As a social role the concept of the persona is useful in allowing an individual to move in and out of relationships without being too vulnerable. A persona can be the oil to ease potential social friction. A persona provides for some predictability of relationship, but wearing a mask may become a sub-personality preventing us from embracing our true spiritual identity.
The Masks We Wear
Wearing A Mask May Become a Sub-Personality Preventing Us From Embracing Our True Spiritual IdentityBy Eugene C. RollinsAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Dr. Eugene C. Rollins
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4389-9712-4Contents
Dedication............................vForeword..............................ixIntroduction..........................xiChapter One...........................1Chapter Two...........................21Chapter Three.........................31Chapter Four..........................41Chapter Five..........................53Chapter Six...........................63Chapter Seven.........................73Chapter Eight.........................83Chapter Nine..........................93Chapter Ten...........................103Chapter Eleven........................113Chapter Twelve........................123Chapter Thirteen......................131Chapter Fourteen......................143Chapter Fifteen.......................153Chapter Sixteen.......................161Chapter Seventeen.....................171Bibliography..........................183Suggested Reading.....................185About the Author......................187
Chapter One
The Most Tragic Mask of All!
TEXTS: Genesis 1:26-31; John 4:24; James 3:9-11
CIT: (Central idea of the text) God created humankind in God's image.
THESIS: Having been created in God's image, we are spirit.
PURPOSE: Major Objective: Doctrinal Specific Objective: Through the power of the Holy Spirit, I hope to lead each of us in affirming our true spiritual identity.
TITLE: The Most Tragic Mask of All!
INTRODUCTION
OUTLINE
I. Masks Have a Positive Use
II. Masks Have a Negative Use
III. Masks Have a Serious Unhealthy Use
IV. A Mask May Become a Sub-Personality
V. Our True Spiritual Identity
A. Humankind Is to Extend God's Life on Planet Earth-Genesis 1:26a.
B. Humankind Is to Express God's Character on Planet Earth-Genesis 1:26b.
C. Humankind Is to Exhibit God's Power on Planet Earth-Genesis 1:26c.
CONCLUSION
The Word of the Lord
Genesis 1:26-31 (All of the Bible Scripture in this book is quoted from the New International Version)
Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, over the livestock and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful, and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seeds in it, they will be yours for food. And so all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that has breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that he had made and it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
John 4:24
Jesus said, God is spirit and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.
James 3:9-12
With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father and with it we curse men who have been made in God's likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and curses. My brothers, this should not be. Can both freshwater and saltwater flow from the same spring? My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring bear fresh water.
Introduction
All of us wear masks. It is normal and natural to wear a mask from time to time. Oscar Wilde said, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." There is some truth to Wilde's statement. The purpose of a mask is to hide, conceal, or disguise. Its use has been traced back seven thousand years BC, and according to Joseph Campbell, its use has been found in every human society, in art, song, liturgies, and life-empowering visions by seers, medicine men and women, poets, theologians, and philosophers.
Masks have been worn by people everywhere, for everything from religious rituals to costume parties, from dramatic performances to protective devices in sports. For many reasons, masks have an archetypal fascination for us as humans.
Carl Jung said, "The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is." Robert Johnson refers to the persona as our "psychological clothing." The persona refers to that aspect of the ego that we present to the world for its approval. It is like a mask, and we can hide behind it.
The word persona comes from the Greek word for the large masks that early Greek actors would use to portray their characters. With audiences in the big Greek amphitheater, the nuances of performances could easily be lost. The primary function of the mask was not to hide the actor but to give information about the character. The persona is the mask or role that a person plays in society. While it gives information, it can be used to hide the ego.
The concept of the persona as a social role is useful in allowing an individual to move in and out of relationships without being too vulnerable. A persona can be the oil to ease potential social friction. A persona provides for some predictability of relationship. For example, the personas of doctor and patient or of student and teacher can be useful in knowing what to do, when, and where. Other examples of the persona are mother, father, husband, wife, lawyer, judge, policeman, and baker. A persona becomes a problem only when a person becomes too attached to it and cannot put it aside; for example, when someone who is a judge is a "judge", all the time at work and at home. Or perhaps, a teacher who is in her role all the time. When a person cannot move flexibly between roles, then the persona hides the person not only from others but also from himself. It is difficult for such a person to have appropriate self-knowledge.
