I have a strange habit of discovering profound spiritual truths while doing the least profound things imaginable.
This time, I was playing Dark Souls 3, repeatedly murdering the same two silver knights on the steps of Anor Londo. Those of you who understand why someone would do this are already praying for me. To those who don’t, there's a rare item called a Proof of a Concord Kept, and I need thirty of them. The drop rate is abysmal. I've climbed those stairs so many times that I dreamed about them last night.
So there I was, performing the FromSoftware equivalent of rolling the same boulder uphill for eternity, when I started crying about the body of Christ.
Typical Friday night stuff.
The night before, my church group had been discussing Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he describes Christians collectively as the body of Christ.
1 Corinthians 12:12
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
Paul’s message is that a body needs different parts. An eye can't reject a hand because it's not an eye. A head can't tell the feet that they're unnecessary. Each part has a different purpose, but all belong to the same body.
Our group took the metaphor somewhat literally and asked which body part each of us thought we might be.
An answer immediately popped to mind.
I’m a hand.
A hand is how we act upon the world. It builds things, fixes things, puts together puzzles, and occasionally has to clean up all the vile fluids that are ceaselessly produced by babies and puppies. I'm an engineer by training and disposition. I like tinkering, understanding how things work, and especially solving problems. In short, math class ruled.
The hand also holds the pen.
Writing is one of the central sources of meaning in my life. When I'm fully immersed in writing a scene, I lose track of time. The boundary between myself and the characters thins. I no longer think about whether I'm hungry, or whether I should check if someone responded to my post on X.
The common name for this experience is a flow state, and I believe it's one of the primary ways that we can answer the question of what gives our lives meaning. Perhaps it's also a way to discover what part of the body we are.
Another way to determine that, at least for me, is that I'm overcome by a welling of emotions and often cry. Usually it's while listening to an orchestra perform a stirring piece of music, or in admiration of a masterfully crafted story, or witnessing a heroic, self-sacrificial act. That sort of thing.
Sometimes it arrives out of nowhere, like when stabbing my eight-hundredth silver knight of Anor Londo. I like to think of it as an "upward stirring of the soul."
Certain things call us out of daily, mundane existence and toward some higher participation in life. They make us feel aligned with something beyond ourselves. I think this is one way of experiencing what Paul meant when he wrote, "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it." (1 Corinthians 12:27)
We all have different gifts – individual callings – yet we're part of the same body.
Only later did I realize that I had already spent years writing about bodies.
The Agency in An Ocean of Others is organized through an extended anatomical metaphor. Its leader is the Head. He conveys messages through the Nerves. The Organs handle the bureaucratic machinery. Eyes scout the Benefactor threats. Hands go into the field, with five Fingers assigned to each one.
I originally drew more from the old Soviet language of “organs of state” – I hadn't read Paul yet. The metaphor suited the Agency because it was faintly grotesque and thematically appropriate for a world where monsters assimilate human bodies to grow their own.
Looking at it now, the Agency feels almost like a perversion of the body of Christ.
It has many members with different purposes, but they're not bound by mutual love. They're overly hierarchical, inflexible, and coordinated through command. The body doesn't serve its members so much as consume them for the purposes of the Head. And the Hands become instruments of harm, carrying out a corrupt will.
Perhaps that's part of why the metaphor felt so natural to me. A body isn't good merely because its parts work together efficiently. Everything depends upon what the body is ordered toward.
A hand is also something you extend to another person.
I want to be useful, to help people, to take care of Rachel and Benny. I want to support my friends, contribute to my church community, and create stories that offer something meaningful to the people who read them.
That was my case for the hand.
The other members of the group listened politely and then informed me that I was obviously a brain.
Not a bad outcome, all things considered.
They said I was intelligent and insightful. They meant it sincerely, and I was grateful. But compliments about intelligence have always produced an odd reaction in me.
