Being a Good Witch
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Can there be such a thing as a good witch? The first part of this sermon will answer, no. The second will answer, yes. Like thousands of religious men before me, I will try to define witchcraft. Most of my predecessors failed, but the energies that we associate with being a witch remain very powerful, whether we see them on the play level of Halloween, on the personal level in our relationships or on the level of politics and state dinners. There are times in history when we sense there is a writing on the wall that heralds doom, even if we can't quite read it. There are also people, women and men, who focus irrationally upon the negative-but if you are doing something wrong, the truth can seem negative and the wise woman is called a witch... but this is to jump ahead. This sermon has a practical, personal side and a large scale side, where I try to show that fear of a kind of witchcraft, terrorism, may turn our own leaders into spell-casters and too much fascination with the Dark Arts.
The key thing to know about the witch is know her opposite, and here I depend upon the best book on this subject: The Witch and the Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality (Wilmette, IL: Chiron, 1987), by Ann and Barry Ulanov. (Ann Belford Ulanov teaches at Union Seminary in Psychiatry and Religion; Barry Ulanov, until his recent death, headed the English Department at Barnard College.) The Ulanov's focus on the descriptions of the witch and the clown in fairy tales and adult literature from around the world, and consider the cross-cultural patterns to be "archetypes" that constantly re-emerge, no matter how good a marriage, and no matter how good a government.
If you can recall the basic witch stories, you know that the witch is the opposite of the nurturing mom. She may want to fatten up Hansel and Gretel, but its because she wants to eat them. Baba Yaga, the witch in Russian folktales, lives in a hut deep in a scary forest and eats unwary travelers, especially children. The wicked queen or step-mother who is really a witch wants Snow White to die; the witch mom always wants the daughter to be ugly and to fail, and she wants her son or her husband to be a sorry clown, dancing in attendance, acting out feelings, but always unsure of himself. Being afraid of being a weak clown drives many a world leader into the hands of the devouring and pitiless witch. (And then the peoples whose natural powers and fulfillment are suppressed turn to witchcraft's indirect powers to inflict damage, so others will also suffer.)
The Ulanov's give psychological and theological reasons why a good witch may always remain a contradiction in terms. Despite Harry Potter's good friends and teachers, despite the total co-optation of the broomstick into a piece of sports equipment, rather than stolen male equipment, efforts to rehabilitate the witch will fail. Although we know that any woman who steps out of line may be called a witch, being a witch is having something out of line inside, its about how the masculine part of a woman goes wrong. It is a reactive process, because the witch energy emerges when men do not integrate their feminine sides-when they give away that part of their power that depends on feeling and compassion. A woman becomes more of a witch, for example, when a man doesn't stand up for himself, when he doesn't know what he wants or feels. (Despite the expansion of women's roles, which is good and still needed, and despite our recognition that some cultures, like many in Asia, give women more of the thinking style and men more of the passionate feeling function, the witch or hag symbol is precisely the opposite of domestication.)
Here is a summary of the witch's reversal function, from Ulanov, p. 27:
"In the (Grimm's) tale "Frau Trude," a little girl's curiosity leads her, against her parents' strong warnings, to poke into a witch's cottage. When the witch questions the girl about what she has seen, the girl naively tells all. For this impertinence of seeing into her dark secrets, the witch pops the little girl into the fire to provide light and warmth for her old witch bones... Against (her parents') better judgment, she went off into the witch's terrain. But when faced with the witch, against whom she needed all her alertness, guile and self-reliance, the girl reverted to childish dependence... (Unwise!) The witch figure does not nurture the girl's growth to enlightened understanding; instead, she uses the little girl to illuminate and warm her own living space."
On a psychological level, we can see the witch and the clown at the edges of our own lives: "...they show us what we leave out ... the missing pieces of our sexual (or gender) identities... Thus a little girl can feel a witch's fury smoldering in herself-in direct opposition to the nice, clean, gentle, cooperative girl she has so often been told she has to be. She can feel bubbling up in her own mother that same fierce lust to break free, even as her mother is enslaved in the role of good feeder, forced to give all her time and energy to nourishing her daughter. That force (may)... poison the food she offers her daughter. Both mother and daughter would be better off if this witch force were openly acknowledged as a valid part of their female identities..." (p. 15). This is to point us from the destructive side of the witch energy to the redemption of this energy through its integration in the whole personality-the possibility of the good witch.
