Reticence is a virtue.
We live in a self-indulgent world that is quite the opposite of civil. Civility is the quality of removing enough of yourself from the common market of human interaction to participate without intruding on anyone else. The goal of civility is to avoid looming large, pretending significance only in the eyes of those with whom life requires you to remain close. Life is the thing; it’s not about us as individuals.
Our world is populated by millions of isolated countries of individuals. Community must not happen; that would diminish us. We have no awareness of safely building ourselves with commitment into something worthy, something bigger than ourselves. Instead, nothing is bigger than the self.
This is completely backwards to what God had in mind. We need not attempt the impossible task of backing up until we are back in Eden; we can’t go there until we leave this world. Rather, monumental enough is the task of simply recovering what God said was possible after the Fall. We have no idea because our world has not simply wandered off, but scattered in frantic fear of having to sacrifice some small piece of ourselves to be near God.
So we live the paradox of being so utterly individually alone because we insist on pushing our whole selves into every other eye. We have no sense of scale when it comes to community. There are a million ways to do it wrong, but only one way is consistent with the design God used in creating the universe.
That way has very soft edges, because it was meant to require paying full attention to God’s individual calling for each of us. If you do not participate in His society, you cannot participate at all, because there is no other society in existence. We have well dreamed up all sorts of imaginary societies, forcefully willing them into some semblance of reality in our minds, but all of them are fake. We remain isolated and it burns, whether conscious or not. Your very real intimate lover remains only a machine with no lasting fulfillment, so the burning agony of isolation continues. It may be not be fully conscious; you can lie to yourself. Still, it’s there and it makes us hungry. We burn ourselves out in seeking every way except the one our Creator proclaimed.
When in your dying thirst someone gives you water, you must first sip slowly or you will vomit it all back up and be worse off. The path to the deepest communion possible in our fallen space is to sip slowly and offer only small sips of ourselves. There is no virtue in probing questions about the details of another’s soul, nor spilling out the full content of our character. Communion grows strongest in the soil of common commitment to something far, far bigger. You don’t need to know about me, but about my commitments. We have no idea how to do that because our society threw that away centuries ago.
We have to rediscover, and rebuild, or we have nothing. We have nothing more than our wild imaginations, the vivid vapors that disappear in the slightest breeze of human sorrow. We have no strength to endure because we have too long consumed nothing of substance in this empty world.
It’s not about us, but about communion itself.
