Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
—Step 4 of the Twelve Steps
“Sacrifice gives you no pleasure, were I to offer a holocaust, you would not have it. My sacrifice is this broken spirit. You will never scorn a crushed and broken heart.”
—Psalm 50:16–17
“If inside you have the bitterness of jealousy, or a selfish ambition, never make any false claims for yourself or cover up the truth with lies.”
—James 3:14
“Be awake and pray that you pass the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
—Matthew 26:41
Those who were raised in highly moral families, or with a strict religious upbringing, will usually recoil at Step 4. They are so tired of judging themselves—and the judgmentalism toward others that comes with it—that they tend to resist any “searching and fearless moral inventory.” Perhaps it did not work for them in the past but only made them more self-preoccupied, and in a negative way besides. “Analysis is paralysis” is surely true for many people.
In fact, I am convinced that some people are driven to addictions to quiet their constant inner critic; it only gives them ever another thing to hate themselves for!1 What a vicious cycle, and honestly not an uncommon one. The internalized voices of a demanding parent, a rigid culture, or a finger-waving church, persist long after the parent is gone, we move to another country, or leave the church. We are now our own problem. That, in fact, is the final value of a moral inventory. Moral scrutiny is not to discover how good or bad I am and regain some moral high ground, but it is to begin some honest “shadow boxing” which is at the heart of all spiritual awakening. Yes, “the truth will set you free” as Jesus says (John 8:32), but first it tends to make you miserable. The medieval spiritual writers called it compunction, the necessary sadness and humiliation that comes from seeing one’s own failures and weaknesses. Without confidence in a Greater Love, none of us will have the courage to go inside, nor should we. It merely becomes silly scrupulosity (2 Timothy 3:6) and not any mature development of conscience or social awareness.
People only come to deeper consciousness by intentional struggles with contradictions, conflicts, inconsistencies, inner confusions, and what the biblical tradition calls “sin” or moral failure. Starting with Adam and Eve, there seems to be a necessary “transgression” that sets the whole human story into motion. In Paul’s brilliant exposé on the spiritual function of law, his Letter to the Romans, he actually says that “the law was given to multiply the opportunities of falling!” Now deal with that one. And then he adds “so that grace can even be greater” (5:20–21)! God actually relishes the vacuum, which God knows God alone can fill. St. Thérèse of Lisieux called this her “little way,” which is nothing other than the Gospel itself. “Whoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Proverbs 9:4) became her mantra and her message.
In other words, the goal is actually not the perfect avoidance of all sin, which is not possible anyway (1 John 1:8–9; Romans 5:12), but the struggle itself, and the encounter and wisdom that comes from it. Law and failure create the foil, which creates the conflict, which leads to a very different kind of victory than any of us expected. Not perfect moral victory, not moral superiority, but just luminosity of awareness and compassion for the world, which becomes our real moral victory. Alcoholics after thirty years in perfect recovery are still imperfect and still alcoholic, and they know it, which makes all the difference. Paul dares to say that “God has imprisoned all people in their own disobedience so that God can show mercy to all people” (Romans 11:32). It feels like a Divine catch-22, but instead of a no-win situation, it feels more like a “lose-win” situation or even a “win-win.” Not a double bind but a double release. No wonder they called it the true “good news!” God has trapped us all inside of certain grace and enclosed all things human in a constant need for mercy.
So shadow boxing, a “searching and fearless moral inventory,” is for the sake of truth and humility and generosity of spirit, not vengeance on the self or some kind of total victory over the self. Seeing and naming our actual faults is probably not so much a gift to us—although it is—as it is to those around us. As my Franciscan novice master said to me as a young man, “We must try to make it easier for others to love us.” I am sure I needed that advice! People who are more transparent and admitting of their blind spots and personality flaws are actually quite easy to love and be with. None of us need or expect perfect people around us, but we do want people who can be up front and honest about their mistakes and limitations, and hopefully grow from them.Ongoing Shadow Boxing Is Absolutely Necessary
In that, I think humans are certainly “created in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26) because that is what God appears to want too: Simple honesty and humility. There is no other way to read Jesus’ stories of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) or the publican and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14). In each story, the one who did wrong ends up being right—simply because he is honest about it. How have we been able to miss that important point? I suspect it is because the ego wants to think well of itself and deny any shadow material. Only the soul knows that we grow best in the shadowlands. We are blinded inside of either total light or total darkness, but “the light shines on inside the darkness, and it is a light that darkness cannot overcome” (John 1:5). In darkness we find and ever long for more light.
Your shadow self is not your evil self. It is just that part of you that you do not want to see, your unacceptable self by reason of nature, nurture, and choice. That bit of chosen blindness, or what A.A. calls denial, is what allows us to do evil and cruel things—without recognizing them as evil or cruel. So ongoing shadow boxing is absolutely necessary because we all have a well-denied shadow self. We all have that which we cannot see, will not see, dare not see. It would destroy our public and personal self-image.
The more you are attached to any persona (“stage mask” in Greek) whatsoever, bad or good, any chosen and preferred self-image, the more shadow self you will have. So we absolutely need conflicts, relationship difficulties, moral failures, defeats to our grandiosity, even seeming enemies, or we will have no way to ever spot or track our shadow self. They are our necessary mirrors. Isn’t that sort of a surprise? And even then, we usually catch it out of the corner of our eye—in a graced insight and gifted moment of inner freedom.
Let’s draw this together with another marvelous quote from Jesus, who seems to have preceded modern depth psychology and Step 4 by two thousand years. He says, “Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eyes and never notice the plank in your own? How dare you say to your sister ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a log in your own? Take the log out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother’s or sister’s eye” (Matthew 7:4–5).
Step 4 is about seeing your own log first, so you can stop blaming, accusing, and denying, and thus displacing the problem. It is about seeing truthfully and fully. Note that Jesus does not just praise good moral behavior or criticize immoral behavior, as you might expect from a lesser teacher, but instead he talks about something caught in the eye. He knows that if you see rightly, the actions and behavior will eventually take care of themselves. The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful. No one consciously does evil. The very fact that anyone can do stupid, cruel, or destructive things shows they are at that moment unconscious and unaware. Think about that: Evil proceeds from a lack of consciousness.
Jesus also says shortly before, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be darkness. And if the lamp within you is, in fact, darkness, what darkness that will be” (Matthew 6:22–23). Step 4 is about creating a good and trustworthy lamp inside of us that reflects and reveals what is really there, knowing that “anything exposed to the light will itself become light” (Ephesians 5:14). Somehow goodness is transferred by radiance, reflection, and resonance with another goodness, more than by any act of self-achievement. We do not pull ourselves up; we are pulled.
God does not directly destroy evil, the way our heroic and dualistic minds would like to imagine. God is much wiser, wastes nothing, and includes everything. The God of the Bible is best known for transmuting and transforming our very evils into our own more perfect good. God uses our sins in our own favor! God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience. How could that not be good news for just about everybody?