The Beautiful, Difficult Truth

Happy Holy Week, everyone! This time last year, I was dreaming up half a dozen reflections for each of the days of Holy Week, and while I considered doing that again this year, I have decided not to. However, you should all be very excited because there is going to be a guest post soon from one of my friends who graduated last year from the same university I currently attend. She will be addressing the issue of discerning God's will for your life in areas that are not necessarily your vocation (i.e. priesthood, religious life, married life). It will be terrific, and I hope you'll look forward to it as much as I am now.

Today I would like to address difficult truths. I will mainly be talking about those truths that are difficult for me, but I want to urge you to consider which truths are difficult for you. For me, as you might have read before, they pertain to my appearance, my voice, and the way others perceive me. They sound shallow, I admit, but are nevertheless important to me. Having never heard growing up that I was pretty, never received any encouragement to be feminine, and being told that I did not have a pleasant singing voice, I had no cause to believe any of that when those things began to matter to me as a young woman.

I have been discussing these issues with my spiritual director over the past few months within a larger context, as I've been slowly coming out of my spiritual dryness and looking to other spiritual matters. In the midst of our discussions, I had mentioned a young man I thought there might have been potential with, and my spiritual director encouraged me to cautiously and prudently look into the matter more. Over that time, I noticed that this young man was paying me compliments, and not just the ones I'm used to receiving. I hear remarks about my intelligence, public reading/speaking, athleticism, etc. often enough that I believe those things about myself, but suddenly I was also being told that I'm pretty, feminine, and have a nice singing voice. Unfortunately for my emotional chastity, these compliments contributed to my feelings for him, though he wasn't giving me any encouragement.

When I told my spiritual director this, he remarked that it did not seem that my feelings were being reciprocated, but quickly followed up with a comment that I was missing something much more important. If indeed this young man did not like me back, that gave his compliments a great deal more weight, because he wasn't saying them to butter me up, he was saying them because he genuinely believed them to be true. I was a little disappointed to be honest, but when I began to think about what my spiritual director had said and mulled over the other compliments I had received from the men in my life, I realized he was right.

I was watching a clip from the movie Tangled that night, and having just had its Catholic imagery explained to me earlier in the day, a much clearer insight into the situation was made known to me. As Rapunzel is sitting in a boat with her beau, she sees hundreds of lanterns floating down around her and becomes delighted because she has wanted to see them up close her entire life. Something drew her to them, even when she was being kept in her tower by the witch who she was raised to call "Mother", but she could never explain what. To be in the middle of them finally was an ecstatic experience, though she never understood they were always meant for her, launched by her parents (the king and queen) each year on her birthday to call her back to them.

This minor digression is only to illustrate more fully what God was making known to me. He had always been trying to convince me of the difficult truths that I was pretty, feminine, and had a nice voice, but I never knew His attempts for what they were. Suddenly I was surrounded by them (or at least, more so than I had ever been), and ecstatic about it, but not realizing that it was all for a greater good. Just as Rapunzel never knew the lanterns she loved were meant to call her home to the love and happiness of her family, so I had not realized that the compliments, which came from a few men I love and respect, were God's way of opening my eyes to truths I never knew. In the same way that Rapunzel's beau could not have known that he was bringing her back home to her mother and father (symbols, I was told, of God the Father and Mary), neither could the men who complimented me have known that they were speaking to me for God, the only one who knew the true value of the words.

God was whispering to me for a long time the difficult truths I didn't believe, but longed to hear. I wanted more than anything to hear and believe those things, but couldn't understand their significance from a distance, so God used someone to move me closer to Him so I could hear His whispers. Though there is no beau in my boat currently, that's fine. I've found something better, something more worth the wait than any relationship. It's not every day that the One who means the most to you tells you all the difficult things you long to hear most about yourself. I'm content to be where I am, and I look forward to discovering how much deeper my understanding of God's love (hopefully) becomes this week, having had a much more personal experience of it so recently. It is no wonder to me that God chose to tell me these difficult truths, but it will never cease being a wonder that He knows me so much better than I do, that He would choose to do so in such a moving and beautiful way. And it is a wonder to me that I ever doubted His love.

In case anyone is interested, the scene I talk about from Tangled is in the song "I See the Light".