Christianity with an Itchy Butt

...a continuation of 'Museum Moans'

Donald Miller, the man who made me moan, writes things like “The most difficult lie I have ever contended with this: life is a story about me.” Are you kidding? How do you not moan when you swallow something like that? I am not even sure a moan was a sufficient response in the moment; I’m pretty sure I also sneezed or farted, too. What this line is forcing me to confront is that I am impressively self-absorbed. It is painful and it is true. The world revolves around me. It always has. Sinatra only made me more certain of this fact, with that global marionette act he loved to sing about. Actually, I’m not sure “the world” even exists as a singular entity. If I extend to the assumption that everyone else is like me, I am led to believe there are billions of worlds, and in each there is one director, actor, coach, quarterback, judge, witness, but they are never the same. Billions of worlds of which we are at the center. Copernicus had it all wrong; it’s really matthewcentricity. I might go as far as to say that sometimes it feels like I am the God of my own earth. Just hauntingly un-Zen. I wish I could be more Zen. I think it would make me a much better Christian.

My buddy Don helped me realize that all this seems to be planted at the root of my introversion—the root of my shyness. Shy is so cute. It’s a cute word to describe cute people. Just look at it: shy. I wish I could a give it a little kiss on the forehead right now. Shy is rosy-cheeked, eye-lashed, and soft-voiced. Shy is Mary Oliver, all thick hair and thicker glasses. Shy is just adorably terrified. It turns out introversion can be pretty charming, too. Introversion is deep and it is cerebral. Introversion is poetry and theory and literature. Introversion is Albert Einstein, all untamed hair and untamed mind. It is relativity and it is grace. Introversion is paralysis with the power to move great things.

What in the world was that last paragraph all about? I am not really sure at the moment, but I am going to try to flush it out. If you are one of those extroverted folks, you might lose interest in what follows. I doubt you can relate. But please, I think it is important for everyone to hear. We introverts just want to be understood (this sentence was to be read facetiously, to hide its seriousness). Now I know shyness and introversion are not inseparable, but for me they are. What follows will reflect that.

I think people have this idea of shyness as a beauty and humility we could all use a little more of. It is a trait held in high esteem by the masses. It is difficult for people not to warm up to a shy individual, as long as that individual can blush on command and has decent teeth. On behalf of that restrained population, however, I can tell you that shy is not as romantic as it may seem. For me, being shy is just being really scared, all the way down to the neurological level. Let us think of it this way. The only reason I am able to write any of what I have been writing, is because I am writing it—alone, on the couch, with no one watching or questioning or doubting that which is appearing on the computer screen, as confidential thoughts are translated by a tandem of keystrokes and binary code into something universal. I could never come close to articulating this effectively if I were speaking person to person (and if there was no such thing as backspace). This is because I am shy, which is just an endearing way of saying I am debilitatingly self-conscious.

In face to face conversation or a novel environment—or heaven forbid in some cruel combination of the two—I fumble with my words, get an itchy butt, and really just have a hard time piecing together a valuable sentence. It is not even that I form well-crafted thoughts and am too afraid to make them publicly accessible. If this were the case, I would just bite the bullet and vocalize. I would have done this a long time ago. It is rather that I am incapable of generating those thoughts at all. My brain simply does not function as well with the distraction of social pressures. I can just imagine myself in a conversation with a group of new people. There are really two conversations going on: that composed of the sound waves traveling through our shared space, and the one in my head. The latter is saying, “Did that make me sound intelligent? Will this make sense to them? I hope it didn’t offend anyone. Why are they all looking at me? Am I looking at them for a socially expected amount of time?” I am too busy wondering what they will think of what I say to think of anything to say at all. This reminds me of a quote I heard: “If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true.” It was Shakespeare or Kanye West, but probably neither. Either way, my struggle is true.

If I do manage to think fruitfully, these thoughts do not come close enough to the parts of the brain responsible for speech production for me or anyone else to know they ever existed. It is like microscopic duplicates of these real-life people ooze through my cerebrospinal fluid and set up roadblocks on my axon terminals. Nothing innervates at all. Sometimes I feel like that Broca patient. I forget if he had the initials. You know, the initials all the famous patients get. The poor sap said nothing but the word “tan” because of damage to the frontal gyrus, or wherever Broca’s Area is. I feel like him sometimes. I know I am capable of all these provocative, hipster-friendly thoughts, like Nietzsche or one of those other depressed Germans, but put me in a conversation with someone I do not know, and it is system failure. The most I can come up with is “Tan. Tan. Tan. Tan.”

