Divine Plagiarism

Warning: I’m about to spoil the plot to a movie. In Y tu Mama Tambien, (which I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone,) a recently cheated-on woman decides to take a road trip with two hormone-riddled adolescent males. Things go fairly predictably from there. It becomes clear pretty early that both she and the boys use sex as a means to run. They use physical intimacy as a means to drown out their insecurities. One of the more interesting scenes occurs after the woman tries to make two wrongs a right, after one of the two boys becomes jealous because of her fooling around with the other, she tries to reset the balance by fooling around with the other one. The first one gets angry, and he and the woman get into an argument. He ends up yelling at her something to the effect of ‘[sleeping with us] was what you wanted, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that why you agreed to go on our road trip?’

There is an irony in this. He accuses her of using sex to hide from her insecurities. Of course, he is doing the same, using sex (foolishly) as a means to validate himself as a man. And he is mostly right. That is exactly what she is doing. But he has no idea why. The boys both think she is using them as a means to run from the grief of her now-broken marriage. They think that explains why she is in her room crying whenever she is alone. But their understanding is very incomplete. In the last scene of the movie, they find out that she had been dying of cancer the whole time. She was using sex to run, but they did not know what she was running from. Her insecurities were about death and becoming a ‘fully realized’ woman before she passed away. They both think they know the story, but they didn’t really know much. That doesn’t make her (or their) actions okay. It just makes her human, like them.

Now that I spoiled it, you won’t have to go see the movie. So don’t.

How much I don’t know. Even if you can figure out what somebody is doing, you rarely know why. Even if you think you do. I remember a point in the old story where I sent her a book I wrote. The book was revised, edited, fairly cleaned up, but it wasn’t perfect. She wrote a book, as well. When I sent her mine, I asked if I could read hers. She told me that she would know when it was ready, and until it was perfect, she didn‘t want anybody reading it. I remember feeling hurt, but not surprised. To me at the time, it seemed typical. I felt as if I would try to share the real me, the vulnerable me, and she would only share the perfect her, would only release whatever she considered unassailable. I would take a step out, and she would stay right where she was and critique whatever I would share. I felt like she was sitting there, staying perfect, judging me for being human. With her clinical distance, she could point out all the things that were wrong about me, but she would never share enough of herself to let me see anything that was wrong in her. A lot of the world feels this way about Christians. This is why they call us hypocrites. They are right. But they don’t know. And I didn’t know.

I thought I had figured out what was going on. I may have been right about some things. But I had no idea why. I don’t know her story, I only know mine. And even that, not so well. She built minefields around her heart. She built moats with dragons. Yet she called to others, called to know them and to be known by them. A Siren’s call to Scylla and Charybdis, that’s what it felt like to me. But what makes a Siren a Siren? Those who hurt others the most often are those who have been hurt the most. As they were hurt, they learned that they needed to guard themselves from others, even if that meant guarding yourself preemptively. So are they the cause, or are the ones who hurt them the cause, who in turn were hurt by others? Where does it start? Well, an infinite negative regress is impossible, so that leaves the Garden. All of our brokenness is found somewhere in between, and so are all of the ways we hide from that brokenness.

A year ago, in one of our unpleasant parting emails, I wrote something that I did genuinely hope would be of service to her. I told her that she was beautiful, but she never really believed that she was. Because of that, she inhabited a broken dialectic of pursuit. On one hand, being pursued by men who found her attractive validated her. At the same time, though, it made her squeamish to think that anyone would find her beautiful, because she did not find herself beautiful. Therefore, she only felt safe with guys who could not find her beautiful, such as inaccessible guys or guys who weren’t into girls. Because of this, she would not allow herself to be caught by a guy who found her beautiful, and when he got too close, she would push him away. I got hurt as I got caught in the middle of this. I think I was right, even looking back. That didn’t fix it, though. I didn’t know why she didn‘t feel beautiful, or why she had to be perfect, or why she pushed people away. I thought I did at the time, I even thought I might be able to fix it. In reality, I didn’t have a clue.

I look at my background. A father and mother who loved each other, a sister, a good family even if we were dysfunctional in our own ways. No major trauma, no Bruce Wayne-style gunshots, no Joy Gresham-style cancer, nothing like that. Standard childhood wounds and scars, maybe a little more than my share. I was the odd one out, the last one picked, all of those things, but nothing crazy. I think I took them hard. So maybe it is not so much what happened as how it affected the person it happened to. Four words said to a ten-year-old girl can scar her more deeply than the hatred of a thousand people voiced in print ten years later. Still, I have been blessed. It is not by my doing that I am not burdened with a childhood of broken trust. So trusting is then not as much of a challenge for me than it may be for another. This is not because I am a better person, only because God kept me safe. I don’t know what was in her past. I don’t know how it affected her. I don’t know what made the voices so loud for her, or what made it so difficult for her to trust. It doesn’t make it right. It just makes her human, the same way that I am.

Her coping mechanisms hurt me. But I have coping mechanisms as well. As I was ground between the gears of her defenses, I am sure I ground others between the gears of mine. Like the movie, it is easy to see how we hurt others when we use them as our defenses. The private defenses can be just as wounding, though. Mine is success… yet while I am busy being perfect, those who would want to know me are not allowed to. I spout words and answers about whatever questions or problems they have, but when they want to know more about who I am, they fall on their face when I refuse to open the door. Perhaps the private defenses are even worse, for they teach us to turn inside for the answer. At least a public defense would teach you to look outside yourself, where the only answer can be found.

C.S. Lewis talked about different ‘standards of decency.’ It may be that what is considered noble in one community is really only a minimum standard of decency in another. It may be that for a particularly selfish person, showing any act of altruism is a monumental achievement, while for someone of a more selfless disposition, giving away half of his wealth is as easy as scratching his nose. We aren’t graded on a curve, and praise God for that. Jesus pretty much blew that curve right out of the water for the rest of us. Instead of judging others for not performing in ways we would consider honorable, perhaps we should pray against the deep brokenness that leads them to those actions. We don’t know what is in their past, and we certainly don’t understand how it had affected them. We do know that person is loved by Jesus Christ. So instead of pronouncing more guilt, perhaps we should use our words to pronounce blessings. There’s certainly already enough guilt to go around.