(Not preached in any form: The Ulanov's similarly talk of the good side of the clown: the trickster function, humor mixing with rebellion, giving space for a self that is not merging with authority... They tell the story of a policeman's son, told to grow up and be a man, who runs off with the circus. But the clown is not just the immaturity of a Peter Pan-who after all prolongs a relationship with a nurturing, junior mothering Wendy. It is as if the boy wants to be a tinkerbell forever. "The clown who sentimentalizes and teases his feelings, but never opens to them, also contaminates the atmosphere with a mushy softness that does not further but rather muddies relationship. At his worst, his is a false assertion of feeling that controls others by getting them to take pity on his frailty. He cuts up emotional connections, and his explosions and jerkings between opposing reactions destroy any continuity of sharing. He is bursting with unmediated, uncontained feeling...the miraculous escape from endless disaster..." p. 12).
To sum up the first part of the sermon I would point to all of the negative and incomplete parts of our lives and world. I started with the Babylonian king paralyzed by fear of ghostly writing. But think of the enormous rise in the number of single people in our culture and the decline in child-bearing. Think of how many lives there are that are fundamentally script-less, people collecting things, distracting themselves, going in circles, full of resentment. This is about the controversy over homosexuality in the culture-which will be confronted later today at the Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, and the now bigger fears of terrorism which shadow our election.
But now, to be a good witch is to put fundamentally scary power to good purpose. There are inevitable obstacles and irrational blockages in the world. They need to be dealt with properly or they take on a life of their own.
On the personal side, where we think of the witch more easily, what men resent or are passive-aggressive toward with women, is usually their own power given away. In the bulletin there's an insert from the Gottman Institute on Perpetual Issues in marriage. These are sources of conflict. These are needs your partner does not satisfy. They do not go away. They are related to personality type, up-bringing, culture and circumstance. Some couples make it on a love/hate bond, staying together with almost a negative force- field of interlocking scripts or games, but there are witch and clown elements in marriages that are unconscious elements which will test all the rational work. Alongside all the mysteries of attraction and repulsion, there are elements of toxic rage or resentment and the compulsive dance of the clown that can weaken marriages or guarantee people will be alone. There is also that catch-phrase: you can work on a conflicted marriage, but not on an abusive one.
I would urge you to take that bulletin insert home and work with it. You may find that you differ fundamentally on as much as 60 or 70% of issues-and yet, if your friendship and shared values-including shared faith-are strong, you will be positive enough to each other in your interactions to make it. When you have differences, one must speak up and the other must respond, even if it is only to kiss each other ruefully and push the hair back in loving frustration-it will not be frustrated loving. But if you begin the cold wars, or just stick to joking around, the witch and the clown will win.
The collective side of the witch must also be contained, lest war break out. We return to the state dinner back at the palace in Babylon. What has this king done? He has taken vessels meant to serve God and used them to serve himself: it is not just putting his private good in the place of the common good (powerful people do that all the time), but he has put himself in the place of God. Thus the writing on the wall comes: then his fatal sickness, and soon the empire destroyed. It is destroyed surprisingly quickly: the King does not have the wise Daniel in himself. It may take foreigners to help us learn the language. There is a truth in the irrational, voodoo-like grip of this terror, that without God we can do nothing, we are cut off from the tree of life. Again, it is fear of being weak or being mocked, like a clown, that makes people abuse power and try to crush others. Pride goeth before a fall-unless we see that witch and clown dynamic.
Jesus lived in the real world, not an inflated world of palaces or a brutal world of circuses. He knew the impulse to pray desperately in anxiety and the impulse to say prayers like spells, repeated over and over again. Our response to terror in the world must be understanding and then our own spiritual grounding. This is not the public, "God Bless Americas." It is the metaphor of praying in secret and doing good in secret. In those words before he gives the model of how to pray, the Lord's Prayer, Jesus warns about "heaping up empty words." But then in the Lord's Prayer, he acknowledges the terrors, of basic lack of sustenance and torture, and the fact that we sin against others and against God. No naivete, no hypocrisy. Wisdom, freedom, courage: Amen.
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