Burning Truth At The Stake

Burning Truth At The Stake

What you are about to read is bald-faced heresy--dangerous sacrilege that challenges a revered belief system . So don’t believe a word of it. Begin stacking the kindling around the public stake. Still it is true.

Do I hear you shouting, “Heresy by definition can’t be truth. Are you crazy?”

Calm down! I haven’t even made my statement yet. Taste before you judge.

Here it is--“Solid, incontrovertible facts do not necessarily lead to truth. The Christian Bible, for example, is a location of truth, but not literally.”

Now you can start yelling. However, if you are not the disputatious type, you may prefer to just bow your head in sadness, and read no further.

But you need to hear me out in order to know how to discredit me. Look for the card whose removal will collapse the house I build. But don’t hastily grab just any card to pull on. Remember that I said you should not believe this heresy.

But, you may reply, why would you advise anyone to not believe what you think is true? Because--take a careful look at the two key words, “facts” and “believe.” All facts are isolated items embedded together in a context. A fact may be solid, but its meaning lies outside itself. Literalism only determines what was said and how the speaker arranged his words. The soundness of my house of truth does not depend on the cards (the word-facts) I use. If the card stack collapses, truth remains, and you won‘t despair because you had an idea of what the truth was anyway.

As for “believing,” belief is a choice--a personal choice. If you accept an arrangement of facts in literal form, presented to you documentarily as the truth and the only truth, you are putting your faith in someone else’s pitch. Of course, the standard answer is that God only “uses” the sacred writers as His own voice. So we should believe the scripture because it is the incontrovertible word of God. But if the Bible were God’s exact words, we should all be able to agree on what He (and not She) said. If this were the case, we would need neither priests nor theologians; not even the New Testament, because Jesus found the Torah to be sufficient reading.

As Professor Christian de Quincy boldly tells his students, “Don’t believe a word I say. I don’t want you to believe anything. Not what I say, or what anybody else says. I want you to learn a new way of using your mind that liberates you from “facts” and “beliefs” by focusing on your own direct, moment-to-moment experience. This is where your real power resides; this is the way to wisdom.” (Radical Knowing, p. 12)

This statement is jolting, but if you add the acknowledgement that individual experience may be distorted by mental deficiencies and emotional disturbances, it still stands that you know better than anyone else what resolves your confusion. If you don’t want to be wise and know truth, then sell your supple, creative, god-like self to someone who has truth already outlined for you, available no doubt now on a CD. (I would check for a money back guarantee.)

Truth does not depend on the words we use to describe it. Truth and heresy are not opposites. Heresy is only a manner of speech. To say truth wrongly does not make truth wrong. The task is to know truth first, then find a way to say it. Here is my way.

What is Truth

In the Judeo-Christian tradition but not unique to it--the content of the sacred text, the Bible, was lived by humans and spoken before it was written. More than dictum, the Bible is a mirror, a reflection, recollections of experiences. It is the telling of people’s stories. Even the literalists acknowledge that God speaks to them with different messages when they read particular passages at different moments, at different sittings. For real life, the enduring richness of sacred writings lies in what is between the lines.

Lecturing is not God’s pedagogy of choice. Rather, God draws and attracts us as we see ourselves in other peoples’ stories. Even Jesus’ “sermon” on the mount was a “talk” from the heart, not found in the strictures of the Talmud. The lessons of life are not static, for wisdom is not quantified and doled out. Truth is certainly well-connected and dependable, but it is flowing and experiential, and never finished--just as God, who has no beginning, is never finished.

On their face, many sacred texts are frankly boring. But while a layer of semantic fog may obscure truth’s beauty, still its luminosity shimmers beneath any cover thrown over it. Truth cannot lack appeal, so we should be able to recognize it. But until we have seen it, all efforts to craft a description of enshrouded truth, in print or speech, must pale before actual experience.

