A Parable 

The Tragedy of Tragedies 

The Story of Hugh  

Once upon a time a Royal person was born. *His name was Hugh. Although I will refer to him as ‘he’, no one actually knows what his sex really was and it didn’t really matter. Hugh was unlike anyone who had ever lived before or who would ever live again. Hugh was precious, unrepeatable incomparable, a trillion-dollar diamond in the rough.  

For the first 15 months of life, Hugh only knew himself from the reflections he saw in the eyes of his caretakers. Hugh was terribly unfortunate. His caretakers, although not blind, had glasses over their eyes. Each set of glasses already had an image on it. So that each caretaker only saw Hugh according to the image on his glasses. Thus, even though Hugh’s caretakers were physically present, not one of them ever actually saw him. By the time Hugh was grown, he was a mosaic of  other people’s images of him, none of which was who he really was. No one had really ever seen him, so no one had ever mirrored back to him what he really looked like. Consequently, Hugh thought he was the mosaic of images. He really did not know who he really was. 

Sometimes in the dark of the night when he was all alone, Hugh knew that something of profound importance was missing. He experienced this as a gnawing sense of emptiness- a deep void. 

Hugh tried to fill the emptiness and void with many things: power, worldly fame, money, possessions, chemical highs, food, sex, excitement, entertainment, relationships, children, work- even exercise. But no matter what he did, he never felt the gnawing emptiness go away. In the quiet of the night when all the distractions were gone, he heard a still quiet voice that said: “Don’t forget; please don’t forget me!” But alas! Hugh did forget and went to his death never knowing who he was!