Later this week, trick-­or-­treaters will descend on your doors, ringing your doorbells with outstretched pillow cases and hollow pumpkins. And among the Elsa costumes from Frozen and the pirates there will be many kids whose faces are hidden by masks. When you imagine a mask, what comes to mind? Is it a Spiderman mask? A ski mask covering the features of a figure darting by a security camera? A masquerade mask covering only the eyes? When we choose a mask for a costume, we choose how we want people to perceive us. We choose to highlight our superherodom or add an air of mystery or obscure our face all together. And in this careful choosing, there is a piece of us that we are putting just behind the mask, perhaps the piece that feels least like a superhero. And while we do this with the greatest flair when we put on costumes, we do it each day when we’re buying coffee or greeting a neighbor or making small talk.
I know that I, at least, smile and say I’m fine even when I’m having a bad day. Like the blue people in Shel Silverstein’s poem, I do not always want to casually reveal my true feelings. I keep an impassive face during political discussions with acquaintances. I can find myself nodding along during a conversation when I do not know what is going on.
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I paint my face neutral so that people will pass right over it, so that no one will see what my unpainted face is like, so that my pain or my confusion or my disagreement will go unnoticed. And this works. It works so well that that I can keep huge swaths of my feelings and experiences to myself.
I don’t think I have to tell you that success at masking my true feelings is mixed. There are absolutely times when it is important to appear to feel or believe a way that is not true, and yet defaulting to this impassive face means that I am isolating myself. To always answer “How are you?” with “I’m fine” means that I close the conversation, that I cut myself off from the care of the other person in the conversation. It is to be the masked blue person missing out on knowing the other masked blue person. I signal to them that this is not a vulnerable space, that they should also respond that they are fine, that it is not a safe space to be our true selves. And yet, it would be an oversimplification to tell you that we should never mask our true feelings, our true beliefs, or our true selves. To say this would be willfully blind to the fact that we have to protect ourselves. Masks can isolate us from other people, and it would false to say that this was never good. 2
There are people we need protecting from, people and situations from which these masks can serve as armor. We have to behave in certain ways to keep our jobs, masking our feelings at times, and our beliefs at others. Housing and professional opportunities can legally be denied to LGBTQ people, making it necessary for some people to stay in the closet in order to make a living and have shelter and be physically safe. Often corporate or academic culture skews towards white, middle class speech and behavior patterns, meaning that people of color or people from working class families have to learn how to wear the mask of middle class whiteness in order to get ahead.
Sometimes, wearing these masks costs us dearly. Sometimes, it hurts to play pretend, to falsely fit in with a culture or to act as if we don’t care. And each one of us has to decide when that pain is worth protecting a certain aspect, and when it is not. We may make different choices, and it is important that we respect other people’s choices, that we do not rip off another person’s mask and “out” them as it were. We wear masks that protect some of our deepest vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities that we do not always want to share.
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But sometimes, we can only get the support that we need by sharing those vulnerabilities. To forge or deepen a friendship, we need to be able to reveal our more vulnerable parts. We need to mark the space as sacred, show our willingness to trust the other person. Sometimes, we have to be the brave one in creating vulnerable space with another person, hoping they will follow. And sometimes, we are forced to remove our masks. When losses are too large to hold in or too public to conceal, as with deaths, divorces, or job losses, we are robbed of the opportunity to pretend that everything is fine, that we don’t need help.
And this robbing can be uncomfortable. It can garner looks of pity we don’t want, draw eyes only curious for the drama. And yet this vulnerability, this removing of the mask, gives other people the opportunity to rise to the occasion. It gives us the possibility that someone will see us in all of our pain, all of our disappointment, all of our confusion, and they will take us in anyway. It is this situation when we learn who else has felt deep pain, overcome disappointments. Who will make us casseroles or not turn away when we cry. Who will stay up a little later or do a little more work to lighten our load.
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And, often, when people surprise us with this compassion, they do not take us in spite of this pain, they do not count our brokenness against us, but they see themselves in it, they find a connection with us they couldn’t find when we were declaring everything was fine with bland, impenetrable faces. It is only in this vulnerability that we can be truly loved. I will say that again, it is only in our vulnerability that we can be truly loved. While we wear our masks, they do not love our real faces, our salty tears, our crooked smiles. While we wear our masks they can only love the barrier between us. And if we want to be loved in our realities and not our walls, we need to take off our masks.
