Writings in both spirituality and psychology focus on the difference between the inside and the outside. And that is the contrast between the external appearances of someone’s life and what is happening on his or her inside. Both approaches name as the ideal a one-to-one correspondence between the two. They would have problems with any growing degree of disparity or misalignment between the outer and the inner.

In Matthew’s 23^rd chapter we hear Jesus forcefully imaging the distance between these two as He encounters it in the lives of some religious leaders of his time. These people present as lily-white tombs on the surface but have decaying bones inside. They show as lavish decorations on the grave markers but interiorly are filled with decomposing filth.

It’s a theme that echoes all through the Scriptures; e.g., Mt 23:30-32, 1 Thess 2:13, Psalm 139.

Paul would have us receive the Word of God, not as something mouthed from the outside, but rather as it truly is, a Word spoken deep down within us – “the Word of God now at work in you who believe.”

The psalmist chimes in when he confesses that: “You, O Lord God, have searched me and you know me. Where could I go to escape Your Spirit within me or Your Presence there?”

We have in these readings three Bible-based encouragements which aim at having our insides and outsides match up. They strive to shorten the distance between our inner cores and external words and actions.

Other words to describe this ideal: transparency, honesty, genuineness, simplicity, sincerity, authenticity – all of them aimed to overcome the evils that Jesus names as “hypocrisy and evil doing.”

No doubt this is a high ideal and requires continual effort to attain. But it highlights the truth lodged in our psalm. “Lord, You have searched me and You know me.” Lord there’s no hiding my inside from my outside and vice versa. There’s to be no mismatch between how I come across externally and who I truly am on the inside.

So again we pray: “Lord, the truth is that You have searched me and You know me. Help me in all my efforts to be ever more genuine, authentic and transparent.”

Vincent names this virtue as Simplicity, and praises it highly.

“When you must speak… then speak quite simply. As for myself, I don’t know, but God has given me such a high esteem of simplicity that I call it my Gospel. I have special devotion and consolation in saying things as they are. (CCD:IX:476)