Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve

p. 116

Smedes wants readers to see that human beings are inexpressibly complex creatures.  “What we are is a set of walking contradictions: our inner lives are not partitioned like day and night, with pure light on one side of us and total darkness on the other.  Mostly, our souls are shadowed places; we live at the border where our dark sides block our light and throw a shadow over our interior places. . . . We cannot always tell where our light ends and our shadow begins or where our shadow ends and our darkness begins.