One of my favorite short stories is “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. A dystopian tale, the story unveils a world stricken by false fairness: Beautiful people are burdened with ugly masks; strong people with bags of birdshot; graceful people with weights and shackles; intelligent people with ear devices that send shocking sounds to disrupt their thought processes. The narrative invites the reader into a world of people hampered from being their true selves, all in the name of creating a false equality. News anchors have speech impediments, ballerinas are weighted down as to be less graceful—you get the point.
The end of the story sees Harrison—a fourteen-year-old male—escape from government custody. He’s seven feet tall, handsome, extremely intelligent, and graceful. He crashes onto a televised ballet stage and proclaims himself the new emperor—something only someone continuously mistreated and held back would do.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a
greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can
become! "
A seemingly societally-imposed insanity has gripped him, yet his true desire is to be seen, to be heard, and to be his best self. Stripping away his mask and all the hampering devices placed upon him, he stands tall and beautiful. The rest of the story you can read for yourself (I found it here), but I’d like to concentrate on Bergeron’s act of shedding his weights, his burdens, and—against what the world tells him to be—showing his true self. He’s so heavy-laden prior to this that he can’t possibly be sane, but can we blame him? The world has taught him that he is to be diminished, that he should take on burdens to hide his created beauty. He defies that, even to his own death, just for a moment of pure freedom and expression of self. But the world soon forgets his death, including his own parents, because they’re so heavily indoctrinated into the counter-intuitive normal that society has allowed to become status quo.
Right now, we’ve been asked to wear masks. But in reality, we’ve always worn them. We wear them to cover our insecurities, our weaknesses, our deepest pain. Right now, we are burdened by financial hardship and have been handicapped by forced separation. We’re separated for our own safety, for once being a valid reason; we’re struggling financially because of the lack of work out there and the lack of businesses’ ability to conduct their trades. But in reality, we’ve always been burdened by hardship at some point, financial or otherwise; in reality, we’ve always been handicapped by forcibly separating ourselves into a ‘us vs. them’ mentality.
Now is a time where we can make a choice. We can choose to blame the current context for the rise in separation from one another, for the continued economic gap that sees impoverished people fall farther into debt and despair, and we can keep wearing our masks—blinded to the truth of this world.
Or we can choose to truly follow Jesus.
Didn’t Jesus say, “Come to me all you who are heavy-laden and I will refresh you?” These masks are heavy, y’all. They cause us to look down and plough ahead, trudging forward in the muck and mire of worldly enticements. What if we let them go? Not the ones that we are physically wearing—those are arguably actually doing something—but the ones we’ve been wearing all along? What if we were to let each other see the beauty with which we were each created, disallowing societal influence to instruct us on how we are to treat one another?
We are each burdened by something. It’s time we allow the masks to fall down so that the burdens can follow. We are unique. We are beautiful. We are created equally in spirit, but our bodies are painted with the beautiful array of God’s palette; we are different hues, sizes, and genders. We are different thinkers and believers, but aren’t we also supposed to let the same mind of Christ be in us as is in Him? In a time where we can’t see each other’s faces, our words and actions matter more than ever. We must lay the burdens of preconceived notions and division down. We the people of God hold these truths to be divinely evident: That we shall love God, love our neighbors, and love ourselves. We don’t need the armor of the figurative masks we wear—they don’t protect us, they wear us down and separate us.
As Harrison died in order to truly live for a moment, let us die to Christ and remember our true identities…the people behind the masks, and watch what we become. After we and the rest of the world witness that, forgetting won’t be possible.
Then we will see and hear each other again…
…or maybe for the first time.
Faithfully,
Fr. Sean+