I was told I was smart throughout my childhood. It became part of my identity before I had much say in the matter. And I suspect that created two apparently contradictory habits.
The first is a kind of intellectual pride. If I'm being honest, I sometimes feel smarter than other people, and a small, shadowy part of me wants to translate that difference into superiority.
The second habit is refusing to believe anyone who calls me intelligent.
These tendencies seem opposed, but they may actually support each other, letting me privately believe the flattering thing while publicly denying it. That produces the appearance of humility without requiring the substance.
It's a pleasant little arrangement for the ego, but denying a real ability is not humility.
Intelligence is distributed unequally, just like athleticism, patience, courage, musical ability, mechanical skill, and everything else. Pretending otherwise honors no one. The moral error comes when we confuse unequal abilities with unequal human worth.
A person who can understand an abstract argument quickly is not intrinsically more valuable than someone who can't. When I think that, I can hear Paul chiding me. An eye isn't more valuable than a foot because it can see.
A brain can't look down upon a hand without forgetting that both depend upon the same heart.
I believe I do have a real gift for understanding ideas, finding connections between them, and communicating what I see. I didn't create that capacity from nothing. In our modern lingo we would say it was a gift from good genes or good upbringing. I now see it as a blessing from God. It doesn't make me better than anyone else. But it does leave me responsible for how I use it.
That last part is important. Gifts create obligations.
If writing ability is part of what I've been given, then I should try to become the best writer I can. Not because I need to prove myself exceptional, but because it would be wasteful to receive a gift and leave it wrapped up and sitting in a closet. If I'm a hand in the body of Christ, I owe it to God and to the rest of the body to become a capable hand.
That doesn't mean becoming the most productive, profitable, admired, or relentlessly optimized hand. It means becoming faithful to the purposes for which the hand exists.
Write when it's time to write. Build when something needs building. Comfort someone who is hurting. Open when the instinct is to clench. And sometimes, despite all my elaborate spreadsheets and project plans and Trello boards and deadlines, rest.
But a gift can't serve anyone if fear keeps it hidden.
The man behind the account
This brings me to something I've been reluctant to admit. I tend to manage other people’s perception of me very tightly.
I don't mean that I fabricate a false personality. What I show people is real, but it's often a carefully controlled portion of what's real.
Even in public places where conversation is expected, I tend to speak quietly on the phone so no one can overhear me. These are strangers I'll probably never encounter again. They have no power over my life. Some of them are speaking so loudly that the person on my call can hear them too. Yet some part of me is still thinking:
Be careful. If you give them any information about yourself, they might form an opinion about you.
I do this with more than just strangers. I do it with coworkers, extended family, friends, church members, and the amorphous crowd of people online. I'm constantly adjusting the aperture, letting through just enough light to be visible but not enough to be exposed. Often letting through so little light as to disappear.
Maybe I'm afraid of judgment, or disagreement, or losing someone’s approval. Even when none of it matters. By temperament, I'm aggressively agreeable. Anti-disagreeable, perhaps. When a moment comes that I know I need to be disagreeable, I start getting heart palpitations. So I work hard to avoid unnecessary conflict, which can be a good quality. Peace is generally preferable to endless combat.
But agreeableness, as with every positive trait, has a shadow.
Sometimes I withhold an honest opinion not because the moment calls for tact, but because I'm afraid of the possibility that someone might think less of me. That's what it is – fear – even if I call it prudence. It's usually easier to say nothing, because silence allows everyone to imagine that I agree with them.
Obviously, there's nothing wrong with privacy. Not every thought belongs in public. Every relationship has an appropriate level of intimacy, and mature people modulate their behavior according to context. We all do it, to some degree. I don't, and shouldn't, speak to coworkers exactly as I speak to my wife, any more than I should begin a company meeting by explaining the metaphysics of divine participation and the contingency argument. (Although that might improve some company meetings.)