To convince the unseeing, one can only resort to verbal helps, such as logic, or interpretation. But logic is cold, and interpretation is second-hand. Better is evidence, which needs no verbalizing. But evidence must be marshaled. Evidence-collecting is an art form. All arguments are artifacts hanging on racks before us. We pick according to our taste or background. But when this leads us into confusion or leaves us in depression, we look for outside help. This can come in two forms--a charismatic authority figure, or quiet companionship of one who “has been through it.” Truth is elemental and simple. If it has to be explained, many of us would not “get it." So the way to test the truth factor of our experiences is in community and relationships. We most likely will find truth if we share and compare, rather than subscribe and imbibe.

I can hear your objections. You would say to me, “Then there is no real, final truth. Surely someone must have the truth. God must want to deliver it to us.” If all assertions are mere proof-texting (selective argumentation), the truth remains hidden in the din of voices. So are we left with only two possible conclusions--either there is no truth, or the truth can’t be shown without bias? No, Truth can be shown, but it is not that which is just challenge-proof, or that which sits atop a mountain to be thundered out to valley dwellers. Nor is Truth that which wins all debates. And Truth is not conveyed by wit and sparkle.

Truth delivers conviction, not the other way around. We tend to go at it backward. We read biblical passages as packaged samples of God, as disks to be inserted into our CD player. We buy the answers (books or discs) first and then try to match them up with our questions. If the fit isn’t quite right, we make it work, because the package cover said “sent by God.” In the process we unwittingly become the creators of God, because we decide ahead of time what packaging company to order from.

The better approach is to find truth as we experience it, as it “comes” to us. We then can verify the insights by the resonation we sense while reading the sacred text. In other words we own the questions first, which enables us to recognize the right answers as they appear to us. Don’t worry about truth getting distorted this way. Truth, in itself, is undistortable. The Bible is not a mail order catalogue of devotional snippets “guaranteed to change your life.” The Bible presents the living, untidy account of people experiencing God. The “connection” with its truths, its believability, comes from our sense of identifying with the stories of people searching for understanding just as we are doing. When we connect with Truth this way, we can be sure that we see God. Jesus expressed this when he said he was the “way, the truth, and the life.” We come to God--“truth“--by the “way” of “life” that Jesus demonstrated. Biological life is the sensory experience of God‘s flow. Spiritual life is the yielding to, the acknowledging of the attractive force behind material processes. This does not make God ambiguous; it makes God real. Anyone can experience this, and you don’t have to be a “writer” to tell about it.

The Search

So how do we initiate the search? We want Truth--this real God--to float on the ocean surface where our boat bobs, like an easily (literally) marked buoy; but instead it lies deep. How can we know where to dive, and what to look for?

Well, one can ask around, attend some workshops, if you have money--there is no lack of willing guides. Some of this may be very helpful, but there is a more direct way.

We can find Truth within. Truth is what we know, as we know it. We know truth because it makes us free. It is what unbinds us. Just as we are not all tied-up the same way, so each is freed in a unique way. Bondage comes in variety packs. Those who are persuaded by my description of truth are those who have known bondage as I describe it. It is not my powers of description that convince, it is the resonation within the listener. Truth is not received as a gift; it arises from within. Wisdom lies not in tightly bound, catechized texts; it is witnessed in human stories that bring tears, smiles, inexpressible connections. Wisdom is personal first. It touches without touching. But as it wells up it becomes communal. We join others because we see they have what we want. The true believer knows the difference between being grabbed by marching words and being embraced by warm light.

Truth lies in stories, the stories of life and living. We don’t learn truth--we find it, we come upon it. It is in the open meadows into which we step after wandering in the forest. It is not in our heads where knowledge grows like crowded saplings and trees; it is in our hearts where there is ample room for knowing to leap and dance--where others join us when they look up from the maps and realize they are there already.

God, as leather-bound and handed to us, may or may not be genuine truth, depending on the integrity of the presenter. But Truth, for certain, is God. And Truth is within us, waiting only to be enlivened. Truth--as God--is down deep, in the bright open spaces down where we are.