Long before blogs (when the web’s groundwork was being laid) a gentleman by the name of Walker Percy, a life-long Catholic with a vibrant evangelical faith that led him from pursuing a promising career as a doctor of the body to pursue a faith rooted calling to be a doctor of the soul as a novelist, groaned on behalf of his generation, as he observed himself and those around him. He reflects on his groaning in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do With the Other (and then later he considers these things again in his book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book):

Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use? Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history and in the very century when he had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and brotherhood? Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why do people often feel so bad in good environments that they prefer bad environments?

He adds to these reflections in the latter book, Lost in the Cosmos:

How is it possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California–or the Cosmos?

Brennen Manning, author of The Ragamuffin Gospel, and also a life-long Catholic with a vital, evangelical faith (i.e., faith that the “evangel” is, in fact, truth unto life itself), observes himself and his contemporaries along with Percy and, also along with Percy, groans with wonder, and then begins to offer something of an answer: “How is it possible? Because we are awash in lies about ourselves, not least of all passionately denying that we are sin-saturated bundles of paradoxes. We drink in, savor, believe, and perpetuate these lies, both by silence as well as verbal declaration.” But …

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good, but someone who experiences the goodness of God.”

A few pages later he quotes Paul Tillich (not one of our tradition’s most trusted theologians, but …)

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life [lives of lies, we should note]. … It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness [think John 1], and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. [Simply 'come unto Me and rest.'] Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.” When that happens, we experience grace.

Truthing about ourselves is a function of grace, a byproduct of the work of grace by the Spirit in our lives; it is a fruit of that creating Word-made-effective by the Spirit; Truthing about ourselves to our Lord (who already knows) and to others (who also already know more than we care to acknowledge) and to ourselves (who are the last to truly come to know ourselves) is the way of God’s life-giving grace in Christ which leads to the promise of SHALOM in and with Christ for real people in real life in real space and time. Thus the proclamation of the Gospel on the lips of Jesus: “Be repented of the lies, those myriad misconceptions and myth-conceptions, that bind, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Be renewed, reborn, recreated in the Truth, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”