Ben Stein is an interesting fellow. Speech writer for Nixon. Hilarious teacher of Ferris Bueller. I re-received an email recently and just got around to reading it; one which originated back in December of 2005 shortly after Mr. Stein offered a commentary on… what was it… CBS Sunday Morning. There are a few versions of the email, but I think the original commentary was pretty close to this:

Herewith at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart:

I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important? I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is, either, and I do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.

Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are. Is this what it means to be no longer young. It's not so bad.

Next confession: I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are: Christmas trees. It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, "Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.

I was reading this and thinking about a couple of people I've met this semester. In class is a Muslim woman from Jordan. Upon meeting her I made the reckless (reckless, because if I had really thought about it I might have realized this) mistake of holding out my hand to shake. She introduced herself and added, "…but I don't shake hands." This week I was in meetings with a guy from back east who is (I presume) an orthodox Jew. He wore his kippah and drank his kosher fruit juice in the midst of all the rest of us, and left early for his fly-back so he wouldn't be travelling on the Sabbath. My simple point is that in watching both of these individuals, I've felt a deep level of respect for the way they shape and conform their lives to their faith. I have no problem at all feeling that the three of us are connected through a committed devotion to God. I guess I simply liked reading Mr. Stein's words this evening. I am a Christian, and I am not at all offended by head coverings, kippahs, Ramadan, or being kosher. Quite to the contrary, I am drawn to simple, humble submission to our Creator—in its various forms.

I have no idea where I was, nor what I was reading, but two or three weeks ago I ran across a Christian's claim that "the Muslim God is not the God of the Christian." Hmmm. Well, this statement could have just as easily been made by a Muslim, or by anybody else for that matter, but I have to say that my understanding of Islam, extremely limited though it may be, is that Christians and Muslims do indeed refer to the same God. At least, certainly, if I was to sit down with a Muslim and talk about God, my underlying assumption would be that we were both talking about the Father of Abram/Abraham.

I suppose what the author of that line might have been implying is that Muslim and Christian would disagree, of course, about the idea of a trinity. But then again, so do Jews and Christians, and nobody says that the God of the Jew is not the God of the Christian. Sometimes I think that there are many things said out of pure fear and/or ignorance and/or malice.

What I was thinking, anyway, is that it's sort of a moot point for me. It seems to me that if you are a monotheist, then whenever somebody talks about worshipping the One or Supreme being, they are talking about God. That's the word I use, but the word is not magical; it's three characters of the particular alphabetic script I use, arranged in one of six possible ways. Even Paul, on Mars Hill, used this idea. He referenced a local statue labeled "to an unknown god" as an inroad to a sermon. So I see you have an unknown god. Well, let me tell you about this unknown God…

Just to clarify a little more, I understand the opinion that if you claim to worship God, but your concept of God is radically different from mine, then we are in some sense worshipping a "different" God. And I think this opinion has merit. So to be more to the point, what I am saying is that God is God irrespective of whether your idea and/or my idea as to the nature of that God is/are correct or not. God's Being does not depend upon a human's concept of God. Whatever God is, God is. And if you are claiming to worship that One Being, then whether or not any of us are conceiving correctly or not, the Being we are pointing to is still the same Being. I guess my point is simply that the Lord our God is one God. Muslim, Christian, Jew; the same Being begat us all, and the same Being is worshipped by us all. And, it's about the Being, after all. It's not about us. It is in this sense that the Muslim God is the Christian God, is the Jewish God, is the God of other monotheistic faiths.

Must it be so difficult, really, for us all to begin here?

If you don't have at least one deep dark, shameful and terrifying secret to be shared with other people, there are only three possibilities as to why. Either you have already shared with others everything about yourself, or you are completely blind to your own humanity, or you are the most plain, most boring, most un-human person to have ever lived. May God save us from being the third, deliver us from being the second, and know us as the first.

One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends. And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of "perfection" to his own life. He cannot seem to make his life fit in with the books.

Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him. He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict Joseph Labre, who wanted to be a Trappist and a Carthusian and succeeded in neither. He finally ended up as a tramp. He died in some street in Rome.

And yet the only canonized saint, venerated by the whole Church, who has lived either as a Cistercian or a Carthusian since the Middle Ages is St. Benedict Jospeh Labre. — New Seeds, chapter 14

The few lines of today's Merton Monday are deceptively simple; the ideas of "true" self and "false" self may not, in the end, cover all the bases. At the very least, I think the false self can be broken into false selves as far as I tend to view it. And then there's the idea in my mind that all this disunity within me, this propensity to foster the disunity by breaking things down, is a (if not the) problem. At the very least, walking a path of discovering one's "true" self in God involves not only casting false selves aside, but also integrating them—or parts of them—into a whole. In other words, part of my true self is the very fact that false selves tend to exist within me; I cannot ignore them, pretend they don't exist. I must recognize them and—in a certain sense and for a certain moment in my life—accept them. After all, there's no way to acknowledge them, to identify them, to bid them farewell, unless I first agree that they exist and then converse with them. And most likely, it is only some aspect of my true self that can accomplish this. Just thinking out loud for a minute.

