The Creepy Cupboard
My
first-year NET team lived in a house that turned 100 the year we moved in. It
was a house full of oddities, decade-appropriate add-ons, and unexpected spaces
– including a room in the basement I didn’t know existed until we’d been living
there three months.
Among the
oddities of our beloved centenarian was a cupboard of dubious character. It was
narrow but about six feet deep, had no light bulb, and smelled vaguely as
though someone had left a murder weapon in its recesses eighty-odd years ago.
We dubbed it “The Creepy Cupboard” and left the door shut apart from the
occasional terrifying game of hide-and-seek. At night-time, I walked past the
door of the Creepy Cupboard quickly, uncertain what might be lurking.
In October
of that year, we had an unexpected team change – one of our brothers went home,
and a new one arrived from another team to replace him in the mission. It was a
strange and heart-achy time, and left us questioning the “golden” image we’d
had of ourselves as a team.
Our new
team brother, arriving at this time of grief and doubt, made an unorthodox
proposal: it was time, he said, to clean out the Creepy Cupboard. There
shouldn’t be spaces in our own home that we were afraid to go into. Fear and
shame were not healthy things to preserve.
And so,
armed with gloves, flashlights, and nerves of steel, we began excavating, fumigating,
and reclaiming the function of the scariest space in our house.
Cleaning
out the creepy cupboard – box by box, spider by spider; scrubbing the floor;
installing a light – became a symbol for what needed to happen in each of our
souls: a thorough appraisal of the things we were afraid of and wanted to hide,
addressing the pain and the shame by bringing them to the light where they could
be dealt with.
“When all things are brought out to the
light, then their true nature is clearly revealed, for anything that is clearly
revealed becomes light.” (Ephesians 5: 13-14a)
We
celebrated the renovation of the Creepy Cupboard by squishing the whole team in
to sit on the newly-polished floor and discuss the week’s ministry. For the
rest of that year, I was not afraid to walk past the door of that closet.
But there
are regularly spaces in my soul that I’m afraid and ashamed to deal with.
On the
whole, I have no reason to deal with them: my proud ego does a pretty good job
of convincing me that I’m a golden girl who has no need of deep cleaning.
Creepy cupboard? Me? No, I’ve got no mess or darkness!
It’s not
often that I’m forced to admit to myself, to God, or to others that I am so
much more broken and dysfunctional than I’d prefer to be – that there are
cupboards filled with thoughts, actions and patterns of behaviour that make me
cringe with shame; that there exists a less-shiny version of Kate whom I hate
and conceal.
She’s the
Kate who procrastinates duty in favour of instant gratification; who wholly
resents the needs of the world as being inconvenient and uncomfortable; who is
paralysed by the fear of being dull and inarticulate and incompetent; who is
clingy and relentless in seeking human validation.
It’s not
even necessarily sins that I hide in
the creepy cupboard (although there’s many boxes of those in there too). More
often it’s aspects of my character that aren’t “cool”, or emotions that I don’t
feel entitled to feel, or ‘unfinished bits’ of my work-in-progress life that
seem too ugly to reveal to the world.
Richard
Rohr, in his phenomenal book 'Falling Upward', refers to this darker part of our nature, which the ego tries so hard to
mask, as ‘the shadow self’: “Your shadow
is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to
see.”
Trouble is,
in seasons of external change, heartbreak, or uncertainty, our ‘shadow’
tends to rear its ugly head, showing us a version of ourselves we’d have liked
to think was long dead. The shadow doesn’t cease to exist simply because we’ve
built up a strong persona or because we’ve made progress towards holiness. Rohr actually suggests that progress towards holiness largely consists in healthy dialogue with the shadow self, rather than a relentless dictatorship by the ego's self-aggrandizing goals.
So when God breaks me down, shows me my shadow, and suggests that it might be time to clean out the creepy cupboard (as He's apt to do), I'm seriously hoping the fruit is growth in the Holy Spirit - cause daaaang it hurts.
Just
recently, I ran aground on a moment of heartache and was suddenly swamped with
emotions I hadn’t remembered I was capable of: anger, self-loathing, anguish,
intense longing, and guilt for feeling any of those emotions in the first
place. My shadow self was making itself known, and despite the several hours my
ego spent trying to wrestle ‘shadow’ back into the creepy cupboard, I couldn’t
quite hold it all together.
In prayer,
I begged Jesus to make my emotions go away so I could function like a normal
human being. But He, like my new NET brother a few years earlier, simply said:
“Denying it won’t make it go away. The pain
will merely lash out in others ways, rather than be relieved through direct
attention and procedure.”
He reminded
me that only in the Light can things be dealt with and rationalised. In the
darkness of the Creepy Cupboard, they’ll only seem misshapen and terrifying. The
only way to truly move beyond the shame and fear is to begin the work of
deep-cleaning that closet and dealing with the shadow self.
I resisted
for solidly ten minutes, scrunching up my nose at heaven like a stubborn child.
“I don’t waaaanttt toooooo. It’s going to hurrrrttttt. I feel so stupiddddddd.”
But the Lord was relentless in inviting me to wholeness:
Shame has no claim to a valid place in your
heart.
In the end,
it wasn’t as big or as painful as I believed it was going to be. Yes, there
were boxes of memories to sift through and re-label according to His truth;
yes, there was the realization that I was hoarding a lot of these boxes out of
desire for a future I knew would never arise.
But
surrendering each box from the Creepy Cupboard back to Him felt like
being freed from all the chains of desire and fear that held me captive for so
long.
It was a good reminder that authentic spirituality is never about pretending you have it all together. It's about the gritty confrontation of all that you are and all you are ashamed to be, knowing that you have a Redeemer who will fumigate the Creepy Cupboard with you. It's about knowing that a head-on collision with your shadow self will bring fruits of freedom and integrity if you allow the Holy Spirit to work freely.
We've all got Creepy Cupboards we rush past and shadow selves we'd rather not acknowledge. And I think most of us are so, so afraid to confront these because we think of them like a Pandora's box - an irreversible segue into disillusionment and self-loathing. We think that once we begin to acknowledge our feelings and our mistakes, we'll end up in a downward spiral of awful self-discovery in which our shiny ego has nothing left to cling to.
But it's not true. We have Jesus to cling to. He's not afraid of the depths - heck, He descended into hell! And His promise is this:
"The God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory through Christ Jesus will himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you after you have suffered a little."
1 Peter 5:10
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