​Blog 542 – 02.11.2017

A Particular Truth

Some people want desperately to believe that they have found the absolute truth. It seems a lot more likely to me that all truth is relative as is everything in this space time continuum where we are allowed to put our particular take on things. There was quite a bit of flurry of late over a political spokesman’s, spokeswoman actually, using a phrase “alternate truths” as if there could only be one truth upon which everyone must agree. I think that must be the premise of all religions, “We have found the truth everybody else has got it wrong.” Pretty presumptuous don’t you think? Yes, I do all the time, more folks should try it. That’s a joke, son. And the hits keep coming. The lovely Vanessa Williams some years ago released a beautiful hit song with the lines, “Sometimes the snow comes down in June, sometimes the sun goes round the moon. Sometimes it’s all a big surprise. I see the passion in your eyes.” We can get quite passionate about our particular take on the truth.

The truth for most of us is really just what we agree it is. If that sounds too Orwellian for your tastes consider this. A great and beloved teacher once said a great deal about truth. His more familiar quotes on the subject are:

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
“What is truth?”

But I ask you to consider that even Jesus might have be also thinking about truth and not just a formula for getting things when he said, “If two or more of you shall agree only any one thing you shall have it.” Isn’t it nice when people agree with us on a particular truth? It certainly makes it seem all the more true. We like the old Burger King commercial like to have it our way. Crazy as that may seem to people who hold a different view. Social norms only seem like truth. We have over time believed a lot of things that seem crazy to us now. A mental patient once scrawled on an asylum wall words that later became a great song of faith or truth”

“Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made
Were every stalk on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade.

To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky.”

I may not believe in many of the things my religious friends consider to be “true” but I do believe that person thought to be insane was at least when he wrote those lines far saner than the world around him. Some people’s idea of Heaven is a place where everyone agrees on what is truth. Sounds pretty boring to me. I like it here in the good ole US of A where if you can get even two or three people to agree as Jesus said, you’ve got a miracle. I love this country and this world with all it’s diversity. We are, I think, the many faces of a universal God, big enough to take it all in, a God who is all in all, just like the Love that crazy guy was inspired to write about. And that is my particular truth for the day. Call me crazy but I hope you will call me…

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White