Authenticity requires tact, not maximum disclosure. It doesn't mean saying every thought aloud, speaking at maximum volume, treating restraint as cowardice. So what's the issue?
The difference, I think, lies in why I'm withholding myself.
Am I remaining quiet because love, wisdom, or the needs of the moment call for restraint? Or am I remaining quiet because I'm afraid of being seen?
Mature authenticity means that even when I share only a portion of myself, the portion is faithful to the whole. Not exposing absolutely everything, but not continuously editing myself into someone easier to approve of.
Crossing the valley
There is an obvious risk to becoming more visible.
Some people will dislike what they see.
I have opinions about writing, publishing, artificial intelligence, faith, politics, philosophy, and over nine thousand other subjects. Some of those opinions conflict with the consensus of the communities I belong to. I usually express them privately, where I can control the audience and carefully explain every qualification.
Publicly, I remain much quieter.
Part of this is healthy. The internet has enough people spraying half-formed political opinions into every available space. Not every author newsletter needs to become a manifesto. Sometimes people really do just want to know how the book is going or, more likely, they want to see pictures of Nazgul.
But I also know some things.
I've written and published several books. I've made expensive mistakes and even, yes, occasionally learned from them. I've spent years thinking about stories, technology, human nature, and even if I didn't realize it consciously, faith and meaning. I probably have something useful to offer.
And if I sincerely believe something is true and helpful, refusing to say it merely because someone might disagree is a failure to extend the hand.
Becoming more vocal creates what I think of as an adaptive valley.
Imagine standing on a small hill. Across the valley is a mountain. The mountain is higher and offers a much better view, but reaching it requires temporarily descending.
A more authentic public life seems to work the same way. If I reveal more of what I actually think, some people will inevitably withdraw. A few opportunities may disappear. Someone who liked the carefully curated version of me may discover that the complete person is inconveniently complicated.
That loss might hurt. I've heard it called "the painful upgrade." But remaining on the little hill forever has a cost too. The relationships and opportunities available there are partly organized around an incomplete version of me.
Crossing the valley creates the possibility of reaching people who are aligned with who I actually am. It allows for more genuine friendships, rooted in recognition rather than projection. It allows my public work to become an extension of my real convictions rather than a product engineered for universal tolerability. (Ugh, how bland!)
And unlike an actual mountain, authenticity has no summit. There's always more integration possible. The writer, engineer, Christian, husband, father, friend, private thinker, and public speaker can and should become more recognizably the same man.
Not identical in every context, but revealing more parts of the same whole.
Many members
The body of Christ can't function if every part is trying to imitate every other part.
It also can't function if its members hide their gifts because using them might attract attention. An eye must be willing to see. A mouth must be willing to speak. A hand must be willing to act.
And a brain, apparently, must occasionally admit that it is a brain.
Discovering, and admitting to, our gifts lets us learn how we can best serve one another.
We're created in the image of God, continuously sustained by God, and invited to participate in divine life through grace. Every moment of our existence is known and sustained by Him. Nothing we experience occurs outside His presence.
That should provoke gratitude.
We belong to something larger than ourselves, not like replaceable pieces in a machine but as distinct persons whose particularity matters. The body needs its many members precisely because they're different.
Perhaps becoming more fully ourselves is not a retreat into individualism. Perhaps, properly understood, it's an act of service. The hand does not become more hand-like by severing itself from the body. Instead it must serve the body according to its nature.
So I'm trying to loosen my grip on how other people perceive me.
I think the best way is through small acts of truthful visibility. Speaking at a normal volume. Offering the opinion I actually hold. Accepting a compliment with a simple thank you instead of immediately explaining why it can't possibly be accurate.
Writing something like this and allowing you to see the person behind the author account. Am I oversharing? Probably. But my sin has been undersharing, and I'm writing this for myself as much as for you.
I want to be a good hand. Maybe a bit of a brain too.
I already know that, while farming Proofs of a Concord Kept, I'm a functional tear duct.