fragments of the past that can be reconstructed into a living memory of eons ago. We spend money we can’t afford on memorabilia of personalities, living or dead, that we have never met, but who we imagine have impacted our lives. Maybe a few of them even have. We spend thousands of hours meticulously cleaning away the filth of millennia to discover the tedium of daily life of ancient Pompeii. We won’t even clean our own walls. I wonder if, a thousand years from now, someone will spend those hours carefully cleaning our walls, trying to discover our tedium.
We cannot let the dead lie in peace. I am writing a dissertation about a personality that I have come to admire greatly. But my advisors don’t want to see a great man who overcame so much. They want me to dig deeper: find the dirt, find the scandal, find what makes him interesting! We don’t need no stinkin’ heroes!
But when the person is us, it is an entirely different matter, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, an addict has two choices, deal with the past or remain an addict. Sorry, there is no third choice. Until you acknowledge the past, it WILL keep coming back to bite you. And you want to know something amazing? The way you take power away from someone else is with truth. Now that doesn’t mean you walk around and pour your life out to everyone you meet. But it does mean that you have to face the past, and take its power away.
Side-stepping may seem to work for some. Clinton still got elected even after side-stepping with his famous “I didn’t inhale.” He got re-elected with his “Define sex.” But he will always be remembered as the joke on the late night talk show for those. Regardless of what else he may have done, I doubt that many people will ever mistake him for a loving, faithful husband, no matter how hard he tried to get his wife elected.
No, truth in its raw form is needed because until we face the truth, we can’t fix it. It’s like trying to treat a disease. If you have the wrong medical records, you can do everything right and still kill the patient.
There is an interesting thing I have discovered. It is one thing to be honest with yourself in your mind. It is entirely different to be honest on paper. Somehow, your mind can say, “Yep, yep, yep. I did that…” and be on to something else before the reality sinks in enough to make a difference. But once I’ve put it on paper, it becomes REAL. Now I have to deal with it.
Honesty begins with me. If I can’t be honest with myself, there isn’t a prayer that I can be honest with anyone else, not even God. So I start here: no audience to perform for – just me. And once I’ve finally seen myself in the mirror, I can talk to God about fixing the flaws.
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