"Doppelganger" is German for "double walker" and refers to a shadow self, an apparition, that traditionally is supposed to accompany every person.
Many famous people are said to have seen their doppelgangers: Shelley, Donne, and Goethe among them. Sometimes they are messengers of impending death. In the classic novel I am re-reading - the first time was in college - the young woman, Pauline, is terrified and flees her double because she is convinced that something terrible will happen to her if they should meet face to face.
In an unexpected plot twist, a friend convinces Pauline to allow him to spiritually carry her fear for her - to bear her burden - to leave her emotionally and spiritually free to discover the real meaning of the apparition.
Pauline's pursuing apparition is not a harbinger of death. The apparition - terrible in astounding, almost inhuman, other-worldly beauty - is a messenger of possible new life. Pauline discovers that her doppelganger is really the Pauline whom she can become if she crawls out of the darkness of her continual fear, self-doubt, and timidity. Pauline looks into her double's eyes and accepts God's call to become all that she can be.
I'm sure that my younger self (also fearful, self-doubting, and unbearably shy) was intrigued by this tale because I recognized the spiritual truth in it. In a way, we're all pursued by the doppelganger of who-we-can-become. He or she is always hovering just out of sight, and sometimes glimpsed - that braver, stronger, more honest, more loving me, the person I can become if I'd just take seriously the words of St. Paul: we are all "called to be holy." (1 Corinthians 1:1). And I'm still just as terrified as Pauline at the thought that I could become a better,stronger, more loving me.
Who I am right now is so - SAFE. I'm very happy in my dark little cocoon, thank you very much! Growing and changing are, well, MESSY.
But God and my doppelganger are quietly waiting me out. I am quietly, naturally changing with every ordinary "Yes" to God that I give, every act of love. Who will I finally become?
I'm a lot older now than the girl who read that book. I wish that back then she could have looked in her mirror and seen me now, heard me tell her how she would bloom into a butterfly who overcame her shyness, her timidity, her fears, to fly higher than she ever thought she could. I wish I could have looked into her eyes to give her courage.
But she might have been afraid. Afraid to see what she could become.
Just as I am afraid now of changes and growth to come. Because often enough change comes through and after a period of darkness. The final perfecting will come after the final darkness.
"...when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present, we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present, I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians 13: 10 - 12.)