When I was a young actor in class with my first acting teacher, it took everything in me to get up on stage and allow myself to be vulnerable, allow myself to be seen by others. Time and again I would end up in a state of shame and horror as yet one more of my shortcomings of character was unmasked and exposed to the world. The job was to be human, openly and for others to see, and I seemed always to end up halfway there. I would be open enough that people could see me, but too afraid to commit to something, so what would be seen was my fear, my self-hatred, my shame at being who I was. It was awful. Yet I persisted.
After one particularly embarrassing experience, as I stood on stage, literally under the spotlight and burning with humiliation, my teacher, Maria, asked me what I was afraid of. What was making me hold back. I found myself saying I was afraid of being seen as arrogant--that in the world I came from, that German Lutheran small town farming community, arrogance was perhaps the biggest sin there was, and from deep inside I still was at the mercy of this proscription from my childhood. As we discussed it, Maria asked another actor in the class, Jay Tarses, who was a successful writer/director/producer, what he had to say to me, and from out of the darkness I heard him growl, 'Fuck it. Be arrogant.' I took his words under advisement, but it remained a struggle for me.
Just lately I've been doing some writing of questions and answers from A Course in Weight Loss by Marianne Williamson. The questions, like in any system of self-healing, are designed to show us things we don't know about ourselves and find the places where we remain stuck. The first questions were about those places in us that we all would see as probably less than socially acceptable. Imagine my surprise when, after about two hours of writing, I came to one of the final subjects and was asked to complete this sentence: Arrogance: I am better than ____________, and when I called upon that place inside where answers reside, I found myself writing 'everybody.'
Really? Everybody? I could not have been more appalled. Good Lord. This would explain so much. It is obvious to me that I come up short in many categories much of the time, and yet this thing exists within me. I can only imagine it's been there all along, and my insistence on hiding from others, my fear back then, was that it would be exposed, and that once exposed, no one would want to play with me. Even today, the thought that this is in me is a bit horrifying. But also it's exciting--the idea that something so obviously crooked can be found hiding in the darkness of oneself, even after being alive on the planet as long as I have been. The potential for change and growth is in direct proportion to the size of the shadow exposed. This seems like a fairly hefty shadow.
I mentioned this experience to two different people. Both of them said the same thing. 'Doesn't everybody feel that way?' This hadn't occurred to me, but I guess that would be a part of the story wouldn't it. When we think we are special, then we think we are the only one. And this holds true whether our specialness is telling us we're better than everyone, or worse than everyone. (When I'm in it, mine goes either or both ways, depending on the day.)
What Marianne says, quoting A Course in Miracles, is that we all are special, unique children of God, but we forget that what we are giving is something that is flowing through us. It is not from us. We mistake the faucet for the water. The Holy Spirit can use any faucet through which to flow, and if it allows us to be that faucet, the more we recognize ourselves as not the source, the more freely that flow may occur; and we will find ourselves more fully of service in the world, more useful to nature itself. If we really can get this, we will realize there is nothing we ever have to come up with. There is only ever the need to be open, to be free, to be alive, and to let the truth of us be seen by others.
Today I will ask nature to use me fully. I will ask for the courage to be seen by the world and I will embrace my assignment to be the best, most open faucet I can be.
Redwood Trees, Muir Woods National Monument, Mill Valley, CA
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