Recently some friends from the parish choir stopped by for a summer get together. At one point, we
moved into the family room to gather around the piano and sing, because that's what we do. They have been here many times before, in a variety of seasons, and at every gathering someone comments about how beautiful the room is, especially in winter with the fireplace burning and a 10-foot Christmas tree in front of the window.
I am always grateful for the compliment but, personally, hide the sense of being a fraud because I am aware of all they can’t see -- all of the cleaning that hasn't been done and all of the mess that is stored inconspicuously behind cabinets and closet doors.
The truth is that when you are aware of what really lies beneath, or behind, surface beauty quickly loses its charm.
Thoreau made the same discovery when he lived intimately with nature: "White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them."
How good it would be to have the purity and transparency of a Lake of Light, but it is the truth of human existence that our character is formed not solely by the hand of God but within the realm of free choice and the decisions we make to live with or without integrity. And that reality makes integrity and authenticity an on-going challenge.
Mother Teresa spoke wisely when she said, "Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway."
It was the integrity of the man Nathanael that Jesus affirmed in saying, "Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him" – and this in spite of the fact that Nathanael basically insulted Jesus by saying, "What good can come out of Nazareth?"
But Jesus saw into Nathanael’s heart, as he sees into ours, and what he saw was not a man who smiled and bowed or offered his hand in friendship only to sling insults and barbs when Jesus turned his back, but, rather, a man who lived with integrity and honesty, who had "no guile in him."
Nathanael was like the blessed servant of whom St. Francis spoke:
"Blessed is the servant who loves his brother as much when he is sick and useless as when he is well and can be of service to him. And blessed is he who loves his brother as well when he is afar off as when he is by his side, and who would say nothing behind his back he might not, in love, say before his face."
Personally, I often wonder what God sees when he looks into my heart because another painful truth is that the easiest person to fool about our lapses in integrity is ourselves.
We seem to live in a world where deceit is the norm and honesty is rare. We are encouraged to be and to do whatever it takes to get our own way, to be successful, to be noticed, to be admired, to feel loved. These are shallow victories. As French author Andre Gide wrote, "It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
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