From The Seven Levels of Intimacy

I've stayed home sick yesterday and today with my worst cold in several years. Everything has an upside, though: I've rested a LOT, and have been able to read more than usual. Here are some quotes and reflections from Matthew Kelly's book, The Seven Levels of Intimacy:

"Revealing our feelings makes us vulnerable, but we endure risks in order to reap rewards. The reward of making ourselves vulnerable is mental health."

I'm struck by the simple truth of that statement. Trying to keep yourself safe all the time will literally drive you crazy! We need people in our lives with whom we can just be ourselves, can let our guard down to simply feel whatever it is we're feeling and express it appropriately. We cannot have true intimacy without this freedom.

"The genius of intimacy is that when we bring our dark side out into the light in the context of a loving relationship, our darkness loses its power over us. Darkness cannot abide the light of love. It is intimacy that will hold our hand and walk through the dark rooms of our past and present. It is intimacy that has the power to set us free from our faults, fears, and failures."

How true I have found this to be in my own life. Every close relationship I've ever experienced has involved the sharing of something deeply personal and painful, and in every case it has opened the door to intimacy. Unfortunately, that only brings the light of freedom to the degree that we can acknowledge the darkness' past power over us.

Now obviously in both of these ideas there is an underlying assumption. You can't just take someone off the street and decide that the two of you are going to be emotionally intimate. Obviously, to reach these levels of intimacy requires that a relationship has developed between people with similar goals which has allowed them to develop a sense of trust with one another. Not until our partner proves trustworthy in small matters can we entrust them with larger ones.

"There is a saying in Christian circles that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

I believe that most hypocrisy is the result of people being unwilling to face their own failings. If I've never received mercy -- even if it has been offered freely, if I've never wrapped myself in forgiveness and even come to embrace the role my failings have played in making me the person I am today -- then I'm unlikely to be be very accepting of myself. But (I think) it's psychologically impossible for us to live that way, so we project all of our self-judgment on those around us. Instead of striving to be the person we could be, we settle for being better than "them," as if we don't deserve any better than that.

And maybe we don't. Maybe we're all born with an inner awareness of the ugliness of sin, or if you prefer, with an inner hatred of how we hurt others. And it isn't until we have freely received mercy and forgiveness for our own failings that we can begin to accept others in spite of theirs.