ESSAYS | copelandwrites

STEPHEN COPELAND

AUTHOR & STORYTELLER

A Social Experiment In Heaven

A Social Experiment In Heaven

One day, whatever that means in a realm beyond space and time, the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Spirit, and the Son—decided to run a social experiment on the souls who were waiting outside heaven’s pearly gates. When the gates opened, Saint Peter would announce over the heavenly intercom to form three separate single-file lines: one behind the Father, one behind the Spirit, and one behind the Son, for the Trinity was curious who the souls might gravitate towards. Many of th

The Man Who Conquered His Shadow (Part III)

The Man Who Conquered His Shadow (Part III)

I am the shadow, the shadow of the shepherd. Where did I come from? It’s funny. Not many people ask about my origin. They just assume that their shadows are their truths, deeply ingrained into the nature of their realities. People think they need to be saved from their shadows, but it was the shepherd who somehow learned to dance with me. A thousand times over, people will confess that they need to be saved from their shadows; but it never really works. It only makes them i

The Man Who Conquered His Shadow (Part II)

The Man Who Conquered His Shadow (Part II)

"The shadow self is not of itself evil; it just allows you to do evil without calling it evil...Archaic religion and most of the history of religion has seen the shadow as the problem. Isn’t that what religion is about: getting rid of all our faults? This is the classic pattern of dealing with the symptom instead of the cause. We cannot really get rid of the shadow; we can only expose its game—which eventually undermine its results and effects." -Richard Rohr Yes, it is me. I

The Man Who Conquered His Shadow

The Man Who Conquered His Shadow

“After spending so much energy avoiding the appearance of failure, it will take a major paradigm shift in consciousness to integrate our shadow. Just know that it is the false self that is sad and humbled by shadow work, because its game is over. The True Self, ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:3) is incapable of being humiliated. It only grows from such insight.” -Richard Rohr They’ve been fighting them for millennia, ever since the invasion, when those shadow-like

The Fisherman’s Boy Who Saw His Future

The Fisherman’s Boy Who Saw His Future

There once was an old, wise, craggy-faced woman with long, gray hair. She was a witch and a fortune-teller, yet many believed she might be an angel. People feared her because of her supernatural abilities. Many even worshiped her. She once set an entire invading army on fire with the stroke of a spell. She had predicted the futures of dozens of people—only people whom she felt compelled to select—and all of them had come true, even the outlandish predictions, like peasants be

A Little Story about All the Words there Ever Were

A Little Story about All the Words there Ever Were

Once a year, all the words would gather together for a banquet. Big words and small words. Curse words and holy words. Normal words and strange words. Noun words and verb words and adjective words and adverb words and pronoun words and preposition words and conjunction words. Billions and billions and billions of words. They would come together each year—as such a diverse collection of words, from all over the spectrum of words—because they all realized that they were inheren