Self unseen?

The more people reveal to me about their inner lives, their struggles to ‘do right’ and the challenges and struggles they face: and how those very challenges and struggles make them either turn to God or turn against him… the more impressed I am at the complexity of each human being’s inner life, and the less I feel able to offer any response other than admiration or empathy.

When I look back over this blog I see how far I have travelled in knowing myself… and I am amazed that any person can know Another at all.

Sometimes it seems we human beings hardly try: There are an awful lot of imagined rules for prejudging people rather than knowing them…  for categorising people as ‘types’ rather than relating to people, soul to soul…  it is certainly a lot less demanding to see someone as a ‘type’ rather than to actually truly SEE them.

Nudity is nothing shocking on television in western culture – and the impact -like in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ – is relatively minimal in comparison say with thirty years ago… Revealing the body does not reveal the personhood or Self in the way perhaps it once did – in the days when society demanded uniformed propriety of dress, then naked flesh was a communication of ‘risk’ a revelation of potential further intimacy or acknowledgement of an increased closeness in relationship. Unusual garb was the communication of an unusual Self with unusual things to communicate. It was perhaps never about clothes hiding the flesh, but about hiding or revealing the Self… and the prize of intimacy, the reason for the fascination with revelation… was about the drawing together of two Selves… about an intimate relationship of souls

Now that clothes no longer particularly hide or reveal the Self, and unusual clothes are either a statement of what one WANTS to be known (a bold proclamation rather than an invitation to communicate) – the Self still remains hidden…, it is just that the language of clothing has lost much of its use.

Or has it? – I wear a clerical collar (yes, still) – and to my amusement that can be viewed in a slightly fetishistic way – generally suggesting that I have much hidden or perhaps that I have much repressed; or worst, that it is a statement of how I wish to be seen (that one comes with all the baggage or hope that anyone has for anything church related).  I personally intend it simply to communicate like a badge – or like a doorplate by a door – it lets you know that the ‘office’ of this particular person is to do with God…  it shows I’m on duty, that it’s an official residence so anyone can call at the door – for a cup of tea, or to chat randomly – it still indicates – ‘if you choose to relate with this person, somewhere in all this, there is going to be God’.

But it isn’t how I relate, and collar or not, we won’t really get onto the subject of God until we catch a glimpse of the Self in one another – behind the eyes… perhaps that’s the place of revelation.