Growing up in my family’s Southern Baptist church when my focus seemed split evenly between trying to get comfortable on the hard pew in a scratchy dress and counting the minutes until the altar call, crossing my fingers that the benediction wouldn’t include all the verses of “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling,” two particular revelations cut through my chronic distraction: neither animals nor people in non-Christian parts of the world went to heaven, through no fault of their own, because they knew nothing of the God who resided in the sanctuary of Jackson Mill Baptist Church.
That epiphany, induced by the conviction of our preacher, is probably the source of my lifelong low-key panic at being punished for not knowing what I don’t know. It’s also why I flatly dislike certain Christian theologies that seem okay with the idea that my dogs (or any dog for that matter), the purity of whose souls are absolutely beyond reproach, won’t have a full-access pass to chase all the celestial squirrels they want. My tendency to pick at existential scabs began long before my age hit the double digits, and my enduring habit of wondering what I might not know that could prevent me from being up yonder when the roll is called is where my mind wanders when sleep eludes me.
For me, everything begins and ends with intention. Now, “intention” often gets a bad rap. Pithy quotes that proclaim that the smallest deed counts more than the grandest intention will have you believe that our hearts, our motivation, our purpose take a back seat to any action. Untrue, I say. Intent is most significant, and it is something we owe to ourselves and anyone we bring into our lives to examine daily.
Psychology Today has featured stories over the years about the destructive nature of secrets, lies of omission, and willful ignorance. On average, says one article, a couple has thirteen secrets from one another. Can you even imagine the number if included in that calculation were the untruths we tell ourselves and the whoppers that kids have told their parents since the dawn of humanity (and to be equitable, parents have done their fair share of selective truth telling—Santa Claus? The pet that mysteriously relocated to a distant family farm?)? What must be considered, though, is the intention behind this information nondisclosure. Not telling your partner that you’re planning a surprise party to celebrate them is not equivalent to hiding a behavior that you know would be hurtful and damaging to a relationship. Worse still is convincing yourself that you’re holding those details back for some noble reason.
I wonder what keeps us from asking tough questions of ourselves and examining what makes us tick. It’s not like there’s a chance anyone will uncover our private thoughts; why don’t we have those honest conversations between our ears, then? When we tuck away a purchase we made that we don’t want our partner to see (a common joke featured on any sit-com), why don’t we consider the reason for our action? Perhaps if we do so we’ll have to admit that our choice would hurt someone if they knew; maybe it will guilt us into stopping this behavior, and we really don’t want to? Maybe it’s because we don’t feel safe to share this information for fear of ridicule or rejection. If we don’t face our intention head on, we can deny this lie of omission and make ourselves feel okay with it and even subsequent ones.
How do we know, then, what details of our lives, what behaviors we practice in secret, we need to share with our partners or inner circle? Well, it all goes back to (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) our intention. Are we keeping a thought, a habit, an action, a purchase from our loved one(s) on purpose? Because come on, there is a reason why we share some details and not others. What might be one of the most difficult skills to learn is how to be honest with ourselves and then allowing that transparency to inform every one of our relationships. As with any new learning situation, safety is imperative: having an environment that allows us to practice a new skill without fear of punishment along the way when we make mistakes is what emboldens us and allows eventual mastery of that skill.
Even in the church of my youth, no one was immune to the temptation to look outside oneself as the source of sin or poor choices. Implicit in the beer cans tucked away in the back of the refrigerator or the occasional profanity that slipped out in moments of frustration at work was the belief that “other people” succumbed to temptation, but as long as you don’t see my spiritual stumbles then they don’t count. I wonder how different life would have been for all of us if, in churches and families everywhere, instead of holding back parts of ourselves out of fear of persecution we were encouraged to disclose these parts and learn to receive them from others in such a way that it invited continued honest conversations. How different might we feel if we made no apology for the beer we enjoyed or choosing a word, however profane, that captured the precise sentiment we were feeling in the moment and instead proclaimed, “Yep, this is who I am and I’m doing my very best.”
We engage in willful ignorance because it is useful. When we don’t know the answers, sometimes we feel as though we must plow ahead with some plausible explanation instead of saying, “I just don’t know.” Do we really know that there’s not an afterlife filled with our cherished non-human family members? Or that heaven doesn’t have a place for the remote village inhabitant across the globe who lives with integrity and love but who’s deity looks different from mine? If we have people in our lives who place their faith and loyalty in us, whether we are wives, brothers, pastors, or teachers, we are morally compelled to live a life of continual reflection and self-examination, because those who count on our fidelity deserve no less. Still, I wonder if I’m morally bound to confess to my husband exactly how much I spend each month on dog treats?
PartWolf 