When I was growing up, my parents had a large painting called "Shack in the Woods" over their fireplace. It was by a Canadian artist named Franz Johnston; and it depicted a lonely shack surrounded by a huge forest of trees, deep in the shadows of a rural Canadian winter. My parents loved the painting; but Nana, my mother’s mother, absolutely hated it on sight and never changed her mind about it till her dying day at age ninety-six. The particular object of her wrath was a patch of blue shadow that the artist had placed so as to run from the edge of the cabin to the outermost of the trees. It was clear to all of us that he was depicting the deep sylvan shadows of a wintry dusk. To Nana, it was "blue snow;" and, to her, no artist in his right mind would ever paint blue snow!

Growing up in the 1950’s, even in a together and non-dysfunctional family like mine, there was scarcely any recognition of the darker side of life, much less an acceptance of it. The face of life was that it was happy, that we were all together, taken care of and, hey, what could really be wrong? If you didn’t like something, you could complain; but you could bet that your complaint would be met with a slap, with ridicule or with an admonition that kids in China or Russia or some other remote corner of the world would be happy to have it half so good. If you cried, you were a baby. If you got mad, you were a problem. If you acted out, you were punished. Your negative feelings were "blue snow" -- how could you even think of putting them out there for people to see? When my mother’s second pregnancy ended in a stillborn baby boy, there was absolutely no mention of it. It was nearly twenty years later, when my parents were entertaining a colleague of my father’s from the university, that a pre-dinner daiquiri mysteriously unleashed a flood of memories as my mother sobbed out the story of her long-lost infant son.

What is this shadow, this murky and unpurged side of us, the "blue snow" we try so assiduously to avoid knowing and to keep others from knowing as well? We call it by many names -- interesting, isn’t it, how many of them end in the suffix "-pression. --Depression, Oppression, Repression, Suppression. That suffix comes from Latin roots meaning "to press." The image is that of our taking something and pressing it down, pushing it in, keeping it from ... "ex-pression," which means "pushing out." What happens is that we take something that to us seems scary, unappealing or unpleasant and try to assure ourselves that under no circumstances will we hold it up for personal reflection or show it to others...

>>> Continue Reading "Finding the Gift of the Shadow"

© Copyright Fr. Paul Keenan. This article was originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com, in July 2002,
as part of Soulful Living's "Shadow Work" Issue.

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