Playing with the truth

WE have to be most careful in handling the truth. First,
we have to know what truth is, where to find it, why it is the truth,
how to present it, etc. Otherwise, we can suffer what St. Augustine
once said:

            “They love truth when it enlightens them, but hate when it
accuses them. In this attitude of reluctance to be deceived and intent
to deceive others they love truth when it reveals itself but hate it
when it reveals them. Truth will therefore take its revenge: when
people refuse to be shown up by it, truth will show them up
willy-nilly and yet elude them.”

            This Augustinian observation can be validated, at least
partially, in that gospel episode about some leading Jews who, driven
by unbelief that brought with it its usual cohorts of envy and hatred,
asked Christ, “by what authority are you doing these things?” (cfr. Mk
11,27-33)

            They were referring, of course, to Christ preaching and
performing miracles and in the process drawing a lot of people to him.
But Christ, knowing their motives, also asked them a question that has
to be answered first before he would answer them. “Was John’s baptism
of heavenly or of human origin?”

            This threw them into a quandary. If they answered one or
the other, they would be caught in a bind, since they would certainly
suffer the obvious bad consequence of each possible answer. And so
they said they did not know. To which, Christ simply said: “Neither
shall I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

            We have to understand that to be truthful, the first thing
to do is to believe in God and to follow his commandments. After all,
God is the creator of everything. He knows the ins and outs of all
things, whether material, spiritual, natural, supernatural, etc. All
we do is to discover them, not make or create them.

            Our senses and intelligence alone can capture only so much
truth. They cannot go all the way, and in fact, they always need
another higher principle. This is where faith comes in.

            We have to have faith in God first, before we can get to
the truth. Faith enables us to accept truths that are beyond our
capacity to see, hear and touch, and even to understand. Faith makes
us accept truth through belief. What our Lord told the doubting Thomas
is illustrative of faith.

            “Have you believed, Thomas, because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” (Jn 20,29)

            Even in our ordinary, daily life, we use some kind of
faith, because we simply have to trust people rather than go through
the tedious process of investigating and studying as to whether this
woman, for example, is really my mother or not, or whether the cook
really serves me food and not poison, etc. We are wired for faith.

            We just have to go all the way to the scope of faith and
find that at the beginning and end of it, we will find God himself,
the Creator, who made the universe, the author of all reality in all
its infinite richness and variety of aspects and levels.

            In short, we cannot really be in the truth unless we are
in God. We cannot seek the truth unless we seek God. The problem we
have is that we dare to know, study and use the truth without God, or
ignoring him, at least. We even think that to be objective and
unbiased, we would just depend on what our senses and intelligence can
perceive.

            As a result, we get some aspects of truth that ultimately
depend on us simply. And since we are not stable, not to mention that
we are often affected adversely by passions, if not dominated by
malice, then the truth we see, study, invent and use, cannot be the
truth that is the real truth.

            It would be at best a contingent truth, a relative truth,
detached from its stable and ultimate moorings, and therefore can be
shifty, unstable and vulnerable to be misused and abused. This is what
we see around, and thus we are also quite in a mess.

            We need to have some kind of revolution in our attitude
towards truth. There has to be a conscious, deliberate effort to seek
God who actually revealed himself fully in Christ and continues to
reveal himself to us in the Holy Spirit. Unless, we do this, our
affirmations of truth will always be suspicious.

            Why, for example, do we make an oath before God when we
say something really important?