While known predominantly for his bestseller,The Ragamuffin Gospel, a weighty tome on the forgiving and loving nature of God, author Brennan Manning's most important, most culturally relevant thoughts might just be penned in his often overlooked work, Abba's Child.
In it, Manning describes an important revelation that came to him during a twenty day silent retreat in a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies. "As the days passed, I realized that I had not been able to feel anything since I was eight years old," he explains. "A traumatic experience at that time shut down my memory for the next nine years and my feelings for the next five decades. When I was eight, the impostor, or false self, was born as a defense against the pain. The impostor within whispered, "Brennan, don't ever be your real self anymore because nobody likes you as you are. Invent a new self that everyone will admire and nobody will know."
I suspect that the majority of us share a similar story. In fact, we could probably just swap our names with Brennan's in the above quote and sign off on it as our own. Whether at age eight or twenty-eight, there probably isn't a person alive that hasn't forged from their pain an impostor to help make things a little better, to take the focus off the seemingly unlovable, broken schleps we feel ourselves to be. And so we hide. Hide behind a smile, weight, bravado, alcohol, sexual conquests, humour and even religion. We are the class clown, the school druggie, the cheerleader, the Sunday school teacher, but we are never truly ourselves. And sadly, many of us, myself included, years later, find ourselves trapped behind masks that have become far too familiar, far too much like home.
In his life changing memoir, Telling Secrets, author Frederick Buechner concurs. "The world sets into making us what the world wants us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something the world will like better that it apparently did the selves we originally were," he says. "...the original, shimmering self gets burried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather."
As a kid, I spent a fair amount of time at Grant Memorial Baptist Church. Truthfully, although we went a bit much (3-4 times a week on average), I didn't really mind it. My parents were good enough to not let it interfere with my hockey schedule, so other than being the last ones out of the building every Sunday thanks to my mother's incessant socializing (love you, mom), it wasn't that bad. When it became bad was during the secular music embargo at my house. Not that I didn't like Michael W. Smith's sentimental electric piano pop songs, because I did and still do (please don't tell). Simply, it was not being able to play Platinum Blonde, Ozzy and G&R during mini stick games or Atari battles with friends that sucked (and created a chasm between my friends and I). I remember one time trying to convince David Todd that the Christian band Mad at the World was actually the new David Bowie album I had somehow scored. Needless to say, it didn't go over well.
And so the teasing began. Oddly, seeing as I had a bad haircut and carried a good twenty pounds of excess baby fat back in those days, the teasing was church related. At that point, when I wasn't being invited out as much on account of my "faith", it became clear to me that whatever God had to offer me in the here and now couldn't compare to the acceptance of my friends. And that is when my impostor was born.
I won't get into the gory details of my impostor in this blog. Let it suffice to say, however, that he is alive and well, wreaking havoc at times. But I am aware of him now. And while I very much dislike him, the impostor has helped me through the good and the bad and any hating of the impostor is, as Manning later goes on to explain, self-hatred. So it is with gentle hands that the mask must be removed.
As we roll into 2010 and resolve to hit the gym more, watch less pornography, stop smoking or become better parents, let's, if but for a moment, peek out from behind the masks we have worn since God knows when, if only just to remind ourselves of who we truly are: lost and broken men and women who were fearfully and wonderfully made when stitched together in our mother's wombs (I admit I stitched a couple of Bible verses together there). To be sure, much shit has happened since. We have done horrible things and had horrible things said and done to us. But it will all be redeemed, whether we have abs or money or the perfect marriage or amazing children or not. Those lies are what got us here in the first place.
And so new decade, I introduce you to me: a sensitive little (still little after all these years) boy from the prairies who despite the tattoos, foul mouth and penchant for Jack Daniels (notice the impostor needed to list those), still listens to Christian rock, misses ham sandwich lunches with his Grandma in Morden, MB, and would one day love to grow up to be just like his dad. And I think I'm beginning to be OK with it.
Happy New Year, all.
A toast: to removing the masks, quieting the Impostor, and finally accepting who we truly are, not what the world has told us to be.
