Truth
September 11, 2008 Perhaps you've heard the same expression I heard tonight. Perhaps, like me, you've said it in the midst of a conversation about spiritual things. After all, It does sound spiritual. "All truth," the saying goes, "is God's truth.
Well ...No, it's not.
When I was a teenager I worked in a hospital kitchen in our small town. There was an older woman who worked as a dishwasher. She spoke poor, but passable English with a heavy, east European accent. She was a nervous type of woman, pleasant and smiling, but nervous just the same. She had a number tattooed on her forearm. I did not witness this, but was told by other staff that two police officers had come into the hospital cafeteria for lunch. On seeing them in uniform, our dishwasher was overcome with fear and couldn't finish her shift.
I don't know what her experience was like during the war, but I do know it was about as close to Hell as we humans can create. I know that her experience in that death camp was her particular truth, and God had absolutely nothing to do with it. Cancer is an awful truth. Suicide a terrible truth, as is fear, pain, loneliness and loss. When you're in the midst of any of them they are a truth as powerful and as real as any other and I want you to know these are not - they absolutely are not - from God. No, God's plan was the Garden of Eden, God's plan was paradise, but we had a better idea. It seems to me that our rebellion, in ways both great and small, is a truth God lives with as well.
Near the end of Jesus' time on earth he took his disciples aside and said he would soon be leaving, but would return for them. He promised that there was plenty of room for all of them to live together, with his father God, in his glorious kingdom. Then Thomas - Oh! Doubting Thomas! - asked how the disciples could join him as they had no idea where he would be. It was at this moment that Jesus chose to say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. There may be a lot of different ways to intrepret that statement, given that context, but surely one of those ways is to know that Jesus is promising that no matter what our current truth may be, he is present. War isn't his idea. Abuse, grief, pain, illness, death - none of them were meant to be our truth. But though we don't know the way through our difficulty and pain, though we don't understand where Jesus seems to have gone, though we can scarcely grasp the idea of his coming again, he remains with us, he weeps with us, and for us, and sometimes through us. I think Jesus is also saying that when we face death - when we face that final, great and irrevocable truth, he is the one that has come back from the dead, he is the one that has come back from heaven in that very moment, to meet us as we cross that dark, cold river.
In the end, Jesus isn't saying that he is a truth, or even all truth. He's saying that he is the truth. The memory of those concentration camps are dying with those who experienced them. Soon our world will be bereaved of the souls in which that truth resides. Soon those camps will be one more atrocity in the history books, readily replaced in our collective 'now' by other atrocities. These experiences may not belong to you and I. Yet even here, in the comfort and relative safety of our western, middle class life we experience terrible and awful truths we can scarcely withstand. Spouses leave. Loved ones die. Illness strikes. Violence is done to us. One day, however, we too shall leave our troubles behind. I think what Jesus is saying is not that all truth is God's truth. I think he's saying that he - and the eternity of endless joy that awaits us after this weary life is over - is the final and ultimate truth.
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Reader Comments (11)
She cannot believe/understand how a God could stand by and just watch these things happen to seemingly innocent people...
Awesome post!
your understanding of truth seems to be rooted in experience (phenomenology). is this exclusively so for you, or do you find truth in other ways? where does reasoning fit in for you? as for knowing god, is god only revealed to you in experiences? and how do you relate truth to meaning?
if these questions are of interest...
peace--
scott
i'm especially interested in hearing how you determine meaning in your experiences of god (and other things, too). it seems that experiences can have such a wide variety of meainings.
no agenda here. i'm not sitting on a preconcieved answer. i'm hoping your thinking out loud with me will make me think better.
peace--
scott
How to determine the meaning of my experiences with God? I'm not sure. I guess I tend to think of it like a conversation, except instead of words God is using people and circumstances and events to 'speak' to me. My question then is, 'what is he saying', and that can only be understood, like any conversation, in the context of where the participants are at, what they are doing, the larger context in which the conversation exists.
You didn't strike me as having a preconceived answer. It's just that I haven't thought as deeply about this kind of, what, hermenuetic? before. I feel somewhat like a fish out of water. In any event, how do you determine meaning for the events in your life? Is there a a process you go through?