Truth?

Why bother?

Most every day, I take a walk, and lately while walking I listen to St. Augustine's Confessions. The fellow tries my patience so severely I often mumble less than kindly remarks and won't recommend the Confessions to anyone unless they are students of Catholic church history or fanatically intrigued by rhetoric. Still, it's fascinating to hear the thoughts of someone so dedicated to the search for truth. Make that TRUTH.

Truth is a tough one, even for the best minds.  But I'm not going to let those smarter folks have all the fun. So here's my take on the subject:

 In John 18:33–38, while being interrogated by Pilate, Jesus answered, ". . . the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Note the term "on the side of truth".  I suspect it refers to people who actually seek truth rather than simple or comfortable answers.

Pilate said to Jesus, "What is truth?" and then walked away without waiting for an answer. Apparently, he was no serious truth-seeker. But had he honestly, not rhetorically, posed the  question, Jesus might’ve answered as John 14:6 reports he responded to his disciple Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life". And he might have added the suggestion recorded in John 8:31-32, “‘If you continue in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.'”

A little more vocabulary parsing: The word continue implies perseverance; and by disciples, he likely meant people who follow the discipline his words command or advocate.

If I am right about those meanings, the benefit of being a disciple is that it will make us free.

Free from what, though?

After lots of reading and wondering, the best answer I see is that we can be free from deception.

Freedom from deception can, from a Christian perspective, mean having the ability to detect, and the wisdom to reject, the messages or impulses provided by the entity or force we call Satan, commonly referred to as the father of lies.

So it appears that by persevering in the pursuit and application of Christ's wisdom we can become free from lies.

I had two very different grandmothers. One was both passionately Christian and mean. The other was an artist, a poet, and perhaps an angel. You could read about a grandma like her in my novel Supermen.

I suppose my mean grandma thought of herself as a disciple of Christ, but over the years I knew her, I saw no evidence that she was free of anything.

Meanwhile, many times I heard my poet grandma assert that the worst crime was lying. I am not about to argue this because if I ever again hear (or read) anyone say, "Well what about . . ." I may indulge in a screaming fit and land in a sanitarium. But I will avow that after many years of contemplating my beloved grandma's opinion, I agree with her that lying is the worst crime.

So, if becoming an honest disciple frees us from getting deceived by lies and liars, that's a big deal, and worth plenty perseverance and discipline. And if we get freed from lying, to others and to ourselves, all the better for everybody.

Still, for most of us in this life, nothing is easy, and living free from deception -- no matter if the freedom comes from being a disciple or from some other method -- is one of our harder challenges. So, the next couple weeks I will give my take on a couple ways we can tell truth from lies.

That's worth returning for, right?