"How do you really feel now?"

For the past several years, after our Christmas feast has been consumed and the presents opened, the adults gather to play a game. This year we played a card/board game called Compatibility. In this game, a topic is identified for you and you have to sort through 50 images on cards and select the requisite number of images that have the strongest association for you. The winner is most “compatible” with the other players, meaning he or she is able to correctly guess the most images in the proper order for everyone else that is playing. Along the way, you can learn what other people think about you as well as how your friends and family think of themselves.

After a couple of hours, I drew the topic, “How do you really feel now?” The entire group laughed as I had just whined about how long the game was taking, sounding tired and impatient. With that preface, I selected my image cards and each of my cousins selected the ones they thought I’d picked. It delighted me that all my cousins thought I selected a card with the word “happy” on it. While this characterized the night for me, unfortunately for them, it was not how I felt right that moment.

My primary card threw them all for a loop and earned me much teasing. It was the colorful image of a mask. My first reaction to the question had genuinely been that no one really, truly knew how I felt. My deepest emotions were masked from them. Not because I was intentionally misleading them or anything. Rather, our deepest thoughts, emotions, and desires are generally kept private. We guard them. We guard them not only from others, but largely even from ourselves. The root of the word personality is “persona,” meaning mask. While we can infer personality, we cannot directly observe it. Our personality, our emotions, thoughts, and desires, our true self is hidden behind a mask.

Discovering our own emotions and then sharing them with God (perhaps even within the context of a safe, loving relationship) is the essential premise of Ignatian spirituality. It is the basis for discovering our true self, for deepening our faith, and for walking an authentic, intentional life journey. We must look behind the mask to discover how we really feel and then share it and make it part of our lived reality. Otherwise, it simply remains hidden.