There’s a truth inside you trying to get out
View(s):I can be anything I want to be. If not for the little niggling worry of a fundamental flaw in my mental and emotional make-up. The last time I checked, yours truly had all the right boxes ticked off as regards being wealthy, healthy, and wise beyond measure. And while not quite pure as the driven snow, the party of the first part is good and true and pure and fair as they come these days. And I am monarch of all I surveyed. That is to say, ‘In my dreams.’ My salad days – of being green in judgement and cold in blood – were mostly a matter of fantasy, not fact.
But enough about me, dears. I sense I am beginning to bore you. Don’t put the paper away and reach for the Sunday tonic that clears the sinuses and stiffen the sinews. We are coming to you, O person of inestimable value and preciousness in one’s own eyes. This whole article (well, the rest of it; at least most of the remainder) is about the most important being in the universe. (And I don’t mean me, but let’s not get started on that absorbing topic again – shall we not, dear?)
Tell me. When was the last time you took a long hard cold honest clinical look in the mirror? Like what you see? Very likely, if you’re anything like the next specimen of sapient ape, or fallen angel, you’re thinking about yourself vis-a-vis the rest of humanity along the following lines. Not as bad as Hitler, not as good as Mother Teresa. Not evil like Obama (I mean Osama), not nice like Florence Nightingale. Not half as twisted as those perverts, rapists, and degenerates we read so much about in our favourite newspapers; nowhere near as noble as the heroes and heroines in those fabulous novels and films noirs.
Let me guess. If you were asked to place yourself in a pile of human beings being piled up between heaven and earth, you’d place yourself somewhere about halfway up – right? The more modest would give yourselves a berth a little lower than the middle; the less realistic may be inclined to clamber a few notches above the centre point of this towering mass of humanity. Well, I have news for you. In this regard, at least, you are pretty commonplace or even ordinary – for that is where the average member of our race would rate themselves. The point is, that to anyone truly good or objective enough (say, a Godlike figure observing the Homo sapiens speck from above, on high, a very great height, a cosmic perspective), there’s no discernible difference. Humankind is compacted into a tightly knit mass of creatures, a little lower than the angels, and corrupt with the stuff of fallenness.
There. I said it. I know you are now nodding sagely and reminding yourself that this is why you never read my column on cheerful days like this. Wrong again, dears. You know I’m right. There is something terribly wrong about you.
Let me let you into a little secret. It’s not. Your condition, state, and nature – that is. It’s been well investigated, documented, and catalogued by a multi-millennial generation of poets, princes, philosophers, psychologists, and priests. (To say nothing of more modest master-penmen such as, ahem, me.)
E.g. some Rotten Athenian Sage philosophised: “It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.” (It was Aristotle, in Politics, if you really want to know.) Centuries later, Rousseau had no reason to upgrade his own estimate of the human condition: “Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.” (Women, you aren’t half off the hook, dears, just because these wits were only half-right about the equality of the sexes a la The Fall!). The Book of Romans puts it best for my taste: “We have all sinned, and come up far, far, far short of the glory of God.” (Very well, then, I paraphrase.)
Now don’t go all indignant on me. It’s true, it’s true; the Law has made it clear: all the world is rotten save you and I – and even you are a little rotten. Think about it. What’s the worst thing you know about yourself that no one else (not man, woman, child, confessor, communicant, teacher, or sainted aunt) knows? There. That’s it. And yet, not quite! Because somewhere deep inside you, there’s a secret that you can’t tell yourself. My patron saint, C. S. Lewis of Narnian renown, suggested that there is a chink in our own armour (each of us) that we cannot ever see, but which only others can. It’s your fatal flaw… a fundamental failing common to Samson, Solomon, Citizen Silva, Lady Godiva, and Hitler/some hero or Mother Teresa/Florence Nightingale alike. Do you know what yours is?
I know what mine is. (Yes, dear, it’s back to me.) And until I confess it, I will continue to be the most blissfully unaware – and unhappy – of the naked apes. God luck (I mean, good luck) with seeking, locating, and confronting the truth about yourself. It can – and will – set you free…
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