Coming out by going within

“Be who you is, because if you is who you ain’t, you ain’t who you is.” —Larry Hein 

One thing I’ve always appreciated is the courage that’s involved in coming out.  Whether it is about one’s sexuality, or a phobia, or one’s experience of hidden abuse, childhood or otherwise, or whether it’s about some other self-reconciled form of commitment to one’s irrefutable truth, doesn’t matter.  There is something palpable about the freedom we entreat as we ‘come out by going within’.  It’s a truth-telling exercise, and it’s a practice of faithfulness to your being; an activity of worship to the Creator who made you.

There are so many forms of coming out by going within, and it is applicable to every narrative, and because every person has a narrative, it’s applicable to every person.

Ultimately it is the journey inward to God as a means of coming out as you and I.  It’s a journey of becoming, and whilst there is always a sense that we never fully realise the potential of coming out as more fully ourselves, we do experience many little tastes of this reality as God teases us with the promise of completeness from within, even as we so wish to be complete outwardly.  There, in us, is the wish of heaven, but we’re not there yet.

Yes, this is both exciting and frustrating.  Glimpses meld with mirages as we enter into self-honesty, fearing nothing about journeying inward toward the recognition of falsehoods we carry in our persona, even as we carry these non-truths out and upward to the surface, releasing them in the exchange that is the acceptance of our current selves.

We all project something of what we wish we were outward and onto our worlds.  We all deny some essential truth of who we truly are.  There is always some facet of incompatibility between the reality of who we are and who we wish we were instead.  It’s the falsehood that must go.  It is also the dirty stuff that we reject about ourselves — that stuff we just cannot face.  We need to go in, upon the quiet, and meet ourselves in the pain of ‘there’.  Nobody can do that for us.  It is necessarily awkward and uncomfortable.

It’s probably why most of us completely hate the idea of meditation and authentic contemplation.  It sounds ‘cool’, but truly, for so many, it is torture.  To be quiet and still, though it promises the bliss of peace, manoeuvres us into the territory of disappointment.  It’s a place we go that feels as if it should bring much, and initially at least it delivers nothing, and often times worse.  To go down and deep within, to face our demons, to be at one with the boredom, to strive to stay apart from stimulation, to walk away from the drink or the drug or the tasty morsels; all these are examples of ways of conspiring with freedom.  These are the places we meet God — when nothing else apart from God will do.

Coming out by going within is the practice of an authentic spirituality.  And we can know it by the truth that we dredge up and bring as the spoil of authenticity to the surface.  Going deeply within isn’t about the experience of peace down there in the depths.  Peace comes from reflecting later how we had the strength somehow in our weakness to stay there and encounter God in the throes of that darkness.  The more we go there, the more we return with peace, the more we descend again and again, more and more fearlessly it seems, to wrestle with the vestiges of a darkness that cannot truly harm us.

It’s our story that we’re entering into.  It’s the process of spiritual nostalgia.  We must face who we were to become who we will be.  Going into the places adjacent to the discomfort, the places of life and love sandwiched between the panels of pain, we begin finding our way to the surface again.  And if there are few of those in our story, we know that God was there, so we meet God there again at the depth.  Oh there, our Protector, Sentinel God.

If you’re scared, and you’re allowed to be, perhaps you need a companion; someone who, like God, won’t abandon you in the cavernous moment.  Someone who walks with you gently and won’t disrupt the fine china ornaments that reside in the preciousness of your heart.  Someone who knows it’s God’s job to speak, not theirs, even as together you listen for the unknowable touch of the Spirit who will heal.

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash