The Realm of Death Pt 3

Hiding

            Because the worth we receive in our fallen state is conditional, our strategies for getting life always require hiding and performing. We were created to receive, experience, and overflow with unconditional worth. It is impossible for us to feel truly fulfilled without this. Whatever momentary satisfaction we may experience in receiving worth conditionally, based on what we do, we are invariably left with a sense that something about us is defective. We experience shame.

            Since it is the very absence of unconditional worth that creates this shame, we can’t ever rid ourselves of it by any strategy for getting life. We can only hide it. We have to cover our nakedness.

            Why do we have to hide our shame? For the same reason we experience the shame. The lie that created our emptiness in the first place leads us to eat of the forbidden tree that now judges our emptiness as defective. Were we not living in our knowledge of good and evil, we would not critically assess ourselves in terms of what we are and are not supposed to be, and we would not experience any emptiness. We thus hide our shame from the very thing that creates the shame: our knowledge of good and evil.

            We try to hide our shame from ourselves, from each other, and from God. Because we view God and others through the filter of our knowledge of good and evil, we view them as judges from whom we must hide and before whom we must perform. Because we are empty, we are driven by a strategy to get worth, and this requires avoiding at all costs any judgment that suggests we lack worth. We thus have to hide from the world from which we are trying to get life.

            We might say that the world in which we place ourselves in the center as judge becomes a world full of threatening judges. We view everyone, and we assume everyone views us, with the critical eye of the knowledge of good and evil. Our lives of innocence have been replaced by lives of hiding.