Suffer for the truth

WE are wired for the truth. Our mind, our heart, our senses—in fact, all of our being—are keyed to what is true, to what is real.

Truth is actually when the mind corresponds to the objective reality. Our mind only mirrors and then processes the objective reality that is always outside of itself. This lets us discover deeper levels of the reality that cannot be apprehended simply by the senses or our common sense.

Our mind is not supposed to make its own reality, its own world. Woe to us when we just run circles in our mind, and make our own version of truth detached from an outside reality. That’s when we can get caught in a no-escape spiral of subjectivism, a world of falsehoods and make-believe.

Insanity is like this. It’s not that the mind is not working when one is insane. It can be overworking, in fact, except that it has stopped getting attuned to an objective reality. It’s lost in its own world.

This brings us to a more interesting point. The objective reality for us is much more than just what our senses can discern. The objective reality is not simply a matter of shapes, sizes or color. It’s not simply about facts or statistics.

Itś all of these and a lot more. Consider the truth about our inter-personal, inter-subjective relationships, our social, political life, our philosophies and ideologies!

The objective reality for us is an ever deepening reality that leads us ultimately to God. It’s a very dynamic, living reality, with a strong spiritual and supernatural content, that cannot be reduced to some frozen piece of data, held captive by our senses or mind, or some sentiments and passions.

To reach there, we don’t simply rely on our senses. Not even on our mind alone, no matter how powerful our intelligence may be. We have to use them, no doubt, but we cannot and should not get stuck there.

Nothing less than God’s grace is needed for us to have charity which is the only way to capture the truth proper to us. Charity is the original and permanent reality. We need to uphold and defend charity in our effort to know the truth.

Charity alone allows us to consider and integrate the many elements and levels that go into our effort to know the truth. It infuses understanding, justice, patience, mercy, peace, etc. into our efforts to know the truth. It requires humility and self-denial.

In the purely human and natural level, we can say we already know a lot of things. The progress we have achieved in the sciences and technologies precisely indicate how far we have gone in our human knowledge.

But this is not the whole truth, since the objective reality goes further than that. The objective, original reality is the love of God, which he shares with us so we can love Him and others, as he revealed and commanded us to do. For us to be in the truth, our mind, our life has to correspond to this reality.

We need to use all our human knowledge to reinforce, not to weaken, our charity, our love for God and love for others. Our problem is that we have diluted, if not corrupted, this objective reality. We have leavened it something else.

It must be in reference to this development that St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians:

“Purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new paste, as you are unleavened…Therefore let us feast, not with the old leaven, nor with leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (5,7-8)

To be this unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, we need to follow the example of Christ, who went about telling us the truth by way of humility, meekness, etc., all the way to the Cross.
We need to understand that for us to be in the truth, we need to suffer. There’s no other way. The Cross, being the culmination of God’s love for us, is also the culmination of any human effort to know and live in the truth.

We have to be wary when our efforts to know, spread and defend the truth go unaccompanied by the Cross. This happens when in pursuit of the truth, we generate bitterness, hatred, discord. It’s when we get enslaved by passion, rather than enjoying true freedom, which is nothing other than love for God and others!