All Saints' Day
The Reverend Noel E. Bordador

One of the things I look forward to is our Annual Halloween Parade. Last night, as usual, were plenty of people wearing costumes and masks that hide their true identity. I wasn’t wearing a costume or a mask, but am well aware that I need no mask of cloth or plastic or what not to hide my real self, my real identity from others. Often I do wear an invisible mask, sometimes consciously, and sometimes, unconsciously. All of us do, in fact, wear masks for all sorts of reasons. A poem by the great African-American poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, reminds me of this universal phenomena to hide our true selves from the world. The title of the poem is “We Wear the Mask.”

                        We wear the mask that grins and lies,
                        It hides our cheeks and shade our eyes,
                        This debt we pay to human guile;
                        With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
                        And mouth with myriad subtleties.

                        Why should the world be overwise,
                        In counting all our tears and sighs?
                        Nay, let them only see us, while
                                    We wear the mask.

                        We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
                        To thee from tortured souls arise.
                        We sing, but oh the clay is vile
                        Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
                        But let the world dream otherwise,
                                    We wear the mask.

“We wear the mask that grins and lies.”  Masks conceal the truth that is in us or the truth about us, or about our world. There are masks we wear to conceal our pain and sadness and vulnerability from the world that we find uncaring, indifferent or even hostile, or perhaps not either of these, just a world unable to stand the truth we bear in us. And there are masks we wear that conceal the beauty within. Sometimes the ugly and mean front, that rough edge we have developed to keep others at arms length can bury our deepest longing to be loved, or hide our deep capacity for compassion or love we have for others. And sometimes, the good façade we show others often hides the ugly sins in our lives hiding our capacity for evil and injustice and our inhumanity towards one another. In any case, masks are our false selves. They represent the lies in our lives.

The saints we honor were not without their masks. Their autobiographies, their confessions and hagiographies are but stories of their struggle for authenticity, the uncovering of their masks to reveal their true selves before God. Through grace, they have come to affirm that which the true and beautiful in them- their capacity for compassion, mercy, love and justice; and at the same time, through the same grace working in them, they came to shed off the lie about their humanity- the lie that humanity is made for anything but love that is just, peaceful and merciful.

On this feast of All Saints- we are reminded that holiness of life is about recovering our authenticity before God; the feast challenges us to recover our true selves by identifying and shedding off the masks, the lies we have come to believe about ourselves. What goodness and beauty and true in us have we buried beneath the daily ugly masks we have put on? And what evil things must we uncover, things hiding behind the “good” mask we wear, the “mask that grins and lies so we can live fully that life of love God intends us to have?