Chasing Shadows

With a quote from Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald

I have often noticed that many of my traits I would generally consider strengths, have with them an associated weakness. If I am not careful, those strengths can display themselves in ways that are not good for myself or others. For example, I am fairly open with my thoughts on most any subject. Being straight-forward with people is a good thing, but it needs to be done tactfully at times, which is where I can occasionally have a weakness. There is a similar weakness with all of my strengths and that can be frustrating at times.

However, if there is a weakness related to my strengths, might there not also be a strength associated with my weaknesses? George MacDonald made me think of this in his book Sir Gibbie as he talks about one of the side characters, Fergus, who desires to be admired by everyone and lets that desire guide all of his actions. In discussing this weakness in Fergus, MacDonald says the following:

““If any one judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose objects they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration; and no man ever followed the truth, which is the one path of aspiration, and in the end complained that he had been made this way or that. Man is made to be that which he is made most capable of desiring—but it goes without saying that he must desire the thing itself and not its shadow. Man is of the truth, and while he follows a lie, no indication his nature yields will hold, except the fear, the discontent, the sickness of soul, that tell him he is wrong. If he say, “I care not for what you call the substance—it is to me the shadow; I want what you call the shadow,” the only answer is, that, to all eternity, he can never have it: a shadow can never be had.””

To me, this seems to say that when we are tempted, or when we seek after things that are wrong, we are chasing shadows. We are seeking joy from sources which will never bring anything but brief pleasure at best. C.S. Lewis noted that God has given us all desires which have some divine form to each of them, for we are divine creatures. If that is true, maybe one of the best ways to overcome our various weaknesses is to identify the truth, or the substance, and stop seeking the lie. Rather if we lean into the positive good that is associated with the shadow, we will no longer desire the shadow because we will have become a new creature. I am not saying you can just do the good thing once and be done, indeed I expect the temptation for the shadow may return if that divine portion of the desire ceases to be satisfied. Therefore, in order to remove those shadows from our lives, we must push towards the true and good, proactively satisfying our desires with things of substance. In so doing we will truly turn our weakness into strength, not just by removing the desire for evil, but by turning it to its true purpose.