What I like most about this Merton Monday is the idea of the immense tension which exists between the humility to be ourselves and the pride of our false self (or selves). Merton is correct that this is a struggle of heroic proportions. The idea of it reminds me of intuitions I feel when I'm around other people. At one end of the spectrum are folks who are totally immersed in false selves (their own and those of other people). At the other end are the rare breed who seem to have found their true self and are amazingly humble and peaceful. In the middle is all the rest of us. Toward the people along this spectrum, I confess, I hold various opinions and feel various emotions. I feel compassion for those who are so mired in falsehood they don't even think about truth. I am amazed by those few who seem to have found their true selves. Honestly, I think the ones I just can't stand are those who are fully bound up in falsehood yet spend their time proudly proclaiming it to be the singular Truth. And honestly, I think the ones I identify with the most are those who at some level understand the struggle and are fighting gallantly, against the whole world, to win it. Some of them appear as total freaks to the rest of the world, but I really think that many of them are attempting something quite noble—whether they fully realize it or not. The role of humility in this latter case is to recognize that being considered a freak may at times be necessary—unavoidable, even—in the quest for truth, but it is not an end in itself. Being a freak for the sake of being a freak is a pride which is just as ignoble and ugly as any other of its more common, accepted forms.

THERE IS a problem with this blog—a problem I anticipated before I placed my first post. If the problem were to be considered a disease, then it is born of the same pathogen that affects many people who try to exemplify an image of deep faith in God. It infects writers, television personalities, radio hosts, and people who sit in pews on Sundays. It is, to put it into the least offensive terms possible, a lack of transparency. It is a lack of openness, a lack of full disclosure, a lack of being fully human. In these ways, and depending upon the perceptions of others, it is a manner of presenting one’s self that can be seen as downright dishonest.

Granted, and to use a metaphor, if a person is trying to peer in my front window, and if the window is dirty and hazy so that they cannot see inside my house, and they can only see the “me” that dares to leave the house, then this is one thing. It is not clinically dishonest. After all, if a person cannot see into my house and merely assumes that I am the same person when I am inside that I am when outside, this isn’t my fault. Perhaps they are naïve. But on the other hand, if I know that that person is peering, and if I purposely leave my windows dirty so that they will be left in their naiveté to assume that I am, 24/7/365, the same person they always see on the street, then the once mere appearance of dishonesty now becomes more real. It approaches tenuously close to moral fraud; a vice we know better as hypocrisy.

The problem with this blog is that it could easily be a form of moral fraud. A person could read this blog and assume many things which would be far more lofty than I deserve. I do not want that to happen. I do not mind if my front window is a bit foggy; in fact there may be good reason for me to leave it that way. But to rely upon it, and to hide behind it, is wrong.

Why do we as individuals hide, and why although we do not like to admit it, do we prefer that other people hide as well? Part of the reason is that we do not like to mix our peas and carrots. It is not always an easy thing to look at another person’s dichotomies and find a good solid thing to hold to. We want to place people on pedestals, or keep them in the dirt. It is more simple this way. It allows us to keep a list of the good and bad. It makes it easier for us to compare ourselves with others.

But this approach denies what is true—that to be human is to be both good and bad; to at once harbor virtue and vice. To look at only one side of a person is to throw part of them away, and if we throw part of a person away, we have made them less than whole. And what good is this, to live in a world of partial people? It makes true love impossible. It leaves us in a position to say, “I can love this part of you, but not that part,” which, by the way, is the coward’s way of saying, “I don’t really love you at all.” Or worse still we may say, “I cannot love any part of you, because I cannot love all of you.” This, at least, is honest—but it is horrendously petty and shallow, a game the Devil himself must find quite enjoyable to watch.

I THINK of this phenomenon when I think of the American writer Thomas Merton. His published works through the forties, fifties and sixties were elegant and sublime. They spoke of a person who was far beyond all but a few of us in Godly faith and experienced spirituality. He was to me, in a sense, superhuman. But in recent years I read through his personal journals and found a man who was at times bitter, angry, grumbling and petty. He was often sad and discouraged. He broke the rules of his superiors in the monastery, even going so far as to berate them in his private writings. He considered renouncing his vows. He fell in love with a nurse and seriously questioned Catholic doctrines. On numerous occasions he sneaked out of the monastery to go drinking with a friend. All of this from a man who wrote brilliantly on the complete devotion of one’s entire self to God. Was this the man who at one time was a hero to me? Was he, in truth and in the end, nothing but a grand and clever hypocrite? I think not—although I also think that he wondered this about himself.

It took me a while to sort it out in my mind, and for a while I could no longer read anything he had to say, but what I eventually found in Merton’s journals was a richer, deeper, more fully and authentically human writer and monk. His public writings and his private writings, I now see, complemented each other to form a completed picture of what it means to be human; to be born of two natures that struggle to find a common and sane ground in the midst of one’s own type of madness. It was this struggle that Merton intimated in all of his writings, no matter from which side of the window they were penned. Once this is understood, Merton’s strength shines more brightly, for he knew that his strength was actually the strength of God, which was made manifest in Merton’s weaknesses.

I, TOO, like everyone else, am a story of two natures struggling to find some common ground, some true and lasting peace, some bit of sanity in the midst of my own madness. But this blog, like my daily life, continues to leave this struggle obscured behind a frosted haze. It still paints a picture of a shadow-person who is breathing and moving and casting shapes and forms upon the surfaces of life, but is not a full three dimensional form.

I hope with all of my heart that the posts in this blog reveal the beauty I truly, deeply and honestly see in life, and that a few people may read them and find some use in them. I hope they help people to discover greater depth and meaning in their lives, just as I search for these things in mine. Yet I also hope, with equal passion, that in the end when I am fully known by the world, the picture will be complete, and much more useful and meaningful than the partial image with which today my cowardice is all too content.