Now, I do not wish this forced vulnerability on any of us. My experience with breakups and deaths and lost opportunities has not made forced vulnerability easier, but it has made me see how ordinary people carry within them miraculous kindness, kindness we close ourselves off to when we declare we don’t need it. And without being forced, we can pick moments to voluntarily remove those masks. Not in the business meeting or with the person we don’t trust, but when that voice inside of you suggests that maybe you can trust another person, that you take a leap of faith. 5
That voice that will sometimes whisper that it is ok to remove your mask is the voice that cautiously believes that the person underneath the mask is worth knowing, worth revealing, worth owning. We talk about the inherent worth and dignity of every person a lot in this church, as we should, but I think we forget sometimes that this applies to ourselves. That just as the person we admire or the person we struggle to accept has inherent worth and dignity, that we have it too. We do not have to wear the mask of a worthy or dignified person because are already have worth and dignity. As Jacquie and I discussed this service, we found ourselves wondering if West Shore was a place where people can remove their masks. The obvious and unhelpful answer to this is that it depends, and being a community of humans there will always be times, even at West Shore, where we have to protect ourselves, and yet I wonder how each of us can be brave in making this a safe space for our unmasked selves, in remembering our own worth and dignity and that of others.
Offertory: Unitarian Universalism is a grand vision of a world filled with peace and justice, love and joy. That vision is embodied in a few large congregations, numerous mid-­‐sized congregations, and many, many small congregations. No matter its size, every congregation depends on each of its members. Each one of you, by your commitment of time, energy, and resources, helps make that grand vision real. Individually and together, we are Unitarian Universalists, building a world filled with peace and justice, love and joy. Heather Christensen
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Are you real or pretend? This author suggests that we are both, that we cannot be wholly authentic at every moment, or perhaps at any moment. She suggests that to every interaction we bring some truth, and also a projection of some protective or imaginative being. I like this image, that each time we interact with someone we wear a mask that is swirled with the authentic and the pretend, of who we are and who we might be. It hints at a nuance that we are never fully masked or fully vulnerable. And it also hints at a nuance we can’t see when we only think of masks as a barrier. Surely, sometimes a mask serves merely to obscure a truth. But when a mask is pretend, where does that pretending come from? If we pretend with our imaginations, then isn’t that coming from some authentic piece of our dreams or fears or problem solving?
I am reminded of a school play in the first grade in which I had to pretend to be a monster. I was six years old and I was playing the mother monster to another six year old, who was a good seven inches taller than I was. As we rehearsed the play, I was not concerned about seeming believable as the mother to a little monster, who was in fact towering over me, or about seeming believable as a monster at all.
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I was relying on a mask to do this work for me, a mask my brother had worn the Halloween before. It had a green face, a big nose, long teeth. There were warts all along the forehead. My monster son had a mask too, and I was confident that with this mask, I would be the scariest monster mother that ever there was. When Halloween day came, however, we could not find the mask. We had moved over the summer and though we searched through every box in our basement, it did not turn up. My tall monster son had brought one from home, as had the other kids in the play, but I would have to perform as the mother monster with only my own face. I threw a fit. I howled and I cried. My mom had to take me out in the hallway to try and convince me it would be ok, that I could still act like a believable monster without the mask. But I could not be fooled. Without the mask, I was a six year old girl and everyone would know it. So I wailed and I pouted and then, eventually, I went back into the classroom and grudgingly performed as the mother monster. I viewed the whole play as a disaster.
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I thought, at the time, that the mask was necessary for me to act like a monster. I thought that the big, green, warted face, not my six year old girl face, was the key to my performance. And at that moment the mask was the key. I did not recover well from not finding the mask. But here is the thing. The mask was only key because I believed in it. The mask would could not create my monster voice, only my vocal chords could do that. It could not produce the gestures of someone at once terrifying and maternal, as a monster mother should be. No, only I could do that, but I needed the mask to believe that I could. Primitive cultures used masks to create a sense of authority when taking on different roles or in rituals. They used masks to lend credence to their own actions. I needed the mask to believe I could conjure the scary voice I already had, to stoke the imagination as to how a mother monster would act. The mask could not create what was impossible, what was never inside of me. But the mask could feed and shape what was possible, what was already inside of me. The mask aided my imagination, but I already had the seed.
