Shadow Work

This short multi-movement work for choir, soloists, piano, and string quartet invites us the examine and clear our personal and societal shadows in order to bring light to the world. First presented during a Good Friday Service of the Shadows, this piece can fit in either sacred or secular settings. Performance time: c. 11 minutes. From the composer: First premiered on Good Friday 2025 at Central United Methodist Church in Albuquerque, NM, Shadow Work is a piece that I wrote about our response to these shadows, both personal and communal, that can cause us to either become the mob or to look away and perhaps to succumb under the weight of hopelessness, injustice, inhumanity, and so forth. The opening movement is a direct confrontation with shadow. It laments our pull toward acts of hatred, even as Love cries out from the cross, asking us to pursue a better way. Our unwillingness to heed the lessons of history cause us to choose violence over and over again, and the choir ends the movement chanting that phrase so associated with the Holocaust, “never forget, never again.” The second movement describes our longing for spiritual water with the plea “may healing rains of justice come, filling our arid, cracking soul earth with rivers of light.” The third movement suggests that, if we look thoroughly at our shadows instead of shoving them down, we can experience resurrection from the shadow of death. And the final movement suggests, very simply, that our waiting for light in the darkness ends when we break the cycles of history and become the light ourselves, having done business with shadow. It ends with a nod to the Navajo idea of Hozhoni- translated often as beauty, it more specifically conveys ideas of harmony, restoration, and right thinking. It is not up to anyone else to break these cycles and to create justice- it us up to us, healing our shadows, becoming the light the world needs. “May it be done through us in beauty.”