Look into the Mirror

"I cried because I had no shoes, then I met a man who had no feet." (Anonymous)

A couple of weeks ago our Wednesday group went through a repeating exercise of identifying the habits that put us down and keep us down. These are the stories we learned long ago that just keep showing up in our lives.
One of the new participants in the group, when asked what she thought of this exercise, quickly offered that at first she thought itt was corny, silly, weak, pointless—I don’t remember her exact label. But then she added just as quickly that she realized it had hit the mark for her.

To jump to the chase, from the exercise sheet we had completed, we ended up with three statements that we were then asked to take home with us. Our assignment was to stand in front of the mirror and do the following: Extending our left arm, say “I release my need to ________. Then extending our right arm, say “I release my need to ________. And finally, raising our arms above our heads in the shape of a V (perhaps V for Victory), say “I am grateful God is the ________ I am.” For me, it was: I release my belief in Rejection. I release my need to Self-Criticize. I am grateful God is the wholeness I am.

I guess it should come as no surprise that the words, habits we each chose to complete the blanks were not that dissimilar.
Fear, isolation, rejection, blame and shame plague most of us in some fashion or another. They live at the heart of the stories we have learned and that we continue to tell ourselves. We make them the truth.

Each time I get one of the “Forwarded” email messages that are continually circulating—the ones whose purpose is to separate us one from the other and promote the belief that we can’t trust one another—I immediately go on alert. After all, these messages intend that we should divide ourselves—us and them—and articulate our fears and isolation. They are about rejection and rejecting.

I had paid little attention to these emails until the most recent presidential election. When the messages arrived periodically bearing some alleged truth about the Black man who would be president and the female who would become Speaker of the House, in a combination of outrage and disgust over the ignorance that too frequently has its foot on our necks, I questioned, can this be true! For some time now, messages aimed at charging and condemning people of the Muslim faith are trafficking on the Internet. Thankfully, good sense led me to do a little fact checking (in my case to go to the Internet) and search for the source of these alleged truths. Without exception, I found the email messages to be hoaxes. Websites like www.urbanlegends.com and www.religioustolerance.org nailed it.

My own sense of right told me that I needed to let the person who had forwarded the message to me each time—and usually the list of recipients was at least a score of people—know that he or she was passing along information that was either distorted or untrue and that had clearly been manipulated to slander individuals and groups.
These habits of acting out our fear become most pathetic to me when I see the printed versions in the hands of people who probably haven’t joined the 21st century and don’t have computers. Thank you, friends and family, who are so ready to help us reinforce our fears by putting this nonsense in our hands and heads.

So as corny as it might seem, this morning when I came across my exercise sheet from two weeks ago, I thought, “well maybe this is a sign that I should give this a shot.” With sheet in hand, I went to the bathroom mirror. Clad in t-shirt and boxers, my night hair plastered in twenty directions, I stood there, thinking, “loser”. But I went on, counting the times I repeated the exercise. Maybe I made it to ten. Not the point, however. As I repeated this three-part mantra, at first focused on the sagging flesh of my face, my cow-licked hair, and the lack of muscle tone in my triceps (a reminder to go to the community gym for my modest dumb bell workout this morning), I got it. Gee, I’m better than the credit I give myself. Better yet, I am God’s own. I can love myself, and maybe, just maybe, it might become a lot easier to love—and to trust the love—of others—regardless of the tribe, regardless of how we are different. Smile begets smile, I’m thinking.

I have my habits and stories—learned long ago. And they’ve become comfortable to me, even though they’ve kept me from growing. Do we dare talk about happiness? My dissatisfaction with myself really can’t be separated from my fear of and dissatisfaction with others. As I was reminded the other day, any time we want to start working on figuring out where that gnawing feeling of discord is coming from—fault finding with this person or that group or some situation, all we have to do is look for the common denominator. That would be me. We get what we give—fear, trust, hate, love, blame, responsibility. The least I can do is try to discern when I’m fooling myself, or worse, using the same weapons on others that are part of the arsenal I use on myself. Sometimes a slow learner, I’m getting it. And so it is.

“I'm Starting With The Man In
The Mirror
I'm Asking Him To Change
His Ways
And No Message Could Have
Been Any Clearer
If You Wanna Make The World
A Better Place…
Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change”

From Michael Jackson, “Man in the Mirror”

Look into the Mirror—Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 28, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis