A while back, I woke up one morning and couldn't find my rings as I was getting ready. The rings I wear are pretty special to me. They aren't the expensive kind, they're just really meaningful - two of them were custom made for special occasions, another was my wedding ring, and then there was the San Francisco Embarcadero street vendor ring ... Losing one ring would have been a loss, all of them at once was a pretty big deal to me. There are very few material 'things' I'm attached to, but I felt attached to my rings.
So, I did a pretty thorough search and found nothing ... but I decided not to fret because they were sure to turn up - I chalked it up to scatterbrain-itis, which I suffer from with frustrating regularity. One of my housemates looked through my room, my purse, my jacket ... everywhere, just in case I'd missed something. Someone else wrote a note on the community white board asking if anyone had seen them.. but no one had.
After a few days, we all started thinking that maybe the rings had been stolen. No one wanted to think about it early on, we all thought they'd turn up and didn't want to be making crazy assumptions. (scatterbrain-itis is not a condition one can keep very secret, and I suspect everyone believed it was to blame!) But, when no rings turned up, we started to piece together an understanding that there must have been some kind of weird security breach ... I might have left our door open, or left the rings in the common area, and somehow it must have happened that someone got into the space and snatched them. Security breaches have happened, though not often, and others have had things stolen from their personal space, it wasn't all that far fetched (even though we try to be vigilant about locking things up). I walked to all the pawn shops in the neighborhood, described the rings and hoped for the best, but came back empty handed and discouraged.
After a couple of weeks, one of our community friends called me, saying that he'd heard about the rings being missing and he felt guilty. He said he'd seen them on the counter and hadn't touched them. He was intoxicated and weepy, saying that he felt ashamed and guilty. It sounded like a confused and broken admission of guilt. As I talked it over with some of the other Flatlanders, we remembered that that he'd been acting very strange the day the rings went missing, and that he'd left very unexpectedly even though he'd been planning to stay for waffles... hmmm. Later that day, I asked our friend straight up if he'd taken them, and he said no. I assured him that our friendship was more important than rings, and told him that I wouldn't be that mad even if he had done it. He still said, nope, he hadn't done it. In the moment, I believed him. But then, I sat with the new details for a few more days and slowly replaced my 'the-rings-were-stolen-by-a-random-person' understanding with a new 'the-rings-were-stolen-by-my-friend' understanding. It seemed only reasonable ...
Last Sunday, one of my housemates came to my room and said she had a surprise for me .. A few others had followed her up to watch me receive the big surprise... I was hoping for chocolate, but instead she opened her hand and there, in her curled up palm, were my rings. Over a month after they had gone missing, there they were in her hand. Turns out I had left them in her room when I was attending to some medical equipment she has in there. I left them on a shelf near her bed. We'd all completely forgotten that I'd gone into her room, no one ever thought to look there. So, in the end, scatterbrain-itis was the culprit after all.
Maybe you think the story will end here, but I'm gonna keep going.
You know my friend, the one who phoned me grief-struck and feeling guilty because I'd lost my rings? It was so easy for us to believe he'd done it. He'd done stuff like that before, he had acted strange and ran off on the day they went missing ... the pieces all fit together - we reasoned that it must have been him. It was just so reasonable to believe that he was guilty, and to accuse him in our minds and hearts.
One of the things I've learned over and over and somehow still need to keep re-learning is that reason is not necessarily trustworthy. Somehow, I'm way too willing to trust my own ability to reason. It has allowed me to doubt people far too quickly - people who are my friends and to whom I want to offer honor and dignity. More than I want to admit, my reasoning marginalizes people. I'm ashamed of the perch of superiority that I can climb onto with such ease. I'm ashamed that I'm so easily skeptical of my friend but so sure of myself.
The thought that I just can't shake is ... whats it like to be my friend? To hear that something went missing and to feel responsible, to feel blamed even though you had nothing to do with it and you weren't accused? What it like for those kinds of beliefs about yourself to live in your head, day in and day out?
Maybe more importantly - how much has my, or our, collective 'reasoning' contributed to his deep seated feelings of guilt and shame?
Ouch.
this post is long enough - but I can't help thinking about john 9 and the story of the man born blind.. to reveal the glory of God. (and the arrogance of those who think they know....)
