REsources for Living
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My friend Thomas Anastasi, now retired from the ministry, had a simple solution to the ongoing ministerial problem of what to put in the newsletter about upcoming sermons. Declaring what it is that you’re going to say six weeks or so before you say it is always a tricky proposition, but Thomas had the answer, albeit one he had never tried. The solution, he said, is easy. Every newsletter cover would read something like this: Sunday, March 7—We will be talking about the truth. Sunday, March 14th—The truth will be told. Sunday, March 21—The truth, yours, mine and ours….and so on. The point, he said, is that the business of church is telling the truth. That’s what we do at church, and so long as you know that, then the particular focus or area in which you plan to tell the truth is not terribly important.
I have to say that I am inclined to agree with him. In a world where, as often as not, lying, deliberately or unconsciously, is the assumed behavior, the fact that a group of people are trying to tell the truth is so remarkable that everything else pales by comparison. We live in a wash of lies, some of them so pervasive that we cease to think about them beyond acquiring a layer of cynicism in all that we do. We assume that political leaders, no matter what the country, lie as a matter of course, and the only time we assume that something the American president talks about is true is if he declares it to be “Fake News!” When I watch television I assume that all the commercials are based on lies, if only the implicit underlying lie that happiness can and should be purchased. I assume that the news which reaches me is edited for the comfort of media and politicians, and whatever comes to me through social media is frequently a complete fabrication. And this web of lies doesn’t even touch all the “white lies,” stereotypes, and lies of omission; our delusions, dismissals of unpleasant truths, and deflections of uncomfortable questions that run through almost everyone’s private and social lives. Nor does the daily round of semi-truths and falsehood even glance upon the very large-scale cultural lies that we live with, such as the idea that Columbus discovered America, or even the notion that more is always better.
We live in such a complex web of lies that the very notion of telling the truth, or even knowing the truth, becomes suspect. Indeed, differences in perspective being what they are, if you take four people embroiled in a controversy, or even in a perfectly ordinary event, and gather the story from each of them separately, what you will find is not one seamless narrative—the truth—but rather a related complex of related half-truths, wishes, fears and perceptions, all of which may be mutually exclusive, but equally “true.”
In her essay “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Adrienne Rich writes:
There is no “the truth,” “a truth”—truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet. This is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler—for the liar—than it really is, or ought to be…. An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” —is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
I think that’s what Thomas meant when he talked about church being about telling the truth. It doesn’t mean that any one of us has come up with the final and absolute truth about any issue large enough to be called religious. But it also doesn’t mean that church is a place for the casual dismissals of the truth that confront us moment by moment in our daily lives. Nor is church a place for the jargon-y pseudo-truths of the mind divorced from heart and soul, or for the sentimental outpourings of the heart that fails to acknowledge a place in the world and a responsibility to that place. Church is for something more even than tossing notions back and forth, priding ourselves on our openness as we let the world run through and past us.
To delve deeper into the truth demands a rigorous attention, both to yourself and to all the others with whom you have committed to speak the truth. It requires the ongoing courage to ask the questions that will lead down the treacherous, useful paths, the tenderness to listen with an open heart for truths that ring clear even in places that we are terrified to have struck. It means that our words have to stand up in the world, that we have to put the weight of our convictions into action in order for our words to have enough meaning to qualify as truth.
Rich concludes her essay:
It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.
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