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For most of the year, the masks we wear are not so physical as the monster mask I longed for when I was six. We have a mask for our job, a mask for the person at the grocery store you didn’t want to run into, a mask for the person with NRA bumper stickers who you don’t feel the need to argue with in a parking lot. And then we have more nuanced and meaningful masks. The masks with which we hide our problems, and the masks with which we portray more confidence or competence than we feel, the masks of bravery or non chalance than can help get us from day to day.
And like all of the masks that we see at the costume store and on trick-­or-­
treaters, like the monster mask that my parents and I never did find, they serve a purpose. They show one thing to the outside world, and they raise a question in our internal world. What, inside of six-­year-­old Holly, was monster-­like to start with? What would that monster mask conjure? What would it evoke, shape, create inside of me?
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Perhaps more to the point, when we wear metaphorical masks, the mask is made up of ourselves. When we put on a brave face, that face belongs to us. It does not matter if I imagine the confidence of Beyonce or Taylor Swift when I get ready to preach, if I imagine their posed presences as I stand before you, I am confident that you do not see their faces today, but my own. And when each one of us puts on a mask, that mask calls upon parts of us that we always had, but did not have faith in. It takes those parts and it nurtures them, shapes them, feeds them, until the mask thins and it is only our own faces.
And here is where we run into trouble and also grace. If masks are neither lies nor truths, if they are means of becoming, then we must be desperately careful and wildly creative about the masks that we wear. Masks can be helpful. They can help us become monsters and help us become brave. They can embody a “fake it til you make it” attitude and they can bring out the trite truth that you had it in you all along. But then masks can also aid us in becoming people we do not want to be. If we don masks of indifference with coworkers who make fun of someone else in the office, then we have to be wary of becoming indifferent. If we wear masks that hide our political and religious beliefs, then we have to be careful not to lose our grip on what is important to us.
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If masks are only ever made up of ourselves, then we have to be careful of the parts of ourselves that we feed and empower. We do not become our masks overnight;; we become them a little at a time, without knowing that we are doing so. I think most of us can think of a friend or relative, who one day, by some quiet process, became a person we didn’t know anymore, a person we didn’t want to know anymore. They wore a mask at a job or a significant other, one of privilege or authority or dismissiveness, and one day we found they had become that way, that the person we knew was gone. And if masks transform our insides even as they transform our outsides, then they also reveal another truth. That what lies beneath our masks is not static. That our faces, our hearts, are not solid and unchanging beneath our facades, that whatever our mask and our truth are morphs over time. And I think that is part of why we wear masks. If our true selves are always evolving, if they are eternally embryonic, ready to grow into some new version of ourselves that we are reaching for, then masks both stoke our imaginations and give us a sense of stability. I may not always know what I want, but I can present myself like I do and then I will feel better. Even as masks help us change, they can also project a lack of change that is comforting. Comforting and false. 12
The image that came to mind as I was writing this sermon was that of a sort of patchwork mask. A mask made up of many masks, masks that show aspiration and masks that obscure and protect. None of these masks are inherently good or bad, but they all have an effect on us, to invite people in or send them away, to become braver or quieter, to try on a new persona or to stay locked in an old one. This combination of masks helps us to be whole, because it helps us to grow and also to protect us, it contributes to our evolution and our safety. But these masks can only be helpful to us when we are deliberate about them, when we are intentional about the parts of ourselves that need growing and the parts of ourselves that need be protected, careful about who we can reveal ourselves to and who we can’t. When we design our masks, we design ourselves. 13
Are you real or pretend? I hope that the answer to this is both, that we can make space for the imagination and aspiration of pretending as well as the vulnerability of being real. All of the trick or treaters, when they come home on sugar highs, will count their candy and take off their masks. They will cease to be princesses and superheros, and yet the next morning I imagine there will be more than a few kids making spiderman gestures at the breakfast table and choruses of Let it Go, as they can’t help but be changed by the people they inhabited for an evening. 14