After reading “Till We Have Faces” by C.S. Lewis during spring break, I realized that honesty is an integral part of love.
Being honest with those we love takes courage. We must face ourselves and understand who we are as made in God’s image. Only after this can we hope to be honest with our loved ones and show them who they are as sons and daughters of God. And what suffering mixed with joy awaits us. Loving others and relating to their pain allows us to enter into a piece of Christ’s love. In the end, as Christians, it is our goal to reflect the love that we have received, and one terribly hard but infinitely beautiful way of doing this is through honesty.
“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years…you’ll not talk about the joy of words,” Lewis wrote. “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
As a woman, it is less likely that my speech will come on the battlefield or from the Inaugural Balcony. However, every day I have the chance to show a different kind of courage, a courage gained from love. This may mean standing up for myself in the midst of a family crisis or admitting to a friend that there is a problem in our friendship or being honest about my romantic feelings.
It is God’s love that guides us to see our fallen nature as well as the fact that we are made in his image. Love means seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes. Marriage demonstrates this because mutual love forces you to step outside yourself. Through this, we see ourselves better through the other’s eyes. That’s why when God loves us, He sees us as He created us — our whole selves. It is in accepting this very Love that we finally see our own potential as His creations. We see ourselves through His eyes as He created us to be.
Once we have accepted and felt the tenderness of God’s love, we begin loving others and helping them to know themselves better through honesty. How? Do as Christ did. Get down on our knees and wash the feet of those around us, as Jesus so lovingly did on that Holy Thursday so long ago. The image of washing their feet takes form in our washing away the worldly fog surrounding them, giving them a clearer vision of how Christ sees them. This means pointing out their faults, but also emphasizing their potential for good.
Loving others through honesty is isolating. In being honest to others about their faults as well as our own, we open our hearts to pain. Their pain at realizing their fallen nature becomes our pain. So instead of lessening our earthly suffering, love shown in the form of honesty increases it. Therefore courage is necessary. It is not the same chivalrous courage of a knight nor the courage a young man needs to ask a girl out. It is deeper. It is the willingness to say yes with a smile to every pain that surrounds and penetrates our minds and souls.
We can do this because as brothers and sisters of Christ, there is no earthly pain that we cannot bear. Our honesty to our loved ones opens the door to them finally being honest with themselves and admitting that they also are fallen. An honest word spoken in love thunders down pain on the speaker and the listener, yet this courageous act ultimately brings both souls closer to Christ. Once we are courageous enough to look honestly at our own faces, we can then turn our gaze completely toward the loving face of God.
