-control response was a snapshot of Moses’ leadership before solitude.
Barton invites us to consider how silence might help us respond when we are trapped in reactive patterns:
That one glimpse of the destructive power of his raw and unrefined leadership was so frightening to Moses that he fled into solitude…. He said, in effect, “This part of me, if left as it is, will be no good for anyone.” Yes, he ran because he was afraid of Pharaoh, but oftentimes it is the fear of being found out or the actual experience of being found out that alerts us to what lies beneath. It actually places us on the path of self-discovery and (hopefully) forces us to do whatever work we need to do to take more responsibility for the dark forces that have propelled our bad behavior….
There is some behavioral pattern, something unresolved, something out of control enough, something destructive enough, that we say, “I must go into solitude with this.” We thought we had kept it fairly well hidden. We thought we could manage it or at least keep its destructive nature fairly private, but now here it is—out there for all to see—and it is wreaking havoc on our attempts to accomplish something good.
We must not ignore this moment when it comes…. If such a moment comes early on as it did for Moses, thanks be to God…. If it comes later on—as it does for most of us—then thanks be to God. It means that God is at work, leading us to greater freedom than we have yet known.
Reference:
Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, exp. ed. (IVP Formatio, 2018), 37–40.
Image credit and inspiration: Flavie Martin, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. With cautious breath and glimmers of light, we step into the shadow—drawn by the gifts it holds—seeking the clarity and courage to name what hides.
Story from Our Community:
I have often wondered—am I the only person who has entertained the thought that planet Earth is purgatory? I think of it as a temporary place where lives are born and die and rise again—a place of great suffering and pain in the shadow of hope, love, joy, and sorrow. It’s a place of transformation and struggles, embedded with wisdom and truth that love is possible. And in my experience, only in love do we glimpse the divine experience.
— Michael W.
