Especially primed for change now, right now—as if our world may explode if we don’t—is truth, the way we “get it.” Any high hopes that we can trust news media, political leaders, even preachers to tell the truth have disintegrated beyond the point at which the center holds. While this sounds awful, potentially the breakdown offers good news.
We would like to trust persons in positions of authority to be truthful. The alternative of asserting my individual position can be dangerous as well as arrogant and stupid. Also, trust is a beautiful thing, but it leads to devastating betrayal unless we refine our moral sense. This continued refinement includes holding authorities accountable for telling the truth or saying “I don’t know.” Acts of deception have to be named and punished.
Somewhat on the positive side, being lied to spurs us into hard learning of telling truth, even in uncertainty, in paradox, and in story language that intertwines with experiential data. Contemporary schooling has limited our development of moral sense with an overemphasis on fact as truth, in no small part because that version of true is easier to score “reliably” as right/wrong in grading and testing. Leonard Lewisohn tells the fuller nature of truth:
This Truth/Reality (haqiqat) professed by the Sufis is best expressed by indirect symbolic allusions and more effectively captured by poetic metaphor than described by logical statements of didactic prose. Paradox, symbolic allusion, and apophatic expression are more the tools… (p. xiv in The Wisdom of Sufism)
For adults today to bequeath any quality of life to the next generation, we must commit to advancing our moral sense so that we can tell the truth beyond the fact-level and beyond selfish interests. We make this commitment so that we can live into truth about peace in a world community, about “justice for all.”
While sacred text guides our best effort to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), each person’s engagement with truth also depends on living it out, with courage and persistence through inevitable mistakes. Refining and advancing our moral sense depends on a concerted willingness to live in the moment. “The friend of God is the child of the present instant” (Lewisohn translating Junayd in Hujwiri’s Kashf al-mahjub; p. 45 in The Wisdom of Sufism).
We need courage to turn down the volume of external proclamations blaring across the dial from eyewitness newscasts to expert scientists/academicians to scripture-quoting preachers/theologians. I’m not throwing out the volumes on wisdom, but I’m searching for truthful voices that resonate with experience. Models for interrogating our lived experience include the studies of key figures such as King David. I have about fifty passages marked in Walter Brueggemann’s David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory.
Richly arrayed on my desktop are also Abraham Heschel’s A Passion for Truth; David Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope; Gadamer’s Truth and Method; Richard Niebuhr’s The Meaning of Revelation; Nasr’s The Garden of Truth; and God’s Light: The Prophets of the World’s Great Religions. I don’t want to go into the jungle of personal experience unarmed. From this array of rich texts, great ideas swirl with and against each other threatening to pull me under the spell of word-world, the enchantment of thought and philosophy. But the love of wisdom risks separation from the fragile truth of personal experience.
As noted in previous blogs, my personal favorite for bringing together my body’s knowing with the word world happens in natural horsemanship. For example, I reflect back on the most recent ride with Leg’cy. Shortly before I’d dismounted, my body vibrated in the way I’ve come to realize signals something meaningful, as an offering to be composed—or abandoned in unreflected dust.
But when I hold the moment in consideration, I see that our rides continue to simplify. While we both thrill in the fast-paced canter, we want it to be held in lightness with very subtle cueing. Midway in the ride, I’d asked for the trot-to-canter transition. Leg’cy refused. Instead of demanding, as some texts and coaches assert, I accepted: “O.K. My timing wasn’t right.” So we returned to working on flexion with more leg yields at the trot. Then, before long, Leg’cy herself sent a very subtle canter cue. I followed, and together we smoothly transitioned. The moral: Let go of an unmet desire and accept a higher power in the given—this allows a sweeter union.
This is the lived-experience complement to the quotation by Lewisohn: the divine found in surrender to the present instant. So while it’s not new, the confirmation by body with the wisdom text combines into a vibrant truth that's strong in conviction and begging for commitment. Living in the moment is hard but with body-mind-soul it’s done.
As we live into the integrity of our own being our capacity to tell the truth perfects because we are purifying the self-deceptions, releasing the illusions implanted by consumer culture, false belief, by power mongers, by fear, disappointment, harbored hate, anger, and so much more. How can we begin to expect to discern and to oppose the lies all around unless and until we live into the powerful truth within, moment by living moment in full consciousness and committed conscience!
Said again, in order to live ethically and to advance moral sense for doing it, we need our own embodied authority, refined through intention and reflection, and buttressed with universal source often re-told in good stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment