Personalizing the truth

WE need to understand very well this matter which is crucial in life. Truth is never just a cold and impersonal piece of information or datum which we describe as the objective fact and reality.

            This, sadly, is a common phenomenon. Many of us think that just because we have some facts at hand, we can just blurt them out at our convenience and believe we already are being truthful. The drunkards can easily do that, and yet they may not be truthful.

            Neither is truth just a subjective appreciation of things, dependent solely on one’s opinions, preferences if not biases and other conditionings. And so we hear many of us making statements that are prefaced with, “To me, I think or I believe that...”

            Let’s remember that we have the tendency to make ourselves as the creator of truth, or at least the standard of what is supposed to be right and fair. We have to be guarded against this tendency, because this distorts reality at its roots.

            Though we may manage to say some elements of truth with this tendency, a lot more are still needed to qualify ourselves as genuinely truthful. This tendency is not what personalizing the truth means.

            To personalize the truth means that our understanding of truth should correspond to the basic reality that we are persons. And as persons, we are rational, we have intelligence and will which, we must admit, we have not because we created them ourselves, but rather because they are given to us by a creator who ultimately is God.

            To personalize the truth therefore means that for us to be in the truth, we need to relate ourselves and whatever pieces of data, information and facts, to God in the first place, and then to others. To personalize the truth involves the dynamics of a living relation with God and with others.

            Our intelligence and will are given to us to enable us to enter into such relationships. We are meant for loving. Our pursuit of the truth cannot but be done in the context of love, of self-giving, to God and to everybody else.

            We have to relate ourselves and whatever pieces of data, info, etc., to God first, because as Creator of everything, he is the foundation of reality. Nothing would be real if it is unrelated to God. Thus, we would be taking an unsure and dangerous path if we fail to go to God first.

            As a saying goes, if we put God in the first place, then everything else would be in the right place. This only echoes what Christ himself said. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Mt 6,33)

            And Christ himself, the Son of God who became man, has revealed to us how to be truthful. He explicitly said: “I am the way, the truth and the life...” And the truth he tells us is that we have to love God above all and everybody else as well. In fact, the new commandment he gave us is to love one another as he himself has loved us.

            And so, to be in the truth and to personalize the truth, we also have to understand that to relate ourselves and whatever we have to God also means to relate ourselves and everything else to others. We have to learn to share ourselves and all we have with others.

            We cannot and should not keep ourselves and what we have to ourselves alone. Keeping to ourselves would be a dangerous situation, made even more so by the fact that such situation actually poses as an attractive sweet poison, a treacherous silent killer of truth, love and everything else that flows from them.

            The ideal situation would be that our abiding consciousness is filled with thoughts and desires for God and for others. We have to develop this kind of consciousness in a very deliberate and even aggressive way.

            That’s because, with our weakened and wounded condition due to sin and its effects, we tend to think only of ourselves, of what is immediately convenient and advantageous to us in the material, worldly and temporal sense. The spiritual and supernatural aspects of life are hardly given any consideration.

            Or, many times our consciousness is simply empty or, at best, largely passive and reactive, waiting for some outside stimulus. We should always make the effort to consciously relate ourselves to God and to others. This is when we can say we are personalizing the truth.