"The Lord can do great things through us when we are transparent with Him."The end of mandatory facemasks in hospitals, health centers, nursing homes and pharmacies will make the end of the pandemic nightmare visible, but we still have many masks to remove.
Each person has his or her mask, a mask that separates him or her from others and prevents people from knowing who he or she really is. We show a part of ourselves, and hide another, the one we think it is not convenient to reveal. The very word "person" derives from the term that designated, in the classical world, the masks with which actors covered their faces. The same actor could play different roles, so the word came to designate each of the "characters" of the great theater of the world, each human being.
Masks, like masks in these three years, protect us from a hostile world. They are a barrier against external aggressions, but at the same time they hinder communication, understanding and communion. Who has not experienced that, after meeting a person during the pandemic, it was difficult to recognize him or her when he or she saw him or her without a mask? When we could only see the forehead and eyes of our interlocutor, we imagined the rest of the face according to our criteria, without objective data. For us, that person was like that, just as our brain presented him or her to us, which is why we then had a hard time recognizing the same person with a different face. "It can't be, this is not the person I knew," we thought, when the only truth is that this person was always like that and that's why he or she continues to be the way he or she was before the covid. The only thing that has changed is our perception.
How many misunderstandings happen because we didn't know how to read the other person well! When we lack information, real knowledge of the other person, we fill in the gaps with the prejudices we each build around him or her, for better or for worse. Thus, we judge harshly that unsmiling friend who in reality is dragging a pain we have no idea about, or we fall madly in love with the selfish person who hides behind the seemingly harmless mask of shyness.
We cover up the bad because we believe that no one will love us like that, when the truth is that showing our vulnerability makes us more lovable, in its original sense of passive possibility of the verb to love. It is easier to believe and, therefore, to love the weak, the one who is not at all what he is not, the one who presents himself as one more, as fallible as any other; than the one who appears to have no faults, because it is common sense and humanity not to be always perfect.
It is good to keep this in mind when manifesting our faith in today's world, both as ordinary Christians and as an institutional Church. We do a disservice to the message of Jesus when we try to present ourselves as perfect, when we try to hide our defects, when we put on the mask of faithful followers of the Risen One when in reality we are poor servants who, only sometimes, and only with divine assistance, can do what the Lord commands us. Because, "when I am weak", as St. Paul will say, "I am weak". Paulthen I am strong".
This was well known to the early Christians and, for this reason, the Gospels are in no hurry to present the weaknesses of even the most distinguished members of the Church: the Pope (Peter, the renegade) and the bishops, such as the apostle St. Thomas, whose feast we celebrate today and who was ridiculed before all for his unbelief.
Would we say today that the sins of Peter or Thomas were a scandal that prevented them from bringing people to faith? Obviously, not only were they not a scandal, but even today these weaknesses of the followers of Jesus are a criterion of historicity of the Gospels, because they make the story credible. If there had been a pretense of lying, the evangelists would have tried to make up the story in their favor, not in theirs.
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Could it be that, with the excuse of not scandalizing, what we want today is to preserve our image in a Pharisaic exercise of pride and vanity, taking away God's prominence? Do we not realize that, with the mask, those who should see our real face fill in the gaps of information and imagine us much uglier than we really are?
Let us lose the fear of manifesting ourselves as sinners, of showing ourselves as a weak people in need of divine grace. Let us lose the fear to take off the mask that separates us from the rest of men and women to show them who God is and who we really are, so that they can see that "strength is realized in weakness".
Journalist. Graduate in Communication Sciences and Bachelor in Religious Sciences. He works in the Diocesan Delegation of Media in Malaga. His numerous "threads" on Twitter about faith and daily life have a great popularity.
