Truthtelling

It’s not easy to tell the truth, to reach down and touch how you feel about something or someone and then to crank up the volume. To say it out loud. This is obvious when it comes to criticism…You haven’t called me in months. How can you not care about what’s going on in Gaza? Why are you so stubborn, selfish, dense? And a large variety of other projections. This question of truthtelling becomes even more gripping when you consider how difficult it is to say something loving to someone else. If you say something hurtful, you can always apologize, but if you say something loving, the cat is out of the bag and won’t get off your lap. You have taken the I-Thou fork in the road and there’s no going back. Is it just me or does this generate more vulnerability than saying something critical? 

Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash

A few days ago, before leaving for my other home in Minnesota, I said goodbye to the people I’ve been working with at the Upper Room in Placerville where Frank and I have been volunteering Friday mornings for the last several months.  There are five of us preparing lunch for roughly fifty-five unhoused people for a three day period. A guy in late middle age with a huge grin operates the horror-movie-prop meat slicer, turning hunks of turkey and roast beef into paper thin slices. A high-energy Latina puts on plastic gloves and prepares spicy pasta salads from whatever’s lying around. Frank makes sandwiches, usually from the sliced meat plus that old favorite government cheese, and I put together 165 wax paper bags of cookies, one large or two small depending. The fifth person, Pam, runs the show. She makes sure that the food banks and supermarkets have made their deliveries; that there’s enough sandwich bread; that the celery for the salad hasn’t died on us. She coordinates everyone else’s work and greets the clients by name when they arrive for coffee at 11 am. 

Everyone wanted to hug me when my last shift for the season was over. I’m still overwhelmed by post-pandemic hugging. What only four years ago was a fairly ordinary social interaction is now a religious experience. To be embraced by people you barely know “just because” remains almost too good to be true. It still feels slightly risky and risqué as well which gets my attention. When Pam approached me, arms wide in readiness for the hug, I found myself telling her that she’s really good at her job; that she’s extremely organized and hard-working, but most of all that she’s so kind that everyone, volunteers and clients alike, feels welcome. We both teared up. Everyone knows that Pam is gifted but it could be that her loving nature hadn’t been acknowledged publicly. I could see on her face that my words of appreciation were both welcome and challenging. People do not know what to do when someone else recognizes their goodness. It makes them feel naked, exposed. It makes them feel that their protective coating has rubbed off. 

That encounter was like a visitation, a fleeting moment of snuggling baby in an otherwise harsh and unforgiving world. Yesterday, as if to celebrate that event, I found the green chrysoprase ring my brother-in-law gave me that had been missing for more than two months. It was inside a pair of rolled up black socks that I rarely wear, nestled in there like a crackerjack prize. I could not believe my good fortune. It’s a stretch for me to allow that I was being rewarded for speaking truth to kindness, but there does seem to be some sort of spiritual calculus at play, some sort of karma, even though the word embarrasses me.  The language of spirituality is easily vulgarized and doesn’t hold a candle to the experience. I’m reminded that in my faith tradition you don’t say the name of God out loud. Any word that you attach to the Infinite will of necessity make it finite, smaller. The four Hebrew letters that convey the name are unpronounceable as a word. Instead, they carry the flavor of is-was-will be, the sense that if you pay attention, if you acknowledge the goodness in yourself and in others, you will find that all of life is bathed in sacred moments. If you are present to those moments, you will become increasingly aware of a flowering of people’s capacity to illuminate a path of kindness in the dark heart of the bleeding world.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. In April, Many Voices will feature a piece by Paula Halpin, a retired magazine editor living in the beautiful Gatineau Hills of Western Quebec. Paula is grateful for finally having the time, perspective and opportunity to write and share stories.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.