Keepers of Secret Glories
Meditations | 007
I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. ~ Isaiah 45:3
Have you ever considered the possibility that every facet of your earthly existence was not meant to be known by everyone? We’ll breed such heretical thoughts here today, in the quiet of your mind. Our world functions on an ethos of vulnerability. An engine of compulsive exposure must be fed and it would be very suspicious if you weren’t seen baring all with the rest of them. Dance with them in the total glare of day, all shames and all delights eclipsed by the fire of experience equally shared. Remove the cloak of darkness from your being and allow the world to paw over your inner dreams and fears. Open yourself to every passerby as you would your lover. Remember, honesty is strict and total disclosure. Proclaim yourself to the public without censorship or silence or discretion. Comfort them in the solidarity of depravity. Dare not to suppress a thought or leave a desire unexpressed. After all, what do you have to hide?
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man? ~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Those who speak in this way do not have your best interests at heart. They are not seeking to share in your joys. Mystery is defined as criminality only by those possessed by paranoid minds and stained consciences. The innocent are free to enjoy the moonlight. Obscurity, pseudonymity, and anonymity are powerful weapons to be sure, but only reflexive meddlers refuse scissors because one could run with them. The temperate can conceive of other uses for spirits than debauch. To label hiddenness as the strict domain of sin is the admission of evildoers, not the righteous. Integrity can be hidden, and sin not. In refusing to run compulsively to display, we are mimicking the design of God, who hid the DNA helix and the atomic particle beyond millennia of human imagination, waiting for the discovery of the first pioneers to pierce matter’s veil. God delights in good secrets. Think of the best people you have ever known and recollect that there was an air of deep mystery about them. Their true nature was not a puddle, comprehended in an instant, but a deep well plumbed through decades of discovery. Realize that God speaks of Himself constantly as shrouded in thick clouds of smoke, inviting us to push through the haze to comprehend His hidden grandeur. Are you so shallow a person that you could truly desire to be comprehended representationally? Are you not alive?
Reduce your interests to a few...Pray for a single eye. Read less, but read more of what is important to your inner life. Never let your mind remain scattered for very long...Gaze on Christ with the eyes of your soul. Practice spiritual concentration. ~ A.W. Tozer, Of God and Men
I wonder often if this is not the true terror that cryptography has struck into the hearts of worldwide institutions; the (as yet totally unrealized) potential it holds to create hidden worlds beyond their ken. The amount of public hysteria directed towards the computational deployment of complex math problems seems totally mystifying unless those who are are afraid of true privacy cannot imagine a benign use for the darkness they employ so liberally. The existence of a box which might contain unseen rebellion claws at them psychically. What a joke when they decrypt the final hash with the last key and discover us there, joyfully tending our own digital gardens and sending happy-birthday messages to our grandsires on blockchain rails so obscured that robber barons would salivate enviously to behold their glory. This is incidentally why the obsessive quest for memelord fame and “mass adoption” are something of a canard. The web3 space ought to prize the fact that most of what we do remains indecipherable to our detractors and enemies. Fame is a carrot held out by those afraid of what you might get up to in obscurity. Why should you give over your kitchen knives and scalpels to someone who can only conceive of swords? Perhaps the true answer is that most of us live lives unworthy of secrecy. We might have nothing evil to hide, but no profound good to hide either. Nothing so wonderful or sacred that it cannot be paraded in the street. No joy so unutterably unique that it must be whispered of deep into the night. Nothing to encounter.
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. ~ 1 Corinthians 2:7
Compulsive exhibitionism is its own form of dishonesty. It is impossible for man to control all things, and you can do precious little about your image and perception before others. Stop trying to front-run the whims of the mob by projecting a paper-thin comprehendible façade. Keep your self for those who love you. Relearn modesty. Prize secrecy. Content yourself that your greatest joys and most meaningful accomplishments be hidden furthest from the eyes of the crowd. A person who is legible and defensible to all is knowable and lovable by none. If your need for the approval of others is so great that you cannot endure to be unknown by them, then you have need to seek the approval of God. If you know He does not approve and shrink from His secrecy, then of course you will of necessity fling yourself into the public square, where shame becomes meaningless as we shout together that nudity is the only possible state. What if you could stop hiding from God and start hiding from the world? You cannot be hermetically sequestered from the universe, and you’re a pretty weak creature so there’s not enough of you to go around. So now it’s just a game of who will see you truly when you let go of the last shreds of darkness. Choose wisely.
Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
~ Psalm 51:6
Well said. A good message to think on.