Masks Will Slip Away on a Friday

Masks are like flowers and last only one season. You can flee anywhere, but they will chase you, because they know you need them to cover the worn spots on your face.

During Carnival, you can hide your identity and social status, blending like a chameleon among the crowd of other jesters, but in reality, it is much harder: the mask will always lose its brilliant petals and leave you like a withered stem in the Garden.

This happens when the mask itself grows tired of supporting you and its colors begin to drip into a garden of lies.

Hiding behind tulips is useless. The garden, guardian of Its Nature, knows Creation and the laws that govern it. Wearing a face that is not yours devours the energy of body and spirit, diverting it from the other plants of the Garden. It turns you into a toy without roots, more puppet than human, and condemns you to feed the lie endlessly to sustain a place that does not belong to you.

By doing so, the surrounding vegetation withers, and sometimes the price the Garden pays is life itself, because some botanical species lack the strength to regrow after being altered.

The events of the twentieth century have not disappeared; they repeat under new names. The dramas that once unfolded in aristocratic neighborhoods and feudal palaces now take place in digital squares, exposed without the veil of privacy. The mask, which once protected, has become a spectacle; pretense has become a measure of legitimacy.

The more one performs, the more one is recognized as authentic. Hiding is no longer an act of shame but a survival strategy: it avoids the moral lynching administered by judges who answer to no law.

In this sense, social media are the new public squares: places of display and condemnation, not so different from those where, between the 17th and 18th centuries, witch burnings were celebrated.

You can hide behind a fiction for a set time, but the Day will come when no algorithm, strategy, or image will protect you, because on that Day, what will be judged is not what appears, but what is kept in hearts, as it is remembered:

"And do not hide from your Lord, who knows the secret and what is even more hidden" (Ṭā-Hā 20:7).

Man desires to appear different, to be approved and pleased, perhaps because he loves illusion and often mistakes it for life, thus changing his face without fear, with flesh or with symbol, parading as if he were always at the Venice Carnival.

But the Qur’an reminds:

"Every community has a term appointed; when their term comes, they cannot delay it for an hour, nor advance it" (Al-A‘rāf 7:34).

Judgment does not come immediately, not because God is absent, but because His mercy precedes the reckoning, and He grants time so that man may return, not so that he may persist in error:

"Whoever does good, it is for the benefit of his own soul; whoever does evil, it is against it. Your Lord is not unjust to His servants" (Fuṣṣilat 41:46).

Many claim not to perceive the presence of God when in need, yet it is the very disguise that hides His presence:

"Do they not travel through the land, so that their hearts may thus learn wisdom? Not their eyes" (Al-Ḥajj 22:46).

Then comes the Hour, and the Hour asks no permission: tricks fall away and vision sharpens. No camouflage will be carried onto the Scale, for deeds will be laid out one by one, and even the weight of a speck will be assessed:

"So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it" (Az-Zalzalah 99:7–8).

Those who built upon appearances will discover they have no support, and those who mistook God’s patience for absence of judgment will understand, too late, that the time granted was a test, for:

"He knows what is apparent and what is hidden" (Al-Ḥajj 22:46).

Then the Venetian masks, so beautiful to display, adorned with gold and vivid colors, will begin to melt like snow in the sun, their pigments blending until they turn into indistinct mud, and what seemed art will reveal itself as merely a fake painting. In the face of Truth, in the silence of the Garden, no shapes or decorations remain, only what man has truly carried within himself.