Fr Jim Cogley
When we think back on the religion of our childhood much teaching centered around the pursuit of perfectionism. As a child serving Mass, I used to think that the priest of the time had no other sermon. Judging by the way he treated us his teaching wasn’t working for him, and neither was it working for anyone else that I knew. It was really a dangerous aberration of genuine spirituality that gave the impression that a saint was someone who had never blotted their copybook, who from day one had lived an immaculate life and was returning to God as pure as the day they were born. There was no room for transgressions or errors, and it was this kind of religious thinking that allowed for no second chance that gave rise to that statement that was so devoid of compassion, ‘you made your bed and now you must lie on it.’ In contrast Christ’s word was ‘Take up your bed and walk.’
It was a spirituality of perfectionism that insisted that God only valued perfection and an idealized morality. This then gave rise to a fear of God who was always ready to punish everything that was imperfect. So, we learned to be afraid of our dark side and whenever it reared its ugly head, we were encouraged to employ moral surgery to remove it. Experience has shown over and over that the more we repress the negative the more relentlessly it will pursue it. Our attempts to destroy it can lead to our own destruction and the more we deny it the more it will tighten its grip upon us. If there is a Copernican revolution needed in our religious thinking of today it has to be about coming into a new relationship with our shadow and learning to befriend it after centuries of pretending it didn’t exist or trying to eliminate it from our lives.
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