I sat in church this morning and looked out over the people around and before me. I realized in an instant how differently I view them now than I did the people with whom I attended church in my twenties and how differently I view myself now.
I had become rather cynical about church by the time I’d reached my early twenties. I had begun to access my own dark side: depression, grief, anger, bitterness, doubt. I wanted a place to bring those things and be…whole. At that point, I still wanted to make those things go away, but I knew intuitively that I needed to bring them into the conversations I was having with myself and with others in order to do that. I went to church, and I could see no in-roads for that kind of dialogue. What I saw were the self-righteous masks, the brittle defenses, and the somewhat startled looks when I probed beneath them.
And I wasn’t often kind in my probing. I was as harsh with others as I was with myself. I used sarcasm, dark humor, bitterness, and criticisms about others as my way to attempt to slice through the BS that was the norm. And instead of the intimacy and connection I sought, I alienated others and myself. Eventually, I left the church. It took another 15 years before I was able to attend church again on a regular basis.
And here I am, and I am exploring the shift that happened in me. The people haven’t changed…as in every church, there’s still BS and superficiality and self-righteousness and all of the rest.
But when I look at these people around me, that’s not what I see. I see the woman who lost her young child last year and is doing everything she can to cope with the grief and loss; I see the parents of children doing their best to juggle the care of their children with their own needs and those of their jobs; I see people taking the small steps of courage that are necessary to build relationships and begin to open themselves.
I no longer want to slice through their masks. I think of the ways in which I often exposed my own tender heart by ripping off my mask, leaving myself feeling just a little violated and hurt by the attempt at intimacy. And I no longer want to do that to myself…or to anyone else.
I’m a body worker by trade, and I’ve learned in working with many bodies over the years that a human body is much like any animal body: it never lies. You can tell when you massage a cat or a dog if they like it. They’ll press against you and ask for more. They’ll soften beneath your touch. If they don’t like it, they move away. They swat at you. They resist. And while people can lie with their mouths, their bodies don’t lie. If they are responding to my work, I know it. If not, regardless of what they tell me, I know to be just a bit more gentle or supportive with my work, to give the body a chance to trust. It will let go of its own defenses, if I give it a chance to. Trying to force it to do so only increases the armoring.
Today, I’d rather gentle away people’s masks, the way I’d gentle away the knots in a body. And if they want to keep their masks? Well, that’s okay, too. It’s not up to me to decide when they’re ready to let a defense go. I can’t always even decide when it’s time for me to let a defense go! Sometimes it just takes time and more kind attention.
Today, when I look out on the sea of faces around me in church, I feel softness in my heart for all of us. We’re all kind of crazy, really, in a totally normal, wounded human sort of way. We’re all these tender hearts, contorted and convoluted to protect our tenderness from sharp jabs and careless elbows. We take on all sorts of shapes to keep from getting hurt ourselves and sometimes to keep from hurting others. We all need some compassion and gentleness extended in our general directions so that maybe, just maybe, we’ll all feel safe to let a corner of the mask slip here or there. We’ll perhaps expose a tiny bit of pulsing hearts and see that we all share the same pain and fear and desire for connection. Not everyone manages to find the courage to lower the mask. Today, I don’t feel so much judgment toward those people as just…more compassion. Courage is hard work. And it’s not my job to decide if someone else is doing that work the best they can or not. It’s up to me to be as gentle with myself as possible, to find enough compassion in my heart for me to be me. And in doing that, maybe someone here or there will have a space with me to find compassion to be themselves with me.
