True Lies
I have a friend who often likes to tell me, “Don’t be a Debby Downer.” We have a good laugh because…,well, my name is Debby and in my case the aptronym is ironic. I tend to be what people call an “up” person. I laugh often and I find humor in almost everything, much to the enigma of many of my friends. Humor is often a defense mechanism to hide pain. For most of my life, it’s been my primary coping mechanism for easing tension. In a veiled fashion I could reveal my confusion, dissatisfaction, skepticism, even rage with a smile that did not offend. I learned from a private Christian education that expressing negative emotions or anything outside of the box of allowed topics was not okay. In this sense, my humor was born out of repression and became a way to express my truth even when people didn’t really want to hear it.
As I mature in my faith, I keep returning in my biblical studies to the importance of being honest in how we communicate even when the truth hurts or is uncomfortable. This may mean telling the truth to a friend in a loving way, or telling the truth to ourselves. Being honest about ourselves and others leads us closer to intimacy with God and it can lead us to closer intimacy with each other. Of course, our truths are not God’s truth, but if we seek God with sincerity, we will certainly grow closer to our creator and gain spiritual insight.
The life of Christian faith often seems like a tense walk on a balance beam of grace and truth. If we waver too much to either side, we will fall. As we walk forward slowly and carefully, there are times we must stop completely in order to regain our balance before we can move forward again. In John 1:14, we are told, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The truth can be brutal at times and without grace possibly more than many of us can bear. Living without truth, however, is even worse.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen illustrates the nightmare of a world without truth. The story begins with a vain emperor. Devoid of any true purpose, he spends his days absorbed by the latest fashions and material possessions. The emperor is convinced by scamming peddlers to buy the latest, most fashionable outfit that can only be seen by those who are worthy and not by those who are foolish and stupid. The peddlers immediately recognize the Emperor’s pride, insecurity, and vanity and realize they can play his foible to their economic advantage. There is no suit of clothes, of course. The emperor sees nothing, but fearing he will be revealed as a fool pretends to see the suit and pays a small fortune for it. He parades around naked and the whole court colludes with him in the elaborate lie. They feed him adoring compliments and tell him how fine he looks all while he struts like a peacock practically naked. The courtiers play along fearful that they too will be revealed for the frauds they know they truly are. Everyone in the emperor’s court pretends to see what they really do not see increasing the scope and power of the lie.
The peddler’s scam is only exposed when a child says, “Why, you’re naked”. With his honesty, the farce is revealed and the whole court is outed for the cowardly fools they are. Unlike the sycophants of the court, the child is not concerned about social status, but tells the unwavering truth, which is as easy to him as breathing. When the child speaks, the power of the lie is shattered and the emperor and his court are shamed by the power of the truth.
Many people are not very interested in being honest with themselves or each other. They sugar coat life’s many difficulties to sound nice and pleasant. Christians are often reluctant to admit their true struggles because they fear judgement, gossip, and a demotion in social status if their lives do not measure up to the paragon of virtue firmly established in our culture. For this reason churches sometimes mirror the emperor’s court, a place where everyone works very hard to hide their nakedness or to pretend they don’t see nakedness even when it’s right in front of their eyes.
Culturally speaking, the holy grail of the perfect Christian life has often been depicted in the image of a Christian marriage, which many view as sacred. In most churches, married people experience a preference in status and are considered more desirable for leadership positions and advancement in the church. Since Jesus and the Apostle Paul were both single, the preference shown toward married couples seems out of step with biblical teaching. Both married and single Christians have lived lives holy and pleasing to God. Christian marriages fair little to no better than secular marriages and almost half the time end in divorce. Marriage, in my view does not by its existence purify flawed and sinful people and magically transform them into kind and compassionate partners. Marriage can provide an opportunity for mutual growth and learning as “iron sharpens irons”, but that is only for those who are willing to be shaped and molded by the process and give their partnership everything they have. Some lasting marriages certainly reflect the iron sharpening iron as two partners grow together in faith and maturity, other unions are forged together by co-dependency and dysfunction. A lasting marriage is not necessarily a gauge of Christian depth and maturity.
When my marriage ended, I was gutted. My whole world had been shaped by a personal identity centered in marriage and the marriage was over. To make matters worse, infidelity was involved and my husband and I were both pastors. The taboo nature of our broken union shrouded the pain with shame. Not only was I experiencing a catastrophic identity crisis, the loss of everything I knew, but also a shame so intense I was forced into silence. I am not sure now what was more painful: the loss of my marriage or the horrible shame that forced me into lying every day for over a year that my marriage was A-OKAY. Why? I was petrified I would lose the respect of everyone who mattered to me. I had spent years cultivating a perfect image. It was not easy to let that go.
My relationship reached a breaking point, where the union was so irretrievably broken that everything that we tried to hide could no longer be repressed. The truth poured out like water from a broken dam with a force both damaging and destructive. Everyone knew. It was so horrible and yet…, I was so relieved. There is nothing more exhausting than living a lie. The truth does set you free.
Post-divorce, the church became a difficult and complex place for me, ironically, because I committed myself to a truthful life. When I first came back to church, I did not feel welcome. Sometimes, I still don’t. I did experience a demotion of status, no doubt about it. Friends left me. Through the grapevine I learned that people castigated blame and assumed the worst. The church was not a place of healing immediately after my divorce. Former friends treated me with distrust. I was traumatized on top of the sorrow I was already experiencing over the loss of my marriage and identity, insult to injury so to speak. The secret was out and I was humiliated.
Despite feeling abandoned by some people, God did not leave me, even as I went through the darkest tunnel of my life. I became free. I had to let go of my idolatry of status and image in the church. Every place I sought refuge that wasn’t God collapsed before my eyes. I lost almost all of my worldly pursuits, but I gained intimacy with God.
Despite my struggle with aspects of church culture, I still attend church regularly. I need the fellowship of other Christians and to be a part of communal worship. I need to pray for others and I need prayer in return. With a few lapses now and then, I’ve let go of the need to impress, the status, or the appearance of a perfect life and I am better for it. The last few years have embodied a slow process of releasing my soul from the gods of my idolatry, chasing goals I thought would make me happy, but only made me miserable.
In scripture, Jesus tells us that if we want to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must learn to be like children (Matthew 18:3). We must drop our idols, love of status and pretense and focus on what is truly important. We must tell the truth. There is nothing more important in my life than my relationship with Jesus. I see it as the source of all that is good in my existence. As I move forward, Jesus needs to be the center of my being. I can only be close with God if I’m honest in the life I’m living. The truths we tell need to be guided by our relationship with God. It should never be cruel or told in an intent to hurt someone, but only in the pursuit of living in the rhythm of God’s will. We need to be honest about our struggles so that we know ourselves and others truly and we can pray for the strength not to flee when we are faced with the dark realities of sin. Only in an honest space before the Lord can we access the power of God, power that we will desperately need when faced with difficulties, the hardships God will allow us to face with his grace and truth.
