there sits a spider. Because of the recent flap over Colin’s post about language, which so offended a few sensitive souls, this little news bit jumped off the screen at me this morning: “Catholic Church Removes PB16 Portrait for Fear of Offending Gays.”

Twenty years ago, I was part of a group trying to get a local Humane Society going. Another woman and I went to the city’s “shelter” to check it out. I won’t go into the gruesome things I saw there (too sensitive, donchaknow), but I rushed outside in tears—couldn’t take it, you see. I was utterly useless. So the poor animals in that place received no help from me. The woman with me had to do everything she could on her own without help. I was too sensitive. It’s not now the sight I saw that stays with me, but my own concern for myself that I apparently put first, as something more important than helping creatures in severe distress. That memory stays with me.

When I was nineteen, I had what some people might call a “breakdown.” After a year with a shrink, it came out that my family’s aversion to truth-telling was at the root of it. I had no identity because they didn’t like that identity, didn’t approve of who my father was, and by extension—of me. They didn’t mention “things” because they were nice people (read sensitive). Half a century later, I still bear the wounds. And so I live now in a culture that values niceness above all things. I don’t live here because they love me (they don’t), but because I love them.

The fruit of this experience (and others like it) is sometimes bitter, but always, always life-giving, both to my mind and to my soul. The fruit is Truth, far more precious to me than anyone’s acceptance or approval, more precious than family, and I think, more precious even than life. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that this experience is not “mine,” but everyone’s—both personal and societal, contemporary and historical. Our enemy is not insensitivity; our enemy is the same one it’s always been, the one Truth Himself named for us. We recognize him by his denial of truth. He is a liar.

I too am “nice.” I like nice. I like good manners—I am, after all, southern to the core, my ancestors arriving in the South in 1600-something. My body is made of red Georgia clay and I could no more leave it than I could leave myself. I am nice until being nice becomes deceit. Because I know it’s deceit that destroys, that kills. So, for example, when I was counseling a high school student who’d been beaten by her boyfriend, and who was carrying her second illegitimate child by him, I said to her, “He’s not the one who’s hurting you. You are.” All addiction, including sexual addiction, is born of lies, those we demand that others tell us—because they are lies we tell ourselves.

Ages ago, when I was in school, a professor told me about a woman’s epitaph on an eighteenth-century tombstone in England somewhere: “…died of an excess of sensibility… .” I don’t know her name. But I know mine.