The Power of Self-Disclosure

Our biggest secrets and deepest desires are usually revealed to others, and even discovered by ourselves, in the presence of sorrow, failure, or need—when we are very vulnerable and when we feel entirely safe in the arms of someone's love. That is why all little ones have a huge head start. When vulnerable exchange happens, there is always a broadening of being on both sides. We are bigger and better people afterward. Those who never go there always remain small, superficial, and unconnected to themselves. We would normally experience it as a lack of substance or even reality in a person.

People who have avoided all intimacy normally do not know who they are at any depth—and cannot tell others who they are. The saints discovered that God was always disclosing Godself to them-not ideas, not formulas, not answers, but God's inner secrets or what St. Thérèse of Lisieux called the very "science of love." Such divine intimacy gives us a great big head start in knowing how to do human intimacy.

—Richard Rohr