Nothing Between Us
What does it mean to be fully known?
I was sitting with someone I’d just met, and there was nothing between us.
Not just in the way the conversation flowed. I mean something more specific. There was an absence of interference. There was a lack of what usually runs underneath things and keeps me slightly elsewhere.
I was just there. He was just there.
And as we talked I wasn’t monitoring the conversation from a slight distance. I was in it. And it kept going somewhere real. I was going somewhere real with someone who was basically a stranger.
It wasn’t even that deep. Not yet. But it could have gone there. There were moments of vulnerability. Of transparency I hadn’t even shared with close friends. And all of it was met with mutual understanding. There was nothing in the way.
“That, that is what that’s supposed to feel like.”
Being Known
Working in churches my entire life, there is an idea that is paramount — being known. Truly known. Not just liked, respected, welcomed. Known. Not known as in information, but known deeply and fully.
Here is the problem. I couldn’t be known. Not really. Not there. Not in the church.
In an interview, Denzel Washington was asked if he felt it was important that Black films (films with Black Cultural Stories) were only told by Black filmmakers. I love his response.
“It’s not color, it’s culture. Steven Spielberg did Schindler’s list. Martin Scorsese did Goodfellas, right? Steven Spielberg could direct Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese probably could have done a good job with Schindler’s List. But their cultural differences... we all know (speaking to the other black actors on stage with him) what it is when a hot comb hits your hair on a Sunday morning (referring to a black cultural experience and Spike Lee’s ability to more fully understand and represent that scene in Malcolm X).”
That is the kind of knowledge you either carry in your body or you don’t. You can be generous. You can be gifted. You can love someone across a cultural divide with everything you have. But you cannot know what you have not lived.
What if the things that defined you most deeply were only true of you?
What if certain questions ran through your head, but never appeared in conversation—not because people didn’t care, but because they simply hadn’t occurred to them?
Imagine being the only one you knew who couldn’t get pregnant. The only one who had lost a spouse. The only one who had ever wrestled with depression. You could be surrounded by people who loved you and still be, in the specific way that matters, alone in every room.
Lately, I have found myself more1 fully known by strangers than by people who have been in my life for decades. And I don’t mean only that I’ve allowed myself to only be known here—though that’s a bit true. I mean there was something we shared that made understanding possible in a way it simply hadn't been before. There was no gap to manage. No translation. No monitoring of how I was landing, no quiet cleanup of what I’d just said.
Richard Niebuhr wrote that we are ethically obligated not just to speak the truth, but to speak in a way the other person can receive it. I believe that. I’ve spent my whole life doing it. But I've realized something: when I am always tending to how I'm being perceived, always listening to my own words from the outside, I am never fully in the conversation I'm actually having.
And it distorts what I actually believe. Because I never really allowed myself to sit with my beliefs, thoughts, and understanding as they actually were. I never really let myself be with myself as I actually was. I only encountered those things after they had been translated for someone else.
When life requires constant translation, finally meeting people who already speak the language feels like coming home—and gives you something rare: the chance to simply be there.
Faute de mieux—for lack of a better word. I don’t have one for this yet. I’m not sure one exists.
More isn’t the right word. I’ve been known more, in one sense, by people I’ve done life with for years. Friends who know my history, my habits, my stories.
But these newer relationships have given me something different. Not more knowledge. Not deeper affection. Something closer to recognition. A way of being understood that requires less explanation.