The 'you' you hide

"Will you love the 'you' you hide if I but call your name? Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same?"

So ran the lyrics of the Thanksgiving hymn at Mass yesterday. I stood there in the choir loft, and actually stopped singing the rest of the verse because those words had struck me so powerfully.

When Jesus calls my name, am I prepared to love the version of myself that I hate and hide? 

Vulnerability remains both one of the scariest and most liberating aspects of my life as a Christian. Responding to Jesus' call always means letting down my guard and letting Him in to all those messy, broken places of my soul that I would prefer to lock away and ignore. When Love enters our lives, we can't keep the door to the Creepy Cupboard closed forever. 

Recently I had the privilege of speaking with a friend about some parts of their past that bring them deep shame and regret. There was so much fear for them in admitting the mistakes they have loathed the most - fear of rejection, of condemnation, of hurting others.

Those fears were frighteningly familiar to me. I fear admitting my mistakes. I fear being weak in my times of weakness. I fear acknowledging that I am still a work-in-progress, a mistake-maker, a not-yet-saint, a sinner. Stripped back from the bravado I try so hard to maintain, my soul is just a renovation mess.

For all of us navigating the Incarnate mess of our own humanity, there is a deep fear that God or another person will one day arrive at the conclusion that we are fundamentally unworthy of love. The voice of shame is relentless in saying to us "You are not good. You are not worthy. You can never be new again. If they saw the real you, they couldn't possibly stick around."

And so we consign ourselves to the loneliness of hidden guilt, of storing up box upon box of regret in a darkened cupboard we never want the world to see. We pretend we've got it all together, and rush past that version of self we're ashamed, praying that nobody will notice its existence.

I don't think our Christian culture helps out very much. We as Church so often forget that "it is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick," that our God did not come to call the righteous but to invite sinners to Life to the Full. We remind each other of the necessity of integrity and moral courage and avoiding worldly temptations in every way possible. We make holiness into a competition, playing down the wounds of our past and the habits of imperfection we still hold because we think we can win love (or at least, not lose it).

In striving and fighting so hard to be the best version of ourselves, we end up in a spiral of disillusionment and self-loathing, knowing that we will never meet our own ideals, that we are destined to keep failing and failing. We cling to the precipice of a pedestal we're desperately trying to stay on, dreading the inevitable fall with no-one to catch us.

This is not the Gospel.

We believe in a God who became Incarnate - who chose a human life of mess and stench and people disappointing him. He chose parents who forgot him in Jerusalem, disciples who ran away when the going got tough, a best friend who denied him three times. He chose to take the weight of our sins upon his own body because he didn't want us to have to carry our shame any more. He came to redeem.

Time and time again in prayer, the Lord has told me how silly my façades are. When He calls my name, He doesn't invite me to be a caricature on a pedestal. Yes, He calls me to integrity - but that integrity is not a process of waiting for skin-deep virtue to sink in, it's turning inside-out of my soul so that nothing is hidden from His mercy.

He loves the 'me' I hide.

When Love encounters the darkest parts of our lives, we're forced to admit the gratuitousness of goodness. We can't possibly deserve the tenderness with which Love ministers to our frightened, broken, authentically messy hearts.

We can't deserve it. But we can desert it. We can choose to remain in shame and fear, afraid of the 'us' we hide, and convinced that nobody is going to catch us when we fall.

But He catches us. He sees the truth and loves us anyway.

All He asks of us is to learn from Him: to learn what it means to receive tender mercy, so that we too can administer it to a hurting world. Are we willing to love the version of others they would rather hide?

We will never create a culture of authenticity unless we admit our own brokenness and choose (however hard it may be) to cherish others in their brokenness. We will never be a Gospel people until we strip back the bravado and façades, and allow ourselves to encounter Love exactly as we are.

And you know what? We will never meet our own ideals. Nor will others. But that is not a reason to despair. It is reason to hope and to surrender to the greater wisdom of an incarnate Redeemer who calls us by our names and says "Believe it or not, you are worthy of love."

AMDG