ExploreTruth

So I was watching this video a couple nights ago on theooze.tv

Peter Rollins was discussing coming to grips with the truth about ourselves.  He uses the digital representations we use online(facebook/twitter,etc) to illustrate his point. Which is, that sometimes its easier to live through a “public profile”, which is “the idealized representation of ourselves.”  The type of person we want the world to see.  Smiling, surrounded by friends, leaned up against a car, that isn’t theirs.  You know..stuff like that. :->

Behind that image there is a “private self”, that is probably closer to the truth.

Peter Rollins basically states that the point is about bringing that story we tell ourselves, and others about ourselves, into line with what’s really going on…What we really do.  The truth being in who we really are. So in essence, it doesn’t really matter what you say you believe in, or who, but what does that doctrine look like in reality.

Being a Christian, or a Buddhist, for example, has to mean more than what your facebook profile says. Maybe your bullet point ordered list of doctrinal creeds can be just that, an idealized representation of yourself, but what and who are you really?  Check out the short interview, in Peter’s own words.  Very interesting stuff: (primarily from 2:30 min – 6:10 min)

A few days before seeing this video, I happened across another video from and interview with best selling author William P. Young, who wrote The Shack.  He was discussing how he came to write the book, and touched on the core of what it was all about. 

The Shack, he said, was a metaphor. It’s the place where the real you resides.  All the stuff you don’t let anyone else see.  The true you.  The part you disguise, and deodorize when among other people.  The thin veil worn at church, concealing the secrets, that prevents you from truly dealing with the hurt, and the pain of past events.

But it’s the very place where your healing awaits.

I know I’m listing off a bunch of authors here, but certain messages are connecting all at once.  Rob Bell, author of Drops Like Rain, a book about understanding pain and suffering, makes mention, that maybe the gut of God’s message to mankind, represented while hanging on the cross, was:

I know what you are going through. I understand.  Hanging, in the funk and despair of humanity.

After hearing that, live, at one his book tour presentations a few months ago, that image, has stuck with me.  The image of a God who is in the very mess of life.  I can’t say I’ve fully experienced this image,  but it’s a powerful one.

And probably the only image that I can swallow when I try to make sense of events such as the recent earthquake in Haiti.  Or the “Haiti’s” that have been occurring since our history books can record.  The natural and unnatural disasters that explode and implode, within and around our lives.

But unlike Haiti, we, as individuals, can ignore our own screams for help. We can mask the funk of our pain, guilt, secret mistakes, contradictions, trauma, and dark places.  The places we seek to forget.  But they do not go away.  They sit, festering, like rotting meat, in that “shack” that William P. Young talks about here:

How do you feel about sharing the real you with the world?  Is there even such a thing as the real you?  Pros and cons?