That was a slightly exaggerated take on things. I have never said tan more than three consecutive times in conversation. The details are insignificant. All of that was to say that I spend a lot of my time thinking about myself. That is what shyness is to me. Shy might be cute, but it is selfish. It is focused on the self, which is sort of the antithesis of the message of Jesus. Shyness is fear, which is sort the antithesis of faith. The silver-lining is that there may be a way for me to use this selfishness to my advantage, towards an ends of being a decent human being. About three paragraphs back, before I got into that crap about the butts, I had an explanation for this. Introspective fatigue has set in since then, and that explanation is looking a lot fuzzier—the explanation for how being shy might give me a special tool for being a more selfless person, and a better Christian. Just for the sake of completion, I will give it a hasty whirl.

The conflict at work here lies between being shy and being Christian. I think a large part of the resolution lies right there within the conflict—it lies in the being. As I’ve described, being shy is quite inhibitive. It inhibits action potentials, which proliferates to inhibiting the potential for action. It often results in stillness, of many different varieties. You never have to worry about me overexerting myself. If you were worried about this, don’t be. When I see people who spread themselves thin—like apple butter on too much rice cake—with work and workouts and activities and studies and more activities and leadership positions and meetings and some other activities, it kind of makes me want to throw up. It’s not that I am nauseated by their doing these things; I am impressed and maybe a little envious. I am nauseated by the thought of myself in their position. I am rather comfortable with and fulfilled by a sedentary existence.

There is that prayer, from some psalm, which reads “Be still and know that I am God.” The exercise is to recite this, first in full, then by removing the final word with each repetition, until you are left with a proclamation of “Be”. It is a tricky little exercise that unites the channels of mindfulness and prayer. It is a call to be, and by doing so, know that you are one with yourself, with the universe, and with God. I’m not saying I am particularly good at the prayer, nor that I am particularly adroit in mindfulness. I’m not Zen, as I’ve mentioned. I’m just saying that shyness comes with a built-in propensity toward that one word comprising the final sentence—the prayer as it exists in its most diminished yet most complete form: BE.

God does not want me to spend my life breathing heavily and knowing that I am Him. This would be a giant waste of time and oxygen. I remember only very little from college, but one thing that stuck was God’s love as agape. I love the Greeks. They always make sure that a word is as pretty as its meaning. Agape is understood as the effective willing of the good of another. Effect is the key here. Living God’s love demands action. What shyness does is set a foundation. It is a vehicle for the space needed to learn what that action should look like, so it can be directed in a way that is efficient and teleologically worthwhile. I just wanted to use a fancy word there, but I’m not sure if it was used appropriately. ‘Telogoically worthwhile’ just means that the action ends in a place which God happily resides.

Shyness constantly observes and senses external forces. There is an incessant assault of input, explaining why the output is limited. Shyness is very sensitive to all of this input. It is well practiced in discerning which of these forces are on the side of consolation, and which are on the side of desolation. In other words, it knows without a doubt which environmental stimuli make you feel like dung, and which make you feel like a holy, blessed child of God with the halo and everything. In other, other words, I think I have spent so much time thinking about the workings and patterns of my own mind, that I have a pretty decent knack for inhabiting the minds of others. I am pretty good at understanding what other people are thinking about, what they are feeling; because that is part of being shy. It is party of my delicacy to be tuned into those things. I have a refined set of skills that allow me to become one with another. This would maybe just be for curiosity’s sake, like in the instance of “I wonder what that guy is feeling after just getting confused for Michelle Obama,” but it must move past curiosity. I have learned that this skill can be used in a decent way. At this point, the foundation in being must convert into a life of doing. The input must become output. The contemplative must become a Christian. It is through the examples of mother, father, brothers, sisters, amigos, that this begins to occur for me. I have a disposition to observe and to feel, but they have taught me that I must respond. I cannot forget the effect in my agape. It would leave a gaping hole in the love. I have to learn this stuff. I am not convinced I would have known to love without first being shown what it looks like.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. This is somewhere in the bible. I think it captures what I just failed to say. As it appears in scriptural context, the “He” is God. As it appears in the context of me life, “He” is everyone who I grew up surrounded by—everyone who showed me what love looks like.

The most difficult lie I have to contend with is and will always be this: “Life is a story about me.” But ever since entering the light of the world, I have seen images and harnessed the internal weaponry to help me fight this fallacy. I have been fighting it from birth, and I will fight it until I die.

#personalnarrative