Hiding from God. During the last year of her life, Therese of Lisieux corresponded regularly with a young man named Maurice who was preparing to become a missionary. This man, despite being very sincere and quite pious, had some rather serious moral struggles. While he greatly admired Therese, eagerly awaited her advice on things, he was always afraid to tell her about his moral failures. Thus, for a long time, he would share with her only about the good things in his life, but never about his sins and failings. He feared that if he told her the real truth she would be shocked, lose respect for him, and turn away.
Eventually though he did muster up the courage and trust needed to share his weaknesses with her, though only after first expressing his fear: “I was afraid that in love you would take on the prerogative of justice and holiness and that everything that is sullied would then become an object of horror for you.” Therese’s response to this comment is most noteworthy: “It must be that you don’t know me well at all, if you are afraid that a detailed account of your faults would lessen the tenderness that I feel for your soul.”
God should get more press like this. The fear that this young man experienced in his relationship to Therese is the exact one that all of us perennially have in our relationship with God. We are afraid that in the sight of goodness and holiness all that is sullied in us will be an object of horror. Simply put, we are afraid that God’s good opinion of us might change should all of our darkest secrets be laid bare. Thus Therese’s words could have come right from God’s own mouth: “You don’t know me very well, if you are afraid that baring your faults before me will lessen the tenderness I feel towards you.”
I know so many people, especially young people, who because something is wrong in their lives stop going to church. They stop going to church precisely until such a time when, all on their own, they can somehow rectify the problem and then they go back to church and present their “unsullied” selves, now seemingly more at rights with holiness and goodness. “Given how I’m living, I would be a hypocrite if I went to church! I’m too honest and humble to go to church right now.” That may sound noble and humble, but it betrays a false understanding of God and ultimately does us no favors.
We do not know God very well at all when we fear coming into God’s presence replete with all that is within us, weaknesses as well as strengths. Nothing we do can ever lessen God’s tenderness towards us. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “On Not Hiding from God” August 1999]
