Seeing Through The Glass Not At All

We were reflecting after mass tonight, and I got to thinking about people.  Apologies if the thoughts seem disjointed, but I thought it appropriate to write it down before it was forgotten.

If someone asks you; "Who are you?", the easiest answer is to give your name, and forget the question.  Sometimes, at least at Catholic Heart Work Camp, questions have deeper meanings.  As people, we are so much more than names, and jobs, and colleges or high schools.  It's like in a chemistry lab; a person isn't just a pile of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms, artfully arranged.  "Who you are" is actually the collective summation of all of your life experiences.  You are a collection of bad breakups, summers spent playing in tree-houses, Christmas morning present-opening binges and broken hearts. 

When we come into a stranger's life, like we frequently do at Catholic Heart Work Camp, we only see the current product, the chemical formula of all their prior life experiences if you will.  We don't see, and can only imagine, all of what went into that person, back before even their own life began.  We walk in a door and see an old and crippled man, sitting in a shack by the road-side.  We don't see seventy plus years of life, and laughter, and love, and sorrow.  Since we don't ever see those things hidden behind the curtain, we can become frustrated by some of their actions, or their words.

Even harder to understand, for me, is that we don't experience all of what goes into our own friend's lives.  We tell ourselves that since we are close with so-and-so, that we know each and every one of those inputs that makes our friends who they are.  But we don't.  We may see the big breakups, and you are there for the summer afternoons playing in tree-houses; but even to those we call closest, much of their lives are shrouded in darkness.  St. Paul said, in speaking of the mystery of God, that we "see through a glass, darkly".  With our friends, sometimes, we see through that glass not at all.  The human heart builds its own walls, higher and broader than any that man could build. 

Tomorrow, hopefully, I will step outside of my usual habits, and imagine all the things that have shaped those I deal with, and to try and be more patient with those I can not possibly understand.