Truth

TRUTH: the quality or state of being true;  that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality; a fact or belief that is accepted as true (Oxford Dictionary Online)

To tell you the truth, I've been thinking about this topic in correlation with our EfM lessons about the world of the ancient peoples of the Bible and even further back to the origin of the world itself. It's probably one of the most divisive stories in  Bible history, when it comes to faith, belief and the perception of truth. Funny thing, to be so divisive when it comes to a story that is traditional and common to all sides.

The basic facts of the Genesis stories of creation are the same -- God created the world and everything in it, including human beings. The stories differ in the order of creation, the method and that's about it. I think that's probably agreed-upon by people of the Judeo-Christian faith. Most of the time the stories are somewhat conflated so that parts of the two are told as if they were all one story. It's not an uncommon Biblical thing; Noah's ark, even the birth of Jesus have two tellings that have the same basic facts but are somewhat different.

Truth is about fact and reality. The sun shining is a fact; it's observable. We even believe that the sun will come up tomorrow (sounds like a Broadway show tune, doesn't it?) even though we don't have definite proof that it will. It always has so we assume it always will, prophets and doomsayers to the contrary, but who believes prophets these days?  Science tells us that one day it won't happen, but that's at some remote point in time and so we can cheerfully ignore it for the present. Doesn't make it less true, just less applicable to our everyday life. And it keeps the doomsayers in business.

Truth is also about belief. I believe God exists, even though I can't empirically prove it. I keep reading the weather forecasts and planning activities around them even though I understand the potential for their being wrong a good part of the time (as in prognosticating the possibility and percentage of chance of rain in my specific area of Arizona in on Tuesday, September 21st, in the evening -- 70% predicted, amount actually hitting the ground as rain, 0). 

When it comes to the stories of creation, I believe the stories are true but I don't necessarily believe they are factual.  That puts me at odds with a lot of people, my own relatives included. The stories are, for me, inexplicably true despite their apparent lack of provable fact. I can't explain how the creation was accomplished or by what means. I can't accept a six-day creation as described in the Bible or in any other stories of creation other cultures and religions have as their tradition.  I can accept as true that the creation happened; I can see the world around me and know that a some point in time it had to begin somehow, somewhere, somewhen. I can listen to the science that puts the age of the universe in billions and billions of years and I can hear the Bible's six-day creation. I find truth in each of them - truth in what science tells me, the fossil record, the evolution of writing and art and even science itself, and in what the Bible describes as a progression of events culminating in a populated world that functions by natural laws and sometimes inexplicable events.  I hold the two beliefs in tension because of their truth.

Truth is about more than just demonstrable facts or what people accept as facts regardless of whether or not they are literally true. Yeats said, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."  Beauty is subjective -- everybody has an idea of what's beautiful and what isn't and people don't always agree on what is or isn't beautiful. Same with truth; my truth isn't necessarily yours. In a way it's a kind of diversity. I accept that your truth is true for you and I would hope you would accept that mine is for me. Oh, we might talk about it, discuss it, even heatedly, and perhaps one or both of us will try to convince the other that we are, in fact, right and you are, in fact, wrong. It would be lovely if we could stand up, shake hands, and leave the table as friends who can't agree on something but respecting the truth the other so firmly believes in.

For me, ambiguity is truth because it gives me the opportunity to hold two divergent beliefs in tension and not pin all my hopes -- and faith-- on either one. Did creation happen in a week or billions of years?  Did Noah actually save his family and some animals in a universal flood? were there two of each or two of some and seven pairs of another? Did shepherds and wise men show up in a stable in Bethlehem, or did one group come at one time and in one place while the other group come at a different time and place?  Did the resurrection entail a spiritual reawakening or a physical reanimation --- or both? those are all questions I don't have factual answers for. All I have is belief that regardless of the facts, the truth lies deeper down and is much more precious than just facts.

The truth that lies beneath it is the truth on which my faith is based. Something happened, I don't know how, when, where or by what agency, but I know something happened. That something is the experience that draws me in, encloses me and tells me that I don't need to try to understand the paradoxes. Something happened, I experience something that informs and encourages my faith because of it and that's enough.

And that's the truth.