On Intimacy (We’re pretty screwed up)

The one confounding concept that many struggle to grapple with, let alone face. The one primal human desire that many seek yet so few of us manage to fulfill. A yearning, a longing, a pining, a hankering that lies deep in the Human Heart that seems to be deliberately ignored by the Mind in all efforts to defend oneself from all forms of vulnerability- illusions or otherwise.

There’s no wrong in being found out.

So we tell ourselves, the impostors we are, before we lay our heads in slumber at night. Though we lie asleep, assured in this sentiment, our innate self-defense remain awake, vigilant; our prides swelling in our hearts and drowning out all other voices in our heads that fearlessly champion the need for Intimacy. We fight tirelessly to deny ourselves of our humanity, our true nature to err, to commit mistakes, the sheer imperfection that make us merely human.

Surely everyone has been hurt before.

A heartbreaking truth that in this Modern Age, stands head and shoulders above all in its certitude. The apparent innate ugliness of Humanity is to blame for shutting out the world from the core of our hearts, the blame for our fatal mistake of starving ourselves of the deep kinship and understanding our hearts oh-so-crave placed squarely on the shoulders of the next convenient scapegoat we find. An ex-boyfriend, an ex-girlfriend, an estranged former best friend, a parent, a cousin twice removed, a teacher, a student or a stranger. Best example is the helpless damsel who struggles with the wounds her ex-boyfriend deals her heart, encasing herself in self-pity, having pulled wool over her eyes- to call it self-preservation or a self-defense mechanism of sorts. Of course, she’s the one who waves the 21st century feminist banner, “Where have the Nice Guys gone?”

We have to get tired of all this at some point.

We expend our energy chasing or running away from these figments of our imagination, our minds having been fed by the ideals of today’s post-modernist call to shut the doors to our hearts and throw the keys down a well. Run; from the friend who betrays you, from the relationships that suddenly turn sour, from situations you find yourself “Too grown up or busy to deal with” (surely a lie we all fall for from time to time?), from the God who pursues you with His all?

Fatigued, exhausted, our hearts lie in our chests as we finally slump to catch our breaths realize that we haven’t a clue what exactly it is that’s wearing us down, when we realize that all the needless running has hurt far too many around us- ourselves included.

Modern Evangelistic Christianity is often found marketing God as the solution to all our issues with intimacy- a truth I dare not deny, I might add- but strangely enough, we Christians ourselves remain to be convinced that all the fighting, running and lies will eventually get us somewhere.  The strangest of God’s creatures, we run from the things we purpose for- Charity, Forgiveness, Acceptance and well, Love.

We’re pretty screwed up, aren’t we?