WHAT IS TRUTH?

          Last week I watched a Ted Talk by Anne Lamott speaking about “12 Things I Learned from Life and Writing.” Excellent! I highly recommend it. She talks about what she considers to be some basic truths that she’s discovered about life now that she’s 61. It’s only 15 minutes long, so it would be easy to fit into a day’s schedule. You can find it on YouTube.

          The reason I bring that up is because, I, myself have been recently thinking about the subject of “truth” since there is a lot of versions of it in our world today, and, of course, there always has been. Human nature being what it is—filled with ego, fear, insecurity, pride, love of many kinds and dimensions, prejudice, a full dose of self-righteousness, and at least a dash of pretense—leads to confusion about what is real and what is made up about ourselves, about one another, and about life in general.

          I remember one day in grade school, the teacher was talking about the law of gravity, and so, to make us think, she asked, “Why is a feather light?” And one of my classmates raised his hand and enthusiastically called out, “Because it isn’t very heavy!” On one level, he was right, of course, but that didn’t address the truth for which the teacher was looking. It did, however, bring a huge uproar of laughter in the classroom. As silly as that story is, I think it is a simple illustration of the way the human mind unconsciously works to come up with easy answers to the complexities of life.

          Enter stage right, what, in our own mind we know for sure and what, also entering from stage right, we don’t know, but may be true. In the TedTalk I mentioned, Anne Lamott begins by saying “there’s so little truth in the popular culture, and it’s good to be sure of a few things.” I couldn’t agree more. The great preacher, Peter Marshall (not the game show host), once said that “we need to believe in something, lest we fall for anything.” There is some danger there, of course, in that just picking something willy-nilly to believe in for the sake of feeling secure and committed to a certain path, can lead to a very narrow-minded view of life.

     As for me thinking about truth, there is a biblical text from the season of Lent in the Gospel of John in which Jesus is standing before Pilate who is cross examining him, and after a brief dialogue he asks Jesus, “What is truth?” The question hangs in the air, and it would seem from the limited information that the scripture gives us, that there is no further discussion. That indicates for me that it is up to each of us to decide the answer.

          Anyway, I have taken it upon myself to come up with a list of 12 things of my own that I know for sure about life. If you’re interested, when  I’m finished, I’ll let you know what those are, but maybe it’s a good exercise for all of us—especially when we feel that we’re standing on shaky ground rather than on the holy ground of a good, rich, peaceful life we could be living in these days.