How can it be that intelligent, well-meaning people can have such strongly opposing views? For instance, the pro-lifer might disdain using masks, while the fan of masks might embrace the pro-abortion cause. Both will claim they are saving lives and claim the moral high ground, but each side will find the other at grave fault. Another “for instance:” one group is revolted by the news that 500 children were stranded at border detention centers without parents; while the border patrol tells us that every effort was made to find the parents, but that they could not, or would not, be found. What, then does that tell us about the parents, rather than the border guards? Yet, most will focus on one side while not considering the other.
The point is, we are inclined to believe in a certain way for various reasons. I have a neighbor in his 70s who still hunts and hikes and heats with wood he cuts himself, and is pretty much self-reliant. Yet he proudly put up a Biden for Pres sign. As for myself, I have advanced degrees from a super-liberal university and was raised in a Northeast Catholic family whose political affiliation with the Democratic Party was the stronger of the two religions, and yet I have strayed, alienating almost everyone in my family back home. The neighbor was originally from Chicago and a Catholic himself, his heritage gluing him to the Democrats. On my part, I have always been the moderator, a middle child in a boisterous family whose job it was – little did I know it consciously – to balance extremes. I now believe that the left has taken control of nearly all the power centers in the US, from Big Press to Big Tech to education to Washington Bureaucracy, and so I am siding with the underdog to even things out.
Of course these are snap-shots, with many other currents running through us all, but I hope I have gotten the idea across that “logic” is often what we decide it to be. In fact, debate clubs are often given issues to debate that are simply taken from a hat. The side that wins is not so much the side that holds the greater truth, but the side that argues more persuasively. In politics, persuasion often goes beyond logic, with those in need of power crying crocodile tears to sway our vote. Such tactics are anything but new.
I was struck by this problem during last Saturday’s evening mass. The homily concerned the quotes of Pope Francis taken from the movie “Francesco,” just released. In it, the pope tells us that gay couples should not be excluded from the family for their proclivities, and that such people should be allowed civil unions. The political left was ecstatic (as if they care for what the rest of what the Church says). See? Even the pope has blessed gay relationships! But not so fast, our priest told us. While the pope was vague, he did not proclaim that homosexuality was A-OK, but rather that two people should be able to share legal responsibilities and privileges regardless of sexuality or connections. This could leave in place the dark view the Church has always had on such sexual expressions, which I believe are considered mortal sins, bad enough to send one to the eternal flames.
However, Pope Francis still refuses to clarify his positions, knowing undoubtedly that “civil unions” between homosexuals would fully legitimize homosexual activities. Our priest tried to persuade us that the pope did not condone such things, as this would be contrary to ancient doctrine, but who really knows? Those against gay unions will either condemn the pope for heresy, or claim he meant something else, as our priest did, while those who are for it will dance around the bonfire of newfound papal liberality. How we see this is pre-programmed, allowing us to take one position or another without deep thought. In the end, we see what we want to see based on deep-seated prejudices and often subconscious needs.
But that is not what made this mass special. As is often the case in church-ly things, greater texture was given to help determine what truth really is by a reading from St Paul, given to us just before the homily: “Let us, then, be children no longer, tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine that originates in human trickery and skill in proposing error. Rather, let us profess the truth in love and grow to the full maturity of Christ the head.” (Ephesians, 4: 14-15 in the New American Bible) So it is that the union with Christ is presented as the solution to all our questions and worries. This is so because, after the Resurrection, Christ himself told the Apostles that they were to be bestowed with the “paraclete,” or Holy Spirit, which would direct them in all manner of thought and actions. This is what St Paul is telling us in the passage above, as he does in so many others: that truth can only be seen through this grace of knowledge. Through this enlightenment he found that human knowledge is beset with lies and trickeries including, I might add, lies to the self, lies that we think will validate us in some way.
This is the beginning of truth: that we cannot think ourselves into a real and coherent vision of reality. Reality is far too great, and we are far too fragile to avoid filling in the void with our needs and preferences. We will sometimes even die for our version of the truth, but if it is done to preserve our preferred versions of ourselves, the deaths are in vain, proving nothing but the depth of our own weaknesses.
Such, the paragraph above, becomes obvious with a little thought. However, how we move on from this beginning is not so clear, or better said, is not so attractive to the independent thinker. Now, we must move from personal thoughts to the thoughts given to us through faith. But this, we might ask ourselves, is what the followers of Jim Jones did, right? Or Charley Manson or any number of lost people scrambling for flotsam and jetsam in the shipwreck of their lives. But even if we are not led to a path of destruction, we do not want a path towards bland stupidity, towards myths and clouds and angels cooked up by semi-primitive minds millennia before. How is it, then, that we can know that spiritually-given truth is the real truth?
For Paul and the other apostles it was self-evident. When enlightenment came, it explained all that was needed to be explained that could not be explained otherwise. It was obvious on its face. But such also are paranoid delusions. The difference, Paul tells us, is found in the body of Christ, which consists of all believers, which becomes a union that defines love. Love is what truth is, but we cannot know that until we are given it. This sort of love is not bland or based on sexual chemistry or Hallmark greeting cards; it is not a simpering smile beamed down on the up-thrust face of a child. It is, rather, supernova stuff, blow-away stuff that brings us to the foot of all things. In this love we know not to drink cyanide or kill “the pigs,” even as this love is as far removed from our ordinary knowledge of love as the infinite is to our limited lives. It is, I suspect, all goodness and all knowledge rolled into one, because they go together in the meaning of existence. It is these qualities that define it as something eons away from the schemes of charlatans and the delusions of schizophrenic psychopaths.
If we had it, then, we would know it, but how do we get it? We can seek it through purification and through the denial of material things and certainly through compassion, but, as the Protestants emphasize, we cannot get there through acts alone. In the end it can only be given to us by unearned grace. Grace works through faith. Faith is faith because it is the belief in the ultimate truth before this ultimate truth is made obvious. So it is that we are most often given self-evident truth only after we have decided to have faith that this truth has been given to others, and indeed is the truth. This is something of a Catch-22 for the independent thinker and for just about everyone else, but it is the way of truth in Christianity as well as most other religions (but certainly not always – look at St Paul on the road to Damascus).
The best way to get to truth, then, is to set ourselves out on a proven path and stick with it. There is never a guarantee of results, because such a divine bestowal is granted for reasons that go way above our pay-grade, but it is for most the best and only way. I, for one, have not grasped the better part of eternal truth, but I have learned enough to know that the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, is for real. I have heard it whisper things as if in the wind that are beyond and above any conscious thought. I have heard just enough to know that St Paul and the Apostles had something real to say beyond the confines of their culture and place in history.
As I have not been granted the knowledge of all things, I still have my biased opinions and am as sure as anyone else that I have the right opinions. But I am also aware that what most of us believe is based on some form of human trickery or skill. Knowledge of such bias has been given to us by St Paul through his grace. Perhaps it is, then, that this exceptional time of duplicity and lies that we are living through here in our nation is really a blessing, a grace unto itself. It might just be that we are being forced to admit that, roiled by deceit and bias as we are, only the truth that comes through the divine love that St Paul has brought to us is the tenable choice.
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