In the United States, when someone goes before a court to give testimony they have swear “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” But what is the truth? Surely when people give testimony, they are only giving testimony to what THEY and only THEY know as the truth, because as an eye witness, it has been proven over and over…when we see something or someone it goes into our brain and our brain interprets what we see using all the experiences we have had during our lifetime.
It is the job of the lawyers to try to get at the truth with questions, and for the jury to try and pick out appropriate data.
Truth is elusive.
It took humans thousands of years, until the ancient Greeks learned that the earth was an orb, not a flat disc.
It was only in 1543, when Nicolaus Copernicus laid out his radical theory that the earth and other planets rotated around the sun…that some realized the sun did not rotate around the earth. It still took over 100 years before it was widely accepted.
When all you can see is flat or a sun that rises in the east and sets in the west…when you don’t go very far from your home, your truth is that the earth is flat and the sun does the moving around the earth, but we have learned a different reality with the help of many.
With telescopes we see nebulas, novae, stars and even other galaxies thousands of light years away. We are just beginning to see and adapt our minds to the greatness of the universe. The fact that our lives are brief and tiny amidst the enormity of the universe is frightening, unsettling, but it is also freeing.
You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. (John 8)
Many of us hide from the truth and we do not want to see reality.
In my lifetime, lesbians and gays hid their sexual preferences…and some still do in open societies... while in closed societies, like Russia, these people must hide or be tormented and jailed. But when gays and lesbians started coming out and being truthful about who they were, those of us, straight, saw that they were our sons and daughters, our sisters and brothers, our parents, our friends, and our leaders. What we might have thought before in our ignorance was sinful or unhealthy; we now begin to see the truth…the normality.
And now those of us gay and lesbian and those of us, straight, are moving freely in a dance of welcome and love. The truth will set you free.
With the Capitol breach and riot, we as white people in the American society now begin to see the truth in a stark bright light. White supremacy is alive and well and growing. For awhile the KKK, the neo-Nazis hid in the shadows of the shame of a free society; but now, we who are white can see for ourselves that while they stayed in the shadows, they grew. And many of us have been shocked.
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| 6 January 2021 - protestors breaking into the Capitol - shutterstock licensed photo |
It is good to see the truth…to see reality. We now see the rage of people afraid that they may be disenfranchised of their privilege… rage caused from fear stoked by so many of our leaders….rage caused by hearing lies about how they, the white people, are being oppressed.
Now, many of those people who ransacked the Capitol will say that my…Kathleen’s…truth is backwards. Gays and lesbians should hide. Their political bias is correct. So how could I…Kathleen…justify my truth?
It is a legitimate argument…because like I said above, we all interpret what we see and hear through our brains and our experiences.
I try to interpret truth through love and grace. I know that it is easier for me because I have felt so much love and grace from so many and yet...despite that I fail constantly.
My truth includes a Divine that spreads love and grace to all through our actions. I read the Hebrew and Christian scriptures with questions of how to better love and spread God’s grace, not the literal words written thousands of years ago.
I have had a wealth of experiences with people of color, with people of different sexual preferences, with people living in poverty, with refugees, and with people of different nationalities, religions and opinions. They tell me their truths and help me see with their eyes…and is that not what faith and humanity is all about?
Learning the truths of others with open minds and hearts. Hearing their painful experiences and trying to understand and eliminate their pain. These are ways to broaden our experiences so we see the truth.
We can listen to all sorts of people’s views of facts and news…it all comes down to how we listen to hopefully learn the truth.
Do we listen with only “us” as important… or do we listen with grace and generosity? Do we listen with fear… or do we listen with love?
The more we cling to ourselves and our fear, the more the “facts” and “realities” frighten us. The more we reach out and open up, the more we understand how the “facts” and “realties” affect others, not just us. And the more we practice love and grace instead of fear and selfishness, the easier it will be for our brains to interpret the facts and realities in ways for us to do good and heal our world. The truth indeed sets us free.
-Kathleen
