A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
The experience of Covid-19 lockdown has shown us something we didn’t know was missing. A clue to what we’re missing is the way impressive public personalities look a lot like ordinary people these days. Lacking makeup, scripting, a backup band, a live audience and a stage set, Stephen Colbert looks and sounds pretty ordinary on his back patio, just like Meryl Streep wearing her pajamas in her home being interviewed by him half a world away.
Bishops, ballet dancers, athletes, actors, talking heads—seen without their usual “augmentation”—are mere human personalities trying to think ahead to their next sentence or two, just like all the rest of us. Nobody stands out. While it may give us momentary satisfaction to see they’re no more special under the skin than we are, it’s actually scary because their exposure reveals the degree to which we rely, not on them, but on their larger than life roles, which hold the structure of our world in place.
Thus, we count on Stephen Colbert to use humor to put the chaos of our politics into a safe box where we laugh rather than scream. We need television stars to subdue bad guys in hourlong scripts to confirm that order prevails over chaos. We need bishops and priests to dress differently and perform unusual rites to give evidence that we are linked to a divine power more potent than the chaos we experience daily.
And there’s more. At the same time that our public personalities’ reassurance is taken from us, we ourselves experience the loss of our power to manage chaos. Those of us who are working from home no longer enjoy the support of our own stage set, script and backup band at the office. Those of us who have lost our jobs are feeling stripped naked in the face of a world that doesn’t seem to care whether we live or die. And all of us feel exposed to a virus that really doesn’t care if we live or die.
We are living a lot closer to who we actually are than to who we wish were.
At some risk to our peace of mind, I want to remind you of a person who lived a life deliberately close to who he actually was—a person who systematically rejected the shield of wishing he might be something more. I’m speaking of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who concerned himself with the “true self” concealed beneath all the roles we adopt to manage the world.
Merton wrote that the true self is the person within us that God knows. God isn’t party to our business transactions or any of the things we do to manage our lives. God doesn’t know Stephen Colbert as a talk show host or Meryl Streep as an actress. God knows them as they truly are, something closer to the person we see in them during a pandemic live stream.
Martin Heidegger wrote that the distraction of our daily roles in life have deprived a word like “humanity” of its power within us. He says that our preoccupation with the business of life has robbed us of “our sense of wonder about our own human consciousness.” Merton tells us that a tree is holy just by virtue of being a tree. So, too, should a human being be holy merely for being human. We are holy for who we are, not for who we try to be.
As I said up top, pandemic isolation shows us something we didn’t know was missing. Pandemic isolation shows us a brief glimpse of who we truly are. When your time within time ends and you meet God beyond your mortal life, God is not going to recognize you as a talk show host, a parent, an insurance agent or even a priest. God is in love with your true holy self. Today, right now, in pandemic isolation, you just might have a chance to catch a rare glimpse of that person you really are. That would be a holy moment for you, because it reaches all the way to God in heaven.
