Dark Shadows

When I was thirteen, my friend Debra and I would walk to her house after school, plop down on the floor in front of the TV and glue our eyes on the spooky soap opera Dark Shadows. We were so engrossed by the evil vampire, Barnabas Collins, we hardly paid attention to the snacks Debra’s mother had ready for us. After a day of muddling through math problems and sentence diagrams, nothing less than this delicious dish of melodrama — now considered a cult classic — could suffice. In my parents’ childhood, evil “lurked” on the radio show The Shadow, which provided the same devilish entertainment. I knew it was all fantasy and fun. Not until I grew older did it dawn on me that the shadow was real. It may not drink our blood and cast curses, but as Carl Jung reminds us, “everyone carries a shadow.” And it features prominently in the spiritual journey. That is why, in the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy, “S” is for shadow. . . MORE