Peanuts: A Door to Self-Knowledge

From about fourth grade, I was exiled to the peanut-free lunch table. I was granted a buddy to accompany me each day. My friends would rotate, and I would eat daily with someone.  

After some months of this, rumors dispersed that I was maligning the new girl in class. Naturally, my rotation of friends to accompany me to the peanut-free table thinned. What was initially five-or-so girls who would take turns in gladness diminished to two who would take turns in something less than gladness, and eventuated to my eating lunch alone.  

Now, this rumor flourished in my absence. I was not privy to it until I had already acclimated to eating alone. To riding the bus alone.

Now, what probably serves as a testament to my broodiness or perhaps an omen to my current studies in philosophy and theology, are the questions which befuddled me. What is truth? If what they believe of me is sufficient to terminate benevolent relations with me, what of what was prior, of the feelings of warmth and being known, which I had with them? If these previous experiences were true, they would know me. They would know the falsity of their claims against me.  

In my stubbornness I did not petition against their claims.  I bid all too fully and all too highly on the antecedent truth of our friendship on their knowing and loving me from years prior.

This segment of my childhood culminated in my fourth grade teacher bringing to my attention that I had purported negative claims about some M, to whom I ought to apologize. My latent denial was but a sorry proof of my guilt. 

Now a pithy statement of how this injustice shaped me would be cliché. But it did shape me. Yet it is not straight away that it shaped me to be better. It misinformed me of the value of truth. 

Thus, such a treatment, that it made me grow, would be false, for the direction of my growth was backward. I grew timid and inward in a period where children flourish by growing to relate to one another. 

What took hold of me was a suspicion of people, most poignantly of myself—my incompetence to relate to another in truth. That is, to the degree that I had confessed my innocence to my teacher, who responded with a gaze that sealed my guilt, my perception and my knowledge became a question to me. They had failed me. The truth was inert. Moreover, such experiences echoed that I was not known truly and that I was not loved. 

What consoled me during this period was the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus was unburdened by falsity. He was known to himself. He was loved as the Son of God. 

As an aside, such vignettes of his silence likely aggravated my timidity. For his silence proceeded from holy trust, whereas my silence proceeded from habit. 

Alas, the statute of limitations on the calumniation of a nine-year-old has long passed, and this latent vocalization is last of all a demand for satisfaction. 

What I mean to share is that there is, in the quiet of my heart, a desire to be known and loved; and, what a gift it was that I could know it so early on. My intention of sharing this rather peculiar fragment of my personal history is to bid you to befriend this desire, to attend to it. 

With careful attention to this desire to be known and loved, we can approach the nature of being in which God has graciously invited us to participate: Himself in His essential uncomposed act of knowing and loving. We might find this desire is not to be rid of, much less freed from. We can abide in this desire as it is being satisfied right now, in each moment that His unchanging understanding and loving sustains us in Himself.