April (May, June, July...) Fool

“The life that I touch for good or ill will touches another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.  Our lives are linked together.  No man is an island.

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island.  It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell.  We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool.  And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that, indeed, he is a fool.  The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it.  So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way, of course.  Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be.  We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well – except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known.  In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity.  Part of what it means to be is to be you and not me, between us the sea that we can never entirely cross even when we would.  “My brethren are wholly estranged from me,” Job cries out.  “I have become an alien in their eyes.”

The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island.  Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs above all to be known and accepted, but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over.  So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than more of the time we dare to admit.

Island calls to island across the silence, and once, in trust, the real words come, a bridge is built and love is done – not sentimental, emotional love, but love that is pontifex, bridge-builder.  Love that speaks the holy and healing word which is:  God be with you, stranger who are no stranger.  I wish you well.  The islands become an archipelago, a continent, become a kingdom whose name is the Kingdom of God.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

I'm baaaaaaack.   I took an unplanned, self-inflicted break from blogging over Lent - did you miss me?  Over the next couple of days, you'll have to listen to I plan to tell you about what I learned over the last 40+ days. I've had plenty of time to think about stuff.

Today's learning, advantageously, coincides with the date.

Learning One:  My fear of looking like a fool trumps my ability to move mountains.

Thinking about relationships (work and personal, real and imagined) in retrospect, I've identified instances where I either did or said something which masked the way I actually felt.  Not lying, really.  Mostly just non sequiters, adianoeta, phrases turned which please the listener, but still convey truth when looked at sideways.  I wasn't dishonest, you just interpreted me incorrectly.

Why do I do that?  Well, simply put, I want to protect whatever I believe the relationship's status quo is.  Even if it's a crappy status quo, it's the devil I know.  And I want to be the me that I think you'd like.  It's incredibly difficult for me to take the chance of being completely honest with every man, woman or child.  I don't know any human who can manage that. 

I can save face for a while; ultimately I'll end up more and more detached from myself and others. In keeping with the landmass analogy, I break off and do a little continental drifting. 

I know someone who seems kind of like this   The self they've created is quite honorable:  intelligent, well-spoken, sincere, compassionate, able to cut to the heart of matters. But behind that, I sense a sort of detachment; not an insincere one, but an unconscious indifference created more through habit.  I don't know.  It kind of makes me sad.  Like there's a personal fortress of solitude. Or maybe it's just my imagination.

ANYWAY.  The bottom line is, even though I keep getting the word that I can, in fact, move mountains (enough, already), the leap of faith from private island to archipelago is pretty damn scary. 

I might take that chance if I knew for sure that you were a fool, too.