Costly experiences, vulnerability and convictions…

“The more costly an experience is to us, the greater its significance in our lives and the more it occupies our minds – and also the more we are afraid of its being misunderstood, or that it will be cheapened by some misapplied remark or suspicion. The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are. When we are alone we are haunted by doubts about the genuineness of our deepest intuitions and feelings…Thus, although we are made to suffer by reason of the discordance between our personage and our person…nevertheless, we carefully foster it for fear of having our person hurt if we reveal its most precious treasures. This is often what happens with our artistic, philosophical or religious convictions. We feel they are still too fragile to stand up to being judged and even brutally contradicted by others. But our convictions are never really clear and firm until they have been expressed and defended.“

-Paul Tournier (The Meaning of Persons)

For me this is very true. Those experiences which have made the deepest impressions in our lives are usually the ones we are least willing to address. Whether implicitly through repression or explicitly through denial, we simply do not want to face up to the pain of talking about our darkest moments, fears or doubts. And yet God, in His infinite wisdom, created us in such a way that communication and sharing are prerequisites for full healing, wholeness and hence happiness. First we need to find people who we can trust and who will truly hear us, and then we need to be those people to others.