Truth with a capital "T"

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash

I once worked a very slow election precinct with an older woman who had been a dealer of Persian rugs in her earlier life. I was about nineteen at the time, having started working the polls as soon as I was old enough to do so. It is a perfect job for a people-watcher, as we both seemed to be. She was quite willing to share bits of her story with me, and I found her so fascinating that neither of us minded the long pauses between voters. Some years ago she had started an autobiography, she told me, but couldn’t seem to finish it. There was a need in her to find “The Answer,” some ultimate Meaning. If she did, she said, she might finally be able to finish her book. I have found myself thinking about her often recently. Over the more than ten years since that conversation took place she has come to mind many times, and I have usually seized the moment by sending a silent wish out into the world in hopes it might find her. A wish that she would know that the wide-eyed girl she once spent a cold day in a drafty hall talking to still hopes she found her answer and finished her book. If only I remembered her name I could look her up.

What fascinates me now, looking back, is that despite having been trained in the Christian Apologetics tradition of Bill Jack, Ken Ham, and Ray Comfort, I did not try to “witness” to my friend-for-the-day, the Persian rug dealer (at least, I don’t remember doing so). Something about the wistfulness of her voice and expression, the vulnerability she was willing to show me—whom she had never met before that god-awful early morning and would likely never see again—felt as sacred to me then as it does now. In a moment of spiritual clarity unusual for me back then, I found myself unwilling to intrude my opinions upon her search. I understood that burning need to know the Truth, the kind with a capital T, the kind that is promised to set you free. I was told that I had it, but that was confusing because I certainly did not feel free. Religious messages, even within the same religion, are often so contradictory that it can seem impossible to know what is True. “Look to the Bible,” the pastors from our previous church were fond of saying. “Don’t just take our word for it, read it yourselves.” But when I did, and interpreted the ancient words differently than they did, I was told that I was “misguided.” Apparently, taking their word for it was actually what I was supposed to do. The Bible is supposed to be interpreted, but only by those with the “training and experience to do it right.” God is still speaking and revealing the Divine Mystery, but only to those in authority and the people who agree with them. It is ironic, as Father Richard Rohr points out, that so many people within the sciences are totally comfortable with mystery and the knowledge that the more you know the more you realize how little you know, while those who claim that their entire worldview is based on “faith” are not happy with anything less than precise and detailed answers to The Big Questions. If you think you know everything, doesn’t that negate the need for faith? With so much unknown, is there even such a thing as absolute Truth? I believe there is. The problem with searching for Truth with a capital T, though, is that it exists only within the Divine, however you experience the energy/presence that created and keeps all things in balance. And the Divine cannot be taught, but must be experienced.

“Just learn how to see,” says Father Richard, “and you will know whatever it is that you need to see¹.” Everything I am told about God, everything I read or hear about the nature of the Divine, I filter through my own personal experience of the Divine presence. This allows me to hold on to what seems useful in building my own unique relationship with God/dess (for me, spirituality is relational. For some, it is not. There is no right or wrong way.), and let go of what is not useful to me. Many of the beliefs I have let go are those that used to be fundamental to my religion, but were getting in the way of my spiritual growth. These include: believing in a literal eternal punishment/separation from God for all those who don’t “get it right in this life”; believing that any specific creation story, whether religious or secular, is anything more than the best guess of people who weren’t around to experience it and still don’t know how much we don’t know about the way the universe works now, let alone way back then; believing that any particular religious group or doctrine has cornered the market on Truth and everyone else is wrong; believing that the Bible, or any religious document, should or even can be taken at face value instead of being creatively interpreted in light of our modern culture and ways of living (“if we actually did that,” says the pastor of the United Church of Christ/Presbyterian congregation we’ve attended twice so far, “we would still be dashing the babies of our enemies onto rocks and stoning to death women who committed adultery.” Not to mention murdering entire people groups who occupied land that we wanted for ourselves.); finding it necessary to believe in a literal incarnation of God in the person of Jesus (it’s a beautiful story, and it certainly feels true. But it’s trueness seems to be more figurative and illustrative than literal. I don’t think it matters); and believing that prayer is a weapon that should be used to keep evil at bay. For most, possibly all, of these beliefs, there is nothing inherently wrong with holding them. After giving myself permission to consider everything I held as Truth in light of my own personal experience of the Divine, I found that these central beliefs were blocking me from growing deeper into God, and so I have—with much trepidation, prayer and meditation, fear and trembling, joy and relief, each by turns and sometimes all together—released them into the surging depths of Things I Do Not Know, and embraced Mystery instead.

Any person working to maintain and grow a relationship with another unique individual will intuitively do the same. Every person who has been in a relationship long enough to weather bouts of relational upheaval knows that not all advice fits every relationship or situation. Neither can any religious prescription fit everyone’s needs. This made such perfect sense once I stopped to think about it, but it took a while to get to the point of stopping and thinking because those of us with a strongly Christian understanding of the Divine (and this is probably true for people raised in other religions as well, I just can’t speak directly to anyone else’s experience) have been taught to distrust our own interpretation of anything (which conveniently keeps those in authority in authority). This is fundamentally unBiblical. Abraham, Moses, Paul, and Jesus all trusted their own personal experience of God before and above all religious instruction, often going against the religious leaders and spiritual “experts” of the day in order to do so.