An overemphasis on the persona blocks avenues of communication not only between people but also between the ego and the darker aspects of the personality that need to be acknowledged. These darker aspects are represented by the shadow.
I. Masks Have a Positive Use
When a person comes to see me as a therapist, I have on my therapist mask. She has on her client mask! When she comes in, we do not talk about the weather, the current conditions of sports, or politics; we get right to the business at hand. What is the presenting problem? Our roles are clear. There are times when a mask serves us and serves us well because it helps us to identify the situation, the circumstances, who we are in relationship with, and why. We then can do immediately whatever is necessary. When I fill the pulpit, I wear a robe. It is like a mask. When my three-year-old grandson saw me in it for the first time, he asked, "Papa, why do you have on that dress?"
All of us often wear the "I am fine" mask. I will be walking down the hospital hallway, and a total stranger will approach me saying, "How are you today?" I respond as I put on the "I'm fine" mask: "I am fine, thank you." I do not stop him and say, "I have a horrible prostate infection and haven't peed in two days." It is a good thing that we wear this "I'm fine" mask. So the wearing of a mask has a positive use and at times can serve us well.
II. Masks Have a Negative Use
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) wrote a poem entitled, "We Wear the Mask":
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes- This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us while We wear the mask. We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries To Thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
All too often, a smile is a mask to hide the deep pain within. The minstrel show, also known as the "blackface tradition," was a popular form of American entertainment in the nineteenth century. In this tradition, both white and black persons darkened their faces with a black substance made of burnt cork and grease. They outlined their lips with red or white pigment and performed onstage an exaggerated fictional representation of African American men and women. They were depicted as "happy slaves" despite their inhumane treatment. Langston Hughes wrote a poem entitled, "Minstrel Man."
Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth is wide with laughter, You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing, You do not know I die?
Charles C. Finn captured the inner pain and struggle of wearing a mask with his poem "Please Hear What I'm Not Saying."
Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear For I wear a mask, a thousand masks, Masks that I'm afraid to take off, And none of them is me. Pretending is an art that's second nature with me, But don't be fooled, For God's sake don't be fooled. I give you the impression that I'm secure, That all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well As without, That confidence is my name and coolness my game, That the water's calm and I'm in command And that I need no one, But don't believe me. My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask, Ever-varying and ever-concealing. Beneath lies no complacence. Beneath lies confusion, and fear, and aloneness. But I hide this. I don't want anybody to know it. I panic at the thought of my weakness exposed. That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind, A nonchalant sophisticated facade, To help me pretend, To shield me from the glance that knows. But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only hope, And I know it. That is, if it's followed by acceptance, If it's followed by love. It's the only thing that can liberate me from myself, From my own self-built prison walls, From the barriers I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me Of what I can't assure myself, That I'm really worth something. But I don't tell you this. I don't dare to, I'm afraid to. I'm afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance, Will not be followed by love. I'm afraid you'll think less of me, That you'll laugh, and your laugh would kill me. I'm afraid that deep-down I'm nothing And that you will see this and reject me. So I play my game, my desperate pretending game, With a facade of assurance without And a trembling child within. So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks, And my life becomes a front. I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that's really nothing, And nothing of what's everything, Of what's crying within me. So when I'm going through my routine Do not be fooled by what I'm saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm not saying, What I'd like to be able to say, What for survival I need to say, But what I can't say. I don't like hiding. I don't like playing superficial phony games. I want to stop playing them. I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me But you've got to help me. You've got to hold out your hand Even when that's the last thing I seem to want. Only you can wipe away from my eyes The blank stare of the breathing dead. Only you can call me into aliveness. Each time you're kind, and gentle, and encouraging, Each time you try to understand because you really care, My heart begins to grow wings- Very small wings, Very feeble wings, But wings! With your power to touch me into feeling You can breathe life into me. I want you to know that. I want you to know how important you are to me, How you can be a creator-an honest-to-God creator- Of the person that is me If you choose to. You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble, You alone can remove my mask, You alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic, From my lonely prison, If you choose to. Please choose to. Do not pass me by. It will not be easy for you. A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls. The nearer you approach to me The blinder I may strike back. It's irrational, but despite what the books say about man Often I am irrational. I fight against the very thing I cry out for. But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls And in this lies my hope. Please try to beat down those walls With firm hands but with gentle hands For a child is very sensitive. Who am I, you may wonder? I am someone you know very well. For I am every man you meet And I am every woman you meet.
