“Be watchful, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.”  1 Corinthians 16: 13-14.

I would like to be stronger than I am, and this is hard for me, because I’m not sure what being strong  really means. I know that I am weak sometimes, and strong sometimes.

I do think it takes strength to love, and to be loved. But that is only one idea about strength. The world “strong” generally applies to physical strength in our world,  but strength is not just a physical attribute for me.

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It can also mean robustness, power, muscle, the capacity of a person or object to withstand great pressure. To some it means endurance.

My own idea of being strong is perhaps the narrowest: to me, it means the ability to see myself honestly and to stay within myself no matter what happens outside of me.

I am  not a star, but I seem to be a minor celebrity, and this has caused trouble for me as well as success. I often have had the feeling that people want to know the public me, the book me and the blog me, but they don’t want to bother to get to know me, or perhaps the fact that I am all too human.

I love my blog, but I don’t wish to be known by it by people who are close to me.

I am easiest personally around people who don’t read my blog at all, they have no choice but to know me.

If you know my blog,  you know a part of me, a side of me. But you can’t really know me. I have found that many of the people who get to know me are uncomfortable, even surprised, they wanted the other me.  If you ever want to feel alone, let them make a movie about you, it will seem that no one will ever take the trouble to know you again.

The people who know only the public me are often not as crazy about the real one. Cold this be paranoia? I remember that when Jeff Bridges come to my farm to make a movie of A Dog Year, he brought along a paid employ, who was his official “Best Friend,” and had been for years. I asked Jeff Bridges about this, and he said movie stars can hardly ever trust anyone to like them for who they are, so they pay people to have dinner and spent time with them, they are their official “Best Friends.”

This was a chilling thing to me, I am no movie star, but I did understand what he meant. The movie made me phobic, and I don’t think I have ever really recovered from it.

Maybe I am too wary. But this has happened to me so often, it has spooked me about friends, and I am right more of then I am wrong. I don’t want or need too many friends, and I keep my distance.

Strong comes to mind when I think of who I want to be.

I need to be strong, I am safer and happier alone, at least until I met Maria. “So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in All The Sad Young Men,” just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”

I have come to believe in my strength, because I am still  here, because I survived, because I have found love, and I have kept myself more or less intact.  And because even though I am broken,  I am still me. I feel strong about that.

In the Kabbalah, God cautions humans that everyone has the creative spark, everyone has the right to reach fulfillment, but not everyone will.

That, he said, is the only sin, the only thing his followers  have to fear. I have a good friend who I spoke with about strength one afternoon, and he told me that he was weak, and he knew he was weak, and accepted it.

There was something sacred and truthful for him in that, I thought, and I know what he meant. If you dare to be what you are, I said back to him, then perhaps your weakness will be your strength. I love him for his honesty, I think he is strong, he knew who he was long before I knew who I was.

I think that’s how it worked out for me. My weakness became my strength.

Paul Tillich wrote that there is cowardice in every courage, and unbelief in every faith, and hostility in every love. The strong can never rely on strength alone.

Paul the Apostle – St. Paul, Paul of Tarsus, was an apostle, a Jew, then a Missionary who taught Christianity to the first century world. That’s quite a resume.

He described the strong personality in this way: a courageous, watchful hero, firm in faith, worthy of great praise. But then he qualified, this, and added, “let all you do be done in love.”

The strength Paul had in mind was based on something beyond courage and faith. It is not the strength of a hero. It is the strength of someone who surrenders the praise of a hero and the company of many for the humility of love.

(Photo above, morning shadows on the bedroom wall.)