From Mask-Living to True Connection

By Joel McKerrow

For too long we in the west have stood aloof from each other in our middle class, sterile, holier-than-thou, unconcerned, unsympathetic, ignorant bliss. Ignorant both to our own gaping wounds (complete with band-aids) and the gaping wounds of others. Ignorant to the masks that both we and our friends and family have placed over our bruised and bloodied faces. Attempting to hide from each other what is truly happening in our hearts and lives. As one writer has said, “Pretentious veneers have stolen the better of any sought of worthy relationships.”  We try and hide the cracks and the wrinkles, the weakness and the frailty that is ours forgetting that it is in weakness that we truly work out what life is all about. For weakness can cause us to begin to look beyond ourselves and our own situation.

The same author quoted above speaks of this tension of insecurity as she writes of interacting with a woman on a bus. She writes, ‘What I really wanted was to touch her. I wanted to tell her I’m fighting too, and that I’m as lost and lonely as she is. I wanted to shatter the glass that our preconceptions had raised between us. All I mustered was a sideways glance, and a shuffle towards the window. I wanted to know where she was going, and where she had been. I wanted to share my story with her, to be comforted by someone else’s failures. Empathy is far more comforting than any solution. I want to recognise my own longings through someone else’s. It has been so long since I have listened to someone, uninhibited by the noise of all my own insecurities.’

The very way we work out what life is all about is when we look inside at our own heart/soul/spirit and then just as intently look at the heart/soul/spirit of others. When we finally do we’ll see that there are so many of us who are crying on the inside. So many in pain, anguish, confusion, doubt, misery. Yet all of us seem to be able to ignore the pain and crack a fake smile as we touch up our masks with the makeup of denial.

I believe that to live life to its fullest we need to openly admit our own brokenness before we can learn to truly see. To take away others masks and truly connect with each other in a life-giving relationship our own masks must first be let down. To do this we need to realise who we are in the grand scheme of life and eternity, so that in turn we can journey with others as they discover who they are. From this point of connection, we explore life together finding what is intrinsically good in each other and coaxing that pure goodness out from beneath the mask.

If only we would be willing to thoroughly delve into people’s lives. Into their relationships, their culture, their pain, their dreams. To celebrate in their celebrations, listen to their stories, weep as they weep, laugh as they laugh. To do life with them and let them do likewise. If we are willing to realise that today, perhaps, more than ever, the world needs people who allow themselves to not just be seen and heard, but touched and handled.

When we begin to live these authentic relationships we come to realise that the world doesn’t need more words, not even more of the ‘right’ words; the world needs more words made flesh. It’s a simple truth, yet in the end it is people who bring change to people.

I’ve learnt in my time that everyone has a story to tell, a story of life, a story of spirit. These stories all hold the experience of true life in it’s messiness and pain. They all mean something, something so deep and personal. Should you choose to listen. Stories that make the tears fall down. Stories that make the heart cry in grief. Stories that bring a smile from ear to ear. Stories that cause laughter to bubble over within.

They all have something to share, something to help you grow.  But, if you don’t STOP. If you don’t take a while to listen to that very most important story, that glimpse of life that a person wants you to know, then it can be lost in the blink of an eye. If you bar the way to open up and show no love and compassion, no empathy, then all can be lost. And you won’t gain anything or give anything in that relationship.

Similarly, it is you that needs to help them. For with stories of past comes stories of present. These are the stories that hurt the most as they are coming now, in the present. These are the ones rip open your heart bringing tears to the eyes.

Yet how will you know if you don’t listen?

How will you help if YOU just talk about YOU?

The person will get up and leave with their spirit unfulfilled. Listen first, find out their heart, find out their pain and if led to talk only comfort, never bring shame.
It is at this point an imprint is made on people’s hearts, including our own. Only when we stop and listen, when we truly connect. When we let a soul pour out all that it has to offer, both the good and the bad.

Don’t miss it.

Remember the effect you can have on them and remember the effect this one poor soul can have on so many others. Look beyond the horizon. Look beyond your point of view and you will see the purpose that is there for you. As you show someone the love that you have for him or her, the love that God has for them, both the lives of individuals and society will begin to change for the better.

When we can reach people in this way through openness, honesty and love and leave an imprint on their heart that can unburden them we can clearly see the mask being let down. As people show the cancer in their soul and all their pain and sorrow. As they shed light on the cracks in their heart, their fatal flaws, their joys and their dreams. As they open up leaving themselves totally naked, bare and vulnerable, it is then that they allow the deepest of connection and an imprint upon their souls that will forever stand true.

What a responsibility we have toward one another. To not just walk past a crowd, or to look dumbly into the faces of the people that surround us. These people were sent here for a purpose, as were you, and if you can see through their masks, if you can let them open up, then that pain may be taken away. Even if only for a brief moment, if only for that tiny second, perhaps that time will grasp at their heart later, gnawing at their soul until they give in and let the light overtake them.

So don’t look past people, look at them.

Become involved with their lives, not seeing them as just another person. See them as someone you can connect with, someone you can help and see changed. See them as someone with a story of their own.

It is only in this selfless lifestyle that we have any credence within the postmodern world that we are now finding ourselves in. For people within this world are desperately craving authenticity, realness and connection, but if we give searchers some slick, polished, rational, clichéd, pitch involving 10 irrefutable steps to happiness then I believe we have missed the whole point of our relationships.

The trite answers that we give are in many ways our own attempts at dodging the insecurities that seek to rise in us as we see others emotionally hurt and struggling. We feel too uncomfortable for our own liking and so we end up giving advice more for the purpose of escaping the mess, trying desperately to establish distance between the hurting and ourselves.

Larry Crabb, psychologist and author, in his book, ‘Connecting’ writes that when we encounter hurting people we will usually either retreat (give trite answers and try to escape from the situation), reprove (scold people into better living) or refer them (pass them on to someone else).  He believes, however, that a way forward is to realise that each of us have a power within us that is released as we connect with people in deep, meaningful relationships. He speaks of this longing in his book saying, “Imagine what could happen if God were to place within people tangible nutrients that had the power to both prevent and reverse soul disease and then told us to share those nutrients in a special kind of intimate relating called’ connection’…this is exactly what God has done.”  He demonstrates this in the life of the Catholic Henri Nouwen. Who, when he was in one of the worst periods in his life, finds healing in the arms of a priest friend. The priest, he said “Pulled my head to his chest and prayed for me without words but with a spirit-filled silence that dispelled my demons of despair and made me rise up from his embrace with new vitality.”  

Nouwen also talks of this same concept in his book,  ‘Compassion,’ in which he says,  “The word compassion is derived from the Latin words pati and cum, which together mean, “to suffer with.” Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”