Feeding Your Wolf

Good Wolf-Bad Wolf

“A Cherokee elder sitting with his grandchildren told them, ‘In every life there is a terrible fight—a fight between two wolves. One is evil: he is fear, anger, envy, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, and deceit. The other is good: joy, serenity, humility, confidence, generosity, truth, gentleness, and compassion.’ A child asked, ‘Grandfather, which wolf will win?’ The elder looked him in the eye. ‘The one you feed.’”

This lovely parable from Cherokee lore mirrors the Apostle Paul’s words to the Galatians (5:21-22) in which he lists the fruits of the spirit: “love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” In Paul's case, he wanted the Galatians to refrain from “the works of the flesh”, aka the seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. In other words, the sins we all engage in regularly. I love wisdom stories of every kind, but I think we have to give the “bad wolf” a little respect.

We enter this world with an equal measure of good wolf/bad wolf and our inner landscape is a dueling field much of the time. As little children, we have to learn how to refrain from exercising the seven deadly sins. Our parents must teach us how to feed the good wolf, and not allow the bad one take over. Some of us learn this better than others. Here's the problem: if we are overly identified with the good wolf—the one we like for people to see and the one that is easiest for us to claim—behind him lurks the bad wolf, who is lean and hungry and in need of attention. We can suppress and repress his dark shadow only so long, and then, when we least expect it, he springs out and tears someone to shreds.

Making friends with the bad wolf may feel a little dangerous. He forces us to look at things about ourselves we'd rather not see. Failing to recognize and respect him, however, is an even bigger danger. Then we tend to cast his ugly shadow on everybody who rubs us the wrong way. Before we know it we’re calling other people evil and seeing ourselves as avenging angels of light. It was Viktor Frankl who wrote, “What is to give light must endure burning.” We have to suffer the sight of our bad wolf in order to feed the good one. My son, Ian, had a dream recently in which he was working to cleanse a house of its “bad ju-ju.” Someone asked why he was doing that and he answered, “It's far easier to exorcise the devil than it is to live like an angel.” Human beings are not angelic for the most part—we need to understand that. We can exorcise our demons, but first we must name them.

All in all, the bad wolf turns out to have some fairly adorable characteristics. He's a great protector, and he has a wicked sense of humor. He knows how to take care of business and he knows how to laugh at himself. We don't want to banish him to the badlands; we just need to give him a name and a collar with a good, strong leash.

In the Spirit,
Jane