The Stranger.
Billy Joel, “The Stranger”
“Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves
When everyone has gone
Some are satin some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They’re the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on
Well, we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger
Did you ever let your lover see
The stranger in yourself?”
Billy Joel puts things a lot more eloquently than I do. If you are not familiar with the song, take time to listen to it. It is one of his finest works.
As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I ran into an old pre-school teacher in the library one day in 1999. She immediately recognized me when I gave her my ID to set up a library card and began telling me what a happy and creative little boy I was and what a joy it was to teach me. At this point in my life I was 25 and very jaded and the person that she was telling me about was a total stranger to me. I had a huge temper and nasty anger which I had developed to protect me from emotional pain like that which I dealt with my entire childhood. I let very few people close to me, and most of those who knew me knew of my temper and anger and knew not to get too close to me. And yet when I met this lady as I listened to her I could not help but yearn for the creative boy that she was telling me I once was. I barely remembered him, the days before school and before being told that drawing was a waste of my time. This was the very earliest stage of peeling the onion, slowly stripping away the layers of the mask. Every now and then I would have flashbacks of memory that reminded me of what I was like when I was young and free to be creative. I began to yearn for this person and wanted desperately to find him again. It would take another 10 years before any more work was done, when Fr. John A and I spent the summer working on getting control of my temper. It was another 5 years after that before I met Akira and the real work of peeling the onion began.
I had hidden away my real face from the world because time and again as a youth I was told that I was not good enough. Grandma told me that if I wanted to be an artist I would always be poor. Dad told me that the only true way to be successful was to be good with math and science and get a job like he had. Both of my parents always (and still to this day do) picked on me about my weight, because I am not a scrawny little bean pole the way they wanted me to be. Never mind that neither of them are at all thin. Dad was always on my case about not getting along with my mom. Mom wanted me to be cute and cuddly like a cocker spaniel and didn’t like the fact that I would catch her when she would yell “I hate you!” at me. God forbid that I as a child would challenge her on that statement and ask her how she could hate me and proclaim to love me more than life itself at the same time. My parents response to their failure as parents was to make me change schools in 5th grade and repeatedly send me to counselling. And so I lived in a constant battle between two adults who expected me to be an adult, even though I was only a child.
Other than a very small handful of friends, very few people saw my real face. My parents especially did not see it because I knew they would not approve. My dad to this day has the attitude of “I know everything in the world that is worth knowing.” If Dad and mom did not approve of something, they you better not be in favor of it. As an adult it almost makes me sick to look back on the fact that my dad actually influenced my musical taste. In 3rd grade he bought Billy Joel’s “An Innocent Man” album because of it being done as an homage to the musicians of the 50s. He ended up not listening to it very much, but I loved it, so I listened to it all of the time. By the time Greatest Hits Vol 1 & 2 came out 2 years later I was already a huge fan of Billy’s music and bought that double album with my own money. I remember being at Pizza Hut with my family one Friday night when Bruce Springsteen came on the juke box. Jennifer and I were all excited about Springsteen being played and my parents were very quick to put the music down because they didn’t like his voice. Meanwhile they listened to stuff from the 50s and early 60s that makes my dogs howling sound like a symphony.
College and post-college saw me put on even more fake masks as I tried to hide from the temper that I knew I had and did not want the world to see. In college I studied traditional Catholicism in my spare time, and spent my time around traditionalist Catholics, even though I really did not 100% agree with some of the things they believed. These activities consumed a great amount of my time and so for the most part I skated through college with a C average, when if I had actually put any effort at all in to it I could have gotten through with an average that pushed A’s. I decided while a senior in college that I wanted to go to Seminary. I felt there was a reason that I needed to be in Seminary, though I did not know why because the idea of a lifetime of celibacy was appalling to me. In order to get in to Seminary for the diocese that I had applied for you needed to do a full psychiatric evaluation. The preparation work for this interview with the psychiatrist took me all day to fill out. When I was finally done with it I had the most monstrous headache ever. I am not proud of the fact, but I lied my way through the entire meeting with the psychiatrist. I knew what he would be looking for in the interview, looking for anger issues, looking for signs that I was too conservative and too “rigid” for studies in a Catholic Church that had become increasingly liturgically and theologically liberal, and especially for any sign that he could use to say that I was not ready for seminary. I am not proud of the fact that I flat out lied to him during the interview and testing, but I managed to get past him and get approved to study at St. Vincent.
The funny thing about masks is that you can only wear them for so long before they become very uncomfortable. This is true of both physical masks as well as the masks that we wear to hide from reality. If you are at a party wearing a mask, you can simply take it off when it becomes uncomfortable. Things become a little more tricky when you are wearing a mask that hides your true self from reality. I was able to lie to the psychiatrist to get in to seminary and able to be tolerant of things that I greatly disagreed with during the first semester of seminary. I even got excellent grades that semester in all classes but Latin. But in the second semester, the mask began to crack as I began to find myself at first questioning and then finally openly disagreeing with some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. In the first semester I had begun to learn to paint icons and begun to learn the liturgy of the Orthodox Church since icons are a very liturgical art form. By the second semester I found myself agreeing with the Orthodox theology a lot more than Roman Catholic theology. As this was taking place my tolerance of things that I saw going on around me grew weaker and weaker and my temper began to flare regularly. I stayed in seminary studies for 1 school year and then left. Two years after leaving seminary I converted from Catholicism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. At this time I honestly thought that would be the end of any spiritual journey that I would be on.
It took a few years after leaving seminary for me to run in to that pre-school teacher in the library. After meeting her, I wanted to know who that stranger was that she told me about. This is what peeling the layers of the onion is all about. Freeing myself from the layers of mask that I had let build up on my soul to protect me from being hurt from the world, but which at the very same time were blocking and destroying my creativity. Learning that being creative and focusing on positive things is always superior to being negative and letting that negativity stunt and destroy the artist that God made me to be. Learning that there is a great joy in sharing your work with others and in encouraging them in their work. Learning that the greatest reward you can get for giving half of your sandwich to a total stranger is the look of thanks that they give you when you hand it to them. These are all ideas that were totally foreign to me before the onion began being peeled. Learning that it is finally OK to let the stranger show his face again and knowing that this time he won’t need to lash out at anyone to protect himself from the world.
So to quote Billy Joel again:
“Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger
Did you ever let your lover see
The stranger in yourself?”
Gloria in Excelsis Deo!
NB: The photo is of my friend and model Claire B., shot in my studio in 2013.
