Illusions

Thoughts on feeling connected.

I live in the same town in which both of my parents were born. I have known and been known here for my entire life, to the point that in college I would warn new friends, on our way to the theater or a restaurant or concert, “We are going to run into at least three people I know, and I will be related to one of them.” The funny thing is, it almost always happened, much to my delight, and to my companion’s discomfiture.

So when we moved back here after Wayne’s stint in the Marine Corps, I was utterly surprised one day to hear an old friend say, “I am so glad to finally get to know you!” This baffled me. I had known this sweet friend since I was probably ten years old, and felt like I knew her pretty well. But then I realized: she didn’t know me. We were several years apart in age, and when I was ten, she was already in high school. We went to church together, so I heard her testimony, listened to conversations in which she shared her heart, saw her character grow. I observed her and took in a lot. But as the younger girl, I stayed more in the background. None of the teenagers or adults probably really knew what was going on inside my head during that time. So it was only until we returned to my hometown, and I was a fully-fledged adult with children of my own, that our interactions happened more on the level of peers. To this day, she is one of my dearest friends, and that memory just brings me a smile. But I share it because I think it will shed light on something I have been contemplating.

On a previous post, a friend commented that he was so thankful to hear about what we are going through, but was also concerned that we might not hear from people as often because of it, that friends may ask less, that we may feel alone. And today, at church, another friend told me that it was good to stay caught up with us through my blog. In that moment, I realized that he felt caught up with me, but that I did not, in turn, feel caught up with him. These comments, within a day of each other, made me realize it is really important to address the idea of knowing.

(And yes, here is one of those posts in which I wax philosophical. Please forge ahead with me! Haha. Join me on the ramble, and I promise you, we will arrive somewhere. Together.)

What does it mean to know someone? Did you know (pun intended) that there is a branch of philosophy that just explores the ideas surrounding how we know things? It is called epistemology. You could really dive deep here, if you were so inclined, but I do not intend to do that today. I just want to think about it a little, because so much of what is written here is about knowing. There are some ways in which Wayne and I are baring our souls on this blog, which means there are ways you are knowing us, intimately. But is that way of relating a good in itself? Is it good to know someone through words on a page (or screen)? Does it matter to relate to other humans in a particular way? And, for this particular human, does it matter how you, dear reader, relate to me?

I think it does matter. I think we, as image bearers of Love Himself, have an innate need to know and to be known. We crave intimacy and end up looking for it in all sorts of strange ways. We share social statuses online, hoping for others’ witness to validate our own experience, but that is not true knowing. We listen to popular music or see the latest movie, partly to participate in a communal way with the society around us. We (meaning I) write blogs about our lives and post them for all to see.

The thing is, I can share a lot of intimate, personal information on this platform, but it is still just that: information. Not that it is bad to gain information; it is good for me to know that my daughter’s birthday was yesterday (and yes, I did remember it before this moment, and we celebrated her well). It is crucial to the health of our marriage that I remember the fact that Wayne deeply loathes seafood. Reading an autobiography—or even a biography—really does give us a sense of a person. But to know someone, we have to relate.

If any of you have related to me, in any way, you probably know that education is one of my passions. One educational philosophers who has shaped my thoughts, Charlotte Mason, called education “the science of relations,” and by relations, she meant relationships. She focused on shaping the hearts of our children, helping them to care—to love—not only the people around them, but also the world that God made for their home.

“The question is not, — how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education — but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” (School Education, pp. 170-171)

Charlotte Mason would argue that if we only know facts about the anatomy of a frog, we do not, in fact, have a relationship with that frog. But if we were to go outside and find a frog to observe, perhaps hold him in our hands, keep our eyes peeled for any other frogs in our surrounding neighborhood, then we might begin to have a relationship, might form a love of biology that is rooted in real knowing.

One day in my beginning Spanish class I had an epiphany: other languages have words that cannot be translated into English, at least, not precisely. We were learning the Spanish words saber and conocer, both of which translate in English as “to know.” But in Spanish, saber refers to information, while conocer refers to relationship. I saber that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, but I conocer my mom and dad. The problem with not having precise words for things is that often we lose the idea of the thing itself, too. We forget that knowing facts is not the same as knowing in relationship. In English, we just know. Period.

I would say to you, this is not enough. Please keep reading these updates; I love knowing you are all out there, plodding through my jumbled thoughts, praying for us, sharing our joys and sorrows, staying connected this way. Know the facts. Saber. But our family needs more. You need more. Come up to us and ask the hard questions. Or, and maybe this is even harder to do, come up to us and tell us the hard things you are facing. We need to know you, too. We are not comparing whose hard is harder. We are all human, and we all have joys and sorrows, and God made us to need each other. Let’s learn what it means to conocer. Let’s be “open and unhindered,” as the disciples were at the end of the book of Acts. Let us know and be known.