"Public and
Private"
Kathy
and I have lived in Washington DC
for three years now, yet the locals never cease asking me how I'm
adjusting to life in the District after having grown up in Los Angeles.
"It's really not a problem," I
answer. “Hollywood and
Washington are exactly the same culture. So I’m very much at home here.”
As
you can imagine, this is not a popular answer inside the Beltway, but it is a
true one. Washingtonians may think of themselves as civil servants and
diplomats, but from what I’ve seen they behave pretty much like network
executives and theatrical agents. Both Hollywood and Washington are
one-industry towns. Indeed, both
cities refer to themselves as “this town”—as in “you’ll never do lunch in this
town again,” or “seasoned politicos see trouble brewing for policy analysts in
this town”. And, when you think
about it, show business and politics are really twin branches of one
enterprise. They’re both about packaging a person and projecting an image. Everything in one city is about glitz
and hype. You could also say the same
of Los Angeles.
So
growing up in L.A. and around Hollywood people has actually been an asset for
me, especially when it comes to reading people. Well-known Washingtonians resemble their Hollywood cousins
especially in their personal hidden-ness. In public they are often nothing like
they in private. My father was an
actor, and his public and private personae could not have been more different
from each other. Politicians are
pretty much the same. They project a public image that has almost nothing in
common with how they are when the microphones and cameras disappear.
In
some sense, politicians and actors only read back to us the public-private
discontinuity that we all inhabit. Who are we in company, and who are we when
alone? I've thought about this public-private disjunction a lot, especially as
I've contemplated the Gospel for this morning [Mark 6:30-34, 53-56] because it
is perhaps our greatest spiritual problem, especially in this social media age.
But we humans were this way even before the advent of Twitter. We expect actors
and politicians to wear masks. That’s what they do for a living, and at least
they know the benefits and the risks they’re taking. But what about the rest of us?
In
today’s reading, Mark’s gospel tells us how, after a whirlwind of teaching and
healing, Jesus and his companions decide to come away to a deserted place and
rest for a while. But the crowd sees them and they follow the Jesus group to
their refuge. Jesus is tired, and he is entitled to be cranky. But here is the
difference between Jesus and the rest of us—or at least between Jesus and me. Jesus does not throw a hissy fit. When
cornered in private, Jesus responds as he had in public--not in anger but in
love. He doesn’t tell them to come
back during office hours. He has
compassion on the crowd because they seem to him “like sheep without a shepherd”.
So he teaches and heals them. He does, in private, what he was doing in public.
For
Jesus, there is no Garbo-like "I want to be alone" moment here. Jesus is who he is. He’ll heal you in public. He’ll heal
you in private. He is a unified self in both arenas. He does not have a public
act and a private one. He is one
coherent human being who actually knows who he is and behaves consistently all
the time and with everyone. This doesn’t mean that he is always happy or
cheerful. But he is never
bogus. He knows who he is and
invites you into a zone of compassion and love, a space of healing and peace—a
space where you can know and be who you are, too.
Now
you'd think that knowing who you are and being that person consistently would
be pretty easy. But it is actually
one of the hardest things we ever attempt to do. Growing up in the hothouse of
the family, school, and peer groups, as infants and children we often develop a
false self in response to the rewards and punishments we receive from parents
and other authority figures. This
false self has its place: it helps us navigate the rapids of adolescence and
early adulthood and eventually to get out of the house. But there comes a time later in life—a
personal, relationship, or professional crisis—when that false self is no
longer adequate to the demands of the situation. And what we call the “mid-life crisis” is often simply the
breaking up of that false self and the opportunity to discover our real
identity.
By
being who he was in both public and private, Jesus exemplifies for us his
followers what it means to be a fully realized human being. The Roman Catholic monk and writer
Thomas Merton [who I will discuss/did discuss at the Forum this morning] puts
it this way:
We
are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice
is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire,
appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity.
Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot
expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have
chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we
finally come to need it! [New Seeds of Contemplation,
Chapter 5]
It
is no accident that Thomas Merton learned about true and false selves while
living in a monastery. Monastic
community may look peaceful from the outside, but it is the most intense kind
of living there is; and there’s no place to hide when you’re with your brothers
(or sisters) 24 hours a day. But
monasteries don’t only offer intense communities; they also have what we call a
“Rule of Life”, a monastic commitment to balancing prayer, study, work, rest,
and play in a holistic structure that allows one to experience the fullness of
God’s presence in the routine round of the everyday. You can’t survive in a monastery very long if you’re always
wearing a mask. The pressure is too intense. So one of the ways you learn to
live monastically is to relax and accept your identity within a shared
structure. As a contemporary monk and writer, Curtis Almquist of the Cowley
Fathers, says:
Benedict's [monastic] Rule
is for a “24-7” living experience, nothing pie-in-the-sky. If this is what you
say you believe and value, how do you live this out in the course of the day,
i.e., what’s your praxis? The end of Benedictine spirituality is to develop a
transparent personality. [SSJE website]
What
Curtis Almquist says of the Benedictine Rule for monks and nuns could be said
of the Christian life itself: the
end of following Jesus is “to develop a transparent personality”. Jesus went
into the wilderness seeking rest and found people there who needed him. In his
most private moment, he was who he was, and he responded with the compassion he
exhibited in public. He was one unified, seamless person. Jesus had what Almquist would call “a
transparent personality”.
You
and I can have a transparent personality, too. But to get it we have to work at it. We can start by adopting a Rule of
Life—a commitment to working, playing, resting, praying in a definable
rhythm. We can continue by
deciding, in Thomas Merton’s words, no longer to lie to ourselves or to
others. That decision is one LGBT
people have shown straight people like me how to make. It’s a decision that
people of color and women and oppressed people have shown white men like me to
make. The step into liberation is
the same whatever social location you’re in. It’s the central act of following Jesus: I am no longer going to lie to myself
or to others. I am going to be who
I am, in all environments, regardless of the discomfort that may cause. The decision no longer to lie to
ourselves or to others is one that each of us faces on a daily basis. It is a
choice we can put off but can never finally avoid. It’s one we can be
strengthened to make only in community with Jesus and each other.
And
that’s why we need the church. Christianity is not a solo act, and the church
is really a kind of laboratory for authentic living. We need to come in and
hear the stories of how Jesus lived and what Jesus stood for. We need to come into this place and try
on being our authentic selves with each other. We need to come in and remember that we, like Jesus, are
called to love and transform the world.
We need to come in so that we may go out. You don’t have to be two or
five or sixteen people to get through life. You only have to be one: the precious, fragile person created in God’s image and
loved and redeemed by Jesus.
We
come in to go out. It will be
time, soon enough, to navigate the rapids of “this town”. But for now, we are
here with divine permission to be who we are. And we come now to this table.
May the grace and acceptance we find here empower us to try on being who we
really are so that, with practice, we can offer our true selves to the world. Trust what happens here. The world
needs the real you. Nobody needs your public relations version of you. Everyone
needs you as you are. This is not the conventional wisdom of Washington,
Hollywood, or anyplace else. But
it is the truth. And for it we now proceed together to give thanks. Amen.
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