III. Masks Have a Serious Unhealthy Use
Over these many years, I have been exploring the process of confiding personal information to others. The act of revealing something personal and private about oneself to another person is one that for most of us is fraught with anxiety. We are so accustomed to presenting a facade, a mask, a persona to others that the idea of letting another person really know us can be frightening beyond measure. We are afraid if others know us as we really are, if they know what we have really done in the past, what we really think, feel, plan, want, and seek at the present, they will reject us. Therefore, most of us play a role in our dealings with others. We live a life of acting, of duplicity. We attempt to present ourselves as the kind of person who will be acceptable, likable, admirable, employable, marriageable, and in the process we suppress and hide any characteristics of ourselves that would endanger our purposes of the moment.
Research and clinical experience as a pastoral caregiver and a pastoral psychotherapist have shown me that when such pretense, such attempts to hide one's actual self, proceed over a period of years that the person gradually loses direct contact with her actual self. We say that the person has become increasingly self-alienated. She lives a life of seeming rather than being. Her real feelings, wants, attitudes, and convictions have become unknown to her because she represses them. The person no longer knows who or what she really is or what she really feels and believes. Instead, she expresses feelings, wishes and attitudes, that will make her seem acceptable to others and to herself. This person is living a life of egocentric isolation rather than a life of integrated wholeness.
Now, when a person no longer knows what she really wants, needs, or feels, her behavior can no longer be effective as a means of satisfying the basic need to be understood by others and the need to grow as a person. How can you be understood if you remain unknown? How can you grow without risking? When behavior is no longer effective in achieving these goals-a sense of identity, of being understood, and ongoing growth-the result is feelings of boredom, anxiety, depression, and frustration, or more generally, a sense of emptiness in one's existence. This is in spite of economic or professional success or popularity.
I have reason to suspect that such feelings as despair are widely current among average people, people who are normal in the sense of being typical, but who are not healthy in the sense of buoyant mental and physical health. If a person is sufficiently estranged from her real self, then since her needs are going to remain neglected, she will fall ill from time to time. She will become more susceptible because of lowered resistance to the various infectious ailments that are always with us; or she will suffer some gradually developing stress disease because she ignores the early warning signals of stress that arises from chronically pent-up rage. Or if self-estrangement has proceeded far enough, the suppressed aspects of the real self will come back in forms that psychiatrists recognize as some forms of mental illness.
Thus it seems true that chronically hiding the self from others, through fear or failure to be and disclose oneself, can lead in roundabout ways to various forms of breakdown and misery, to physical and mental illness. Social disguises, the wearing of a mask and impersonations, consume enormous amounts of creative energy. It is no coincidence, although we don't even yet fully understand all the mechanisms that are involved, that much healing occurs simply as an outcome of confession, of confiding, of full self-disclosure to a physician, psychotherapist, minister, or friend. The very act of confiding, of making oneself known as one is and as one has been, seems to relieve tension, and of equal importance, it promotes self-understanding; it makes it possible for a person to change her behavior with others in basic ways, if she dares, so that it will do better justice to her own peculiar needs, thereby yielding richer satisfactions in existence and promoting higher-level health.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Masks We Wearby Eugene C. Rollins Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Eugene C. Rollins. Excerpted by permission.
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