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?

Divine anger and passion

YES, God, the ever-merciful and compassionate God, can be
angry. His anger can even turn into fury and wrath. Just read the Old
Testament, and you will have a good dose of vivid instances of this
divine anger and wrath.

            Which reminds us that anger is not bad after all. If God
can be angry, we, who are his image and likeness, can be angry too.
Anger has a place in our life. Except that we have to be most careful
with it, since our anger can only be good and righteous only when we
are truly identified with Christ. And given our current condition,
that identification can only be at best tenuous.

            To be sure, God’s anger is not a lasting, much less,
permanent feature. It’s a passing emotion. As Sacred Scripture puts
it, he is slow to anger, quick to forgive. His anger is just for a
moment, but his mercy and compassion is forever.

            Our anger should be like the anger of God. In the gospel,
Christ showed this anger when he drove away those sellers and vendors
who were desecrating the temple area. The same when he found a fig
tree full of leaves but without fruit. (cfr. Mk 11,11-26)

            We can clearly see that Christ was a man of passion also,
which tells us that we should not be afraid of emotions and passions
as long as we express them in the proper way. This training our
emotions and passions will be a life-long process, and so we just have
to be patient and sport about the whole affair.

            We have to understand that to move toward our human and
Christian perfection, not only should we be spiritual, but also we
need to go passionate. That’s simply because man is both spiritual and
carnal, intellectual and emotional, with passion as the strongest
expression of our feelings.

            We have to overcome that partial understanding of our
humanity that only highlights our spiritual aspect at the expense of
our bodily dimension. Of course, it is also wrong to go the other way
around, to stress the emotional at the expense of our spiritual
development.

            We have to take care of both dimensions to the highest
degree possible. And in a certain sense, this reminder is urgent,
since many so-called pious or religious people who try hard to effect
some good transformation in individuals and society often concentrate
on the spiritual and neglects the corporeal component of life.

            The result is often dismal failure, wasting a lot of
energy on an apostolic approach that perhaps can achieve some good
effects that often do not last. These apostolic fruits fail to tackle
the finer demands of our real life in the world.

            Passions have to be properly cultivated. First of all,
they have to be given due attention. They have often been considered,
wrongly, as a drag in our human and Christian growth. They are left in
the margins, at best.

            They are never a hindrance. They are a necessary
component, because love which is our perfection, while mainly an act
of the will, a spiritual operation, cannot do away with our bodily
dimension where love too has to be expressed.

            I remember one point in the book, The Way, of St.
Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, that gives a relevant insight.

            “You tell me, yes, that you want to. Very good. But do you
want to as a miser longs for gold, as a mother loves her child, as a
worldling craves for honors, or as a wretched sensualist seeks his
pleasure? No? Then, you don’t want to.” (316)

            If love has to be true love, it should not be confined
only in the will and in the intellect. It has be go passionate,
marshalling all the powers of our body—imagination, memory, feelings,
the very use of our body, etc.—to its employment.

            Human and Christian love first has to be human before it
can be spiritual and supernatural. It cannot be any other way. We
would do violence to the nature of things if we understand it
differently.

            That’s why, especially when dealing with kids and the
young ones who often develop love first through feelings and the
bodily aspects, we have to understand them and know how to make these
feelings or passions conform to right reason and the requirements of
faith and charity.

            It’s not a matter of repressing those feelings. It’s a
matter of educating them, revving them, in fact, to become passions
and not just wimpy elements that we are ashamed to show and express.

Overcoming our blindness

THAT gospel character Bartimaeus, the blind man, gives us
a precious lesson with respect to a certain blindness that we all
have. Like him, we have to acknowledge our blindness and humbly beg
Christ for a cure by repeating Bartimaeus’ words, “Master, I want to
see” (ut videam). (Mk 10,51)

            Though we may enjoy good vision at the moment, we have to
realize that to be able to see things properly and completely, we
simply do not rely on our eyes nor any of our senses.

            Our eyes and senses can only capture a little part of the
whole reality that governs us. They can only perceive what are called
the sensible realities, still light-years away from the intelligible,
not to mention the spiritual and supernatural aspects of reality.

            Still what they get and gather are very useful and in fact
are indispensable, since the data they give are like the raw material
that will be processed by our more powerful faculties of intelligence
and will. In this sense we can already consider ourselves as suffering
from some kind of blindness.

            We need to be more aware that nowadays there is a strong
tendency to base our knowledge of things mainly on the material and
sensible realities alone. That’s why we have these disturbing
phenomena of materialism and commercialism comprising our mainstream
world of knowledge and understanding.

            We have to correct this tendency because that simply is
not the whole of reality. Our senses can only have a limited view of
things. And what is worse, that limited condition is aggravated by the
effects and consequences of our sins that not only limit but also
distort reality.

            Thus, if our thinking, judging and reasoning are simply
based on the sensible and the material, we would miss a lot of things
and would unavoidably get into trouble. We end up making our own
world, our own reality which is actually a fantasy, an illusion, if
not a delusion.

            This is where we have to very strongly acknowledge our
blindness so that we recognize what is lacking and wrong with us, and
start to look for where the remedy and cure can be found.

            We should imitate Bartimaeus in that when he realized it
was Christ passing by, he immediately screamed, “Son of David, have
pity on me!” We have to acknowledge that we are blind and that we are
in great need of help that can only come from God who is our Creator,
Father and Provider for everything that we need.

            Being the Creator, God is the one who has designed
everything in the world. He is the one who knows its ins and outs,
what is real and not real, good and bad, etc. It is from him and with
his light that we can see things clearly and completely.

            We should not simply depend on our senses, nor on our
intelligence and will and the other faculties we have, like our
memory, imagination and other talents, no matter how excellent they
are. At best, they are meant to be mere instruments.

            They should not be made as the ultimate source of truth
and primary means to know the whole of reality. Obviously, to
acknowledge this would require a great amount of humility, since we
tend to make our own selves as the ultimate god, reflecting the very
error of the first sin that took place in Eden with our first parents.

            And nowadays, with the great progress of our sciences and
technologies, we have a formidable temptation to make ourselves our
own god, the maker and not just the stewards of the universe, deciding
on what is true and false, good and bad, and on the destinies of
everyone.

            We can be so intoxicated by our own powers and
achievements that our pride and self-absorption with their consequent
blindness can appear invincible and incurable. We are actually
drifting toward this kind of situation today.

            We have to be most wary of this danger, and so we have to
realize ever more deeply that the more power we have and the more
achievements we make, the more our humility should be.

            We have to make sure that every advance we make in any
field of human knowledge should not dull but rather sharpen our need
for God, our sense of gratitude to him, our awareness that we need to
do everything with him and for him.

            This is what a deepening sense of humility would entail.
And this is what would put us in the right path, avoiding the danger
of blindness.