My opening remarks on this blog were that I would not always be right, but I would always be honest. I think the word "honest" means different things to different people, and it's usually some variation on a theme of transparency.
The reason I usually don't like most blogs is because they are too "honest." I used to write blogs in high school that were like that; my friend Jimmy calls them "verbal masturbation," which is a gross but strikingly accurate summary. Every nasty thought about someone you ran across today or every insignificant thing that annoyed you or every temporary panic attack over misplacing your cell phone or keys.
People need to be straight with each other and we have to be willing to be vulnerable, but does that mean we need to be so utterly transparent?
Blue Like Jazz has this revolutionary idea where a bunch of Christians get together during an all-campus festival of debauchery and drunkenness and set up what they call a confession booth. The trick was that they were confessing to the students at Reed the sins and shortcomings of the church: the failure to be open and loving, the failure to feed the poor and comfort widows, and so on. And it wasn't a gimmick to trick the student body: it was a legitimate attempt to be candid, sincere, and transparent. Was it refreshingly honest or was it a misplaced endeavor?
I went to a campus ministry winter conference seminar where the speaker posed the question of what the consequences would be if all of our sins were broadcast on the campus radio every morning. I don't remember where the thought was going because I was stuck thinking about that idea. At the time, I thought it was the most incredible idea I'd ever heard. And really, when you talk about honesty in terms and scenarios like these, you have to consider the effects for two parties: yourself and the audience. For myself, I thought how humbling and convicting it would be to be held accountable not only by the people I chose to confide in, but by the attention of the campus at large. And how it would instantly negate my precarious hold on silly things like reputation and cool factor. And for the people who would hear it, well! They would hear and understand that I was also privy to sin and failure, but that I was also redeemed by the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ! Isn't that why God chose to use us broken people as His ambassadors? Clearly, the only thing holding back the body of Christ at large from using this transparent approach was utter cowardice!
I used to be a member of an evangelism team, constituted by a committee of five or six upperclassmen at Rice. The goal was to optimize how our students and resources were being used to reach the campus at large for Christ, and our meetings would have a lot of heated back-and-forth discussions about a number of fiery issues. At one point, I thought, wouldn't it be great if any given student could sit in on these private meetings? They could hold us accountable if we had an irrelevant idea or notion. They would see how much we cared about and labored towards their salvation and see our faith in a God who would make it so.
I'm no longer convinced that utter transparency is a good thing, for us or for the audience.
We were naked once upon a time, but in this fallen world, God ordained that we cover up our privates.
I think back to when I first learned the term honesty, around first grade or so, and the teacher or my mom said that to be honest is to tell the truth.
When you look at a blog rife with the messiness of petty details, unfounded conceptions, and desultory emotions, you may think of transparency, but you don't think of truth.
Jesus calls Himself the Truth. He speaks definitively of Light that shines and pierces through darkness. He declares that when men know the truth, the truth shall set them free.
Truth is more than you find in the average daily blog post, and it's a better thing than you would hear if my sins were broadcast daily over the radio. Because all you would hear then is a partial truth (that I'm a sinful person) and not the rest of it (the truth of Jesus's mysterious grace and salvation).
When Darth Vader tells Luke, "Search your feelings, you know it be true," it seems like Luke's confused, pained feelings are the worst place to search for truth.
And the truth is that when you ralph up a confession of your dirty laundry and innermost thoughts to most people, they're not going to respond well. They're going to say, why did you think it would be a good idea to tell me that nonsense?
The truth isn't what you're feeling at a particular point in time. The truth is unshakably Jesus. So we should add discernment and discretion to temper our notions of honesty and transparency. How many proverbs can you find where it tells you to keep your mouth shut?
I do think that most people should be more honest and more vulnerable. We do need to connect with people heart to heart, and we do need to reflect God's redemption in a meaningful, sincere way. We shouldn't pose or hide. We don't need to pretend that we don't have dirty laundry, but decidedly, we should be professors (we should profess) of Jesus's purifying love.
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3 comments:
As you know, I thought a lot about "openness and honesty" last year, and talked about and wrote about it on my blog. As a matter of fact, it sort of came up at the retreat this weekend.
But before I went over the deep end, my Dad hedges me in a little, pulled in the reigns, or executed some other metaphor. I thought about it, and did some reading, and came to the conclusion that myself and the Church are in desperate need for more openness and honesty, but it can have it's deleterious effects.
First, it can be selfish, using persons or a larger audience as your favorite toilet in which to dump all your crap. Second, it can be hurtful to others, not only placing on them unnecessary burdens, but also hurting them by exposure or by exciting sinful thoughts in their heads. In general, I think that sins should only be confessed publicly to the extent that they are public. If you sin against God alone, confess to Him alone; against your brother, than to your brother; against the Church or man as a whole, then to them.
Also, that was one of my favorite parts of Blue Like Jazz.
I think the Blue Like Jazz scenario is a little different than the verbal masturbation you describe. For them, it was about what the church had done wrong. More "emo" type bloggers tend to focus on what they've done wrong in their verbal masturbation; similarly to boasters, they tend to be self-centered in a self-pitying fashion. The confession booth had nothing to do with the students; it was about the faith they claimed to represent. All the same, the idea can become twisted too - I've seen examples of emergent churches that overconfess the sins of evangelical Christianity. Truth covered up by dishonesty can emerge with an honest confession to shake things up, but too much "honest confession" without a need for it can shake things up so much that it becomes difficult to see the truth we meant to uncover.
If Mithun is right about the church needing more honesty and openness (which it probably does), it doesn't fix it by overdoing it. Isolation and two-facedness are bad, but the other extreme isn't any better.
I do really like this post a lot though. A great analogy to Star Wars (applicable as a criticism to a lot of pop-Christian ideas) and Adam/Eve's underwear, and a very thoughtful reflection on truth and its consequences =P.
Really thought-provoking post. I have been through my share of wanting to share my "dirty laundry" only to thank the Lord that I kept my mouth shut due to the effects that I think would've transpired.
I think your perspective on delineating between truth and useless pity parties/therapy sessions is great for a larger audience, but I would err on the side of dirty laundry airing in smaller groups for a variety of reasons. Yes, these can desensitize us to the serious nature of our sin, but pretty much anything can be harmful if we are not prudent in seeking Christ's glory first. The times that I have confessed have been helpful in my walk with God and in my relationships with others. As I'm sure you would agree, there is a happy medium in there somewhere. However, finding it will probably not occur as we strive to keep our mouths shut in the quest for wisdom; rather, it's usually through overstepping the bounds of God-glorifying conduct that I learn where those boundaries lie. In practice, I'm not much of a "look what I did this week" conversationalist, but when I have something I don't hold back.
Again, great post that really got me thinking. Hope you and Mit are having a great time in Boston!
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