Reflection on truth

Sunday 29th November, 2020

"Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all."

This quotation from King Lear caught my attention this afternoon. I am not a lover of the telephone nor of the computer and only this morning I read De La Mare's poem on the dinner party. He captures the small talk, the social niceties, the mutual antipathy masked by politeness, the competitive egos and the snide gossip and the civilised traducing of others, the social scorn and snobbery!

We play games. We need to play games because raw emotion and transparent direct comment can be so hurtful, so destructive, so brutal. We all know of those whose character and attitude have been changed and how people are damaged by bullying, by remarks made by unthinking teachers or boorish insensitivity. I recall many such incidents and have overcome them with a certain maturity and experience. Nastiness and damaging actions are masked by 'robes and furred gowns'. We have to kowtow to the Grandees, our Masters, our Superiors who wear those gowns. It is the way the world works. Yet when one gets to a certain age the masks can come off, the false personas dropped. We can set ourselves free.

Yet today I picked up the telephone and rang a friend who goes to hospital tomorrow for a major operation. She is in her late 70s and suffers many ailments and the operation has, understandably, unsettled her and made her anxious. Yet on the telephone she was as if it was to be a walk in the park. I detected nervousness at the beginning but simply talking helped her hugely, and me for I too share her apprehension. We talked as friends so by the end she and I could both be honest and open without being brutal or maudlin. We have grown beyond the pretences. Yet she was right, I believe, to say she was 'fine' when asked by people how she felt. We need our own dignity, our own way of dealing with the horrors of life. I am told the mind will go in to shock when a trauma happens. The body and mind shut down so as to be able to cope and draw on forces to deal with the trauma.

Sadly the world of cyber space does not have many filters. You can read the most horrid things, the most vile untruths about yourself, the most prejudiced and inaccurate of comments on you and they may have gone viral. So perhaps the social niceties are needed. Yet there is also the need for the person or the ritual wherein one can let out the suppressed scream, as it were. We need the robes so that what is behind the robes can be decorously dealt with, yet with the good comes the bad. Choices as ever. As a friend said to me recently ' you can call him a shit or you can rise above that and ignore what he has done'. I return to love, to turning the other cheek, to walking the extra mile, to giving the cloak for love is of absolute value in itself. Love does not count the cost but rather is kind, understanding, believes in hope. Love is its own reward.

Well, today is the first Sunday in Advent. We wait and we prepare and we admit our failings as the absolute love is incarnated.