Spiritual Must
How a Bothersome Story I told and a Lovely Couple Helped Me Assess How I Show Up
All people know what it’s like to be musty. The decent bunch of us who have access to showers gladly serve our neighbors by executing the wash, apply body wash (or boujee soap) with a cloth and scrub (again with a cloth), and dry method to countermand that nasty aroma from our bodies when run amok with sweat. We do this so our communities don’t have to suffer the atrocities of our apocrine glands. But just because we know what it’s like to be musty and how we should respond doesn’t mean we always know when we are musty.
Beloved... I just gave you a whole word.
You might ask how one might not know when they are musty. And it’s a good question. I’ve lost my sense of smell, so I can’t smell my must. You might contest that I can still feel a certain heaviness under my armpits or a discomfort that leads to itchiness if I have not fully washed and scrubbed this 6’3 lanky, Ethiopian body.
And you’re mostly right. The truth is, though, that there are people whose noses work just fine and whose ability to feel dirt on them has not been hindered one bit... and yet they are still unaware of why Tommy and Tianna no longer sit by them on the bus. What has caused this hygienic unawareness? Many things, but I’d argue that familiarity and negotiation, which have to do with evading the rituals of cleanliness taught to us from a young age, are the main culprits.
If my memory serves me correctly, when I was a kid, I learned that our noses become familiar with odors we don’t take care of immediately. We grow accustomed and complacent to what would normally be an affront to our ever-living souls if we had just continued singing with our rubber duckies into our preteens, yet many compromise. Listen, I get it. We get tired. We go to school, play in chess-club, destroy ourselves at track-practice and raise our crummy armpits during youth group worship. This is where negotiation starts to kick in: I’ll hit the shower as soon as I wake up in the morning. But morning comes and you slept past your alarm, and Mom is late to work. At first, you know you got to cover for your greasy self, so you find your axe spray and make your plight worse, but, in all truthfulness, masking your must seems better than doing nothing about it when you first encounter your capacity for aromatic decay. But, at some point, when Monday negotiations last through Saturday, your putrid fragrance is no longer discernible to you though it is to everyone else, and your unawareness of when you are musty has commenced.
I haven’t been entirely honest. This writing isn’t entirely about physical mustiness; it’s about spiritual mustiness. Spiritual mustiness is a lack of awareness that is exposed by the rank smell of our souls and the habits that have formed us, and the way they have disrupted the peace of those around us without us noticing. This illustration is apt and well-captures my time in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was a period of self-discovery for me. Before moving to Tennessee, I was struggling with purpose. I had just graduated from college, had little joy in Kansas, just started a long-distance relationship and felt like I needed to move to get unstuck.
The problem was, I tried to get unstuck by running away from the internal turmoil that consumed me. To subvert the turmoil’s power, I tried to rise out of it by eating a bunch, watching hours of Netflix, and telling outlandish stories to mask the must. One time, in July of 2022, I took an uncalculated risk and shared an outlandish story whose punchline was “it sounded like brushing the side of an elephant.”
According to the Hluhluwe Game Reserve, Elephant skin feels like the bark of old trees. It is a rough exterior that protects elephants’ inner layers from horrendous, external conditions. If you ever got close to an Elephant, it’s improbable that you would dare touch it to experience the makeup and nuances of its epidermis, but if you did, I’m sure the story I risked telling from a spiritually musty place would resonate with you.
Okay.
So, I was in the basement of a house that belongs to a Northeastern married couple who now live in the Southeast. The couple let me stay with them next to free, and during the first week of my new housing arrangement, I came in hot with the “brushing the side of an elephant” line, which I later discovered was heard as “flossing the trunk of an elephant” by one of them.
The context of this story had to do with a cruise I went on when I was a senior in high- school, which was almost exactly five years before I shared this story with the couple. I brought it up because they told me about a cool cruise trip where they got to zoom on the surface of the ocean while striking a superhero pose on dolphin fins. While my cruise experience was nowhere as thrilling as theirs, I had a fun time recounting my meager sailing week to them. I remembered the fancy dinners we went to every night and the delightful Italian couple that joined us each night, the impressive basketball court on the top of the ship, and the darn small rooms, with the porta-potty-sized bathrooms.
In the process of randomly reliving the events of my cruise trip in that basement, the porta-potty-sized bathrooms signaled a distinct memory I’d never shared up to that point... and should’ve left unspoken. Nonetheless, I let loose and complained to the Yankees about how one day I was reading in my compressed room and my roommate was in the bathroom, going at it, wiping, by using the toilet paper with the ferocity of an elephant groomer. I told them that it was like he was “brushing the side of an elephant.” Trying to read Luther’s theological works, I was disturbed by his audacity to keep in step with nature’s course and not factor in the architectural layout of our space to inform how he went about his business.
Remember... this is my first week in the home of the Red Sox fans, and I disclosed the details of my venture with the familiarity of a biological child. My spiritual must had disrupted the couple’s peace, yet my delusion that it was okay perpetuated my thought that I could survive my inner turmoil during that time without honestly confronting it.
Thankfully, the event had arisen in conversation again the next day on the back deck. And that’s where I learned to smell my must... not with my nose, but with the help of communal accountability, my brain, and a hopeful future of emotional intelligence. One-half of the couple took a risk and revealed the discomfort the story caused, and they gave context for why. This gesture of trust proven by an openness to disclose one’s feelings created the opportunity for clarity and expectations for moving forward. The clarity part came about by curiosity and honesty about how they experienced my story. As this person was unpacking the triggering aspects of my story, the crux of their worry was innuendo. Meaning my story indicated sexual activity. As I listened and pressed into this miscommunication by asking what innuendos were made, the speaker exclaimed: “WASN’T THE STORY ABOUT YOUR FRIEND MASTURBATING IN THE BATHROOM NEXT TO YOU?”
This error was made because the analogy of “brushing the side of an elephant,” referring to my friend’s butt-wiping rigor, was heard as “flossing the trunk of an elephant,” which I agree is a disconcerting image. And while I’m glad we cleared that up, this event has served as a guide for how to appropriately exist, exercising self-awareness and care with the stories I tell and receiving loving counsel in community.
This story is like a rubric that depicts the contents of my life and the reasons I’ve behaved the way I have for most of my life. The books I read, the jokes I attempt, and the stories I tell are sometimes my ways of not letting people know about how I’m feeling, about how my loneliness is affecting me. That night, I actually hoped to share a story with that couple that was more vulnerable, but I pivoted and reverted to something shocking and uncouth. As a result, my must is, as one my friends told me, can “rob people the chance of getting to know the real me.”
This experience unveiled my tendency to lie about myself to others for fear of what they might think about the true me. If I disclosed my biggest regrets who would stay?
To which you might ask, “if you keep sharing butt-wiping stories... who would stay?”
