What is truth?
Okay, that may be a little heavy to ponder on a Saturday morning when the only thing moving is the swirling vapor rising above my hot coffee cup, made visible by a single ray of the sunrise streaming through the window of the kitchen door straight to the coffee table.
See? That's the problem. It is Saturday. I am sitting on the sofa. I am drinking coffee. And the only thing I notice moving is the misty plume rising from my coffee. But my idealistic description of my morning contains non-truths. The vapor is not the only thing moving, there is movement all around. The room is full of morning light, not just a single ray of sun, whatever that is. But it sounded pretty. And it describes what I feel about my surroundings this morning. If you were here with me you might notice completely different things about the scene. I suspect that your first observation would be that I need to put on a shirt. And that it might be helpful if I choose one from that pile of laundry on the love seat that never made it to the closet. Or that you don't notice any plumes of vapor coming from the two coffee mugs on the coffee table obviously still there from previous mornings. Perhaps that is why you haven't been invited to join me.
Sometimes our disagreements would suggest that one of us is not telling the truth. For instance, I would describe my Saturday morning coffee ritual today as quite close to perfect. You, on the other hand, might have entered the doorway and seen nothing but the mess, which would have had to be done away with before any ritual could be enjoyed. Our views of the scene are so different. Was one of us lying? Which one of us saw the truth?
Silly, I know. We both were seeing only a part of the whole truth of the room. Each view was a partial truth.
But it is important how we deal with our limitations on knowing the entire truth of a situation. If we accept a partial truth as the whole truth, we will end our pursuit, and our partial truth will become a lie. But if we accept a partial truth for what it is, we are on our way to discovering more of what we have yet to see.
A few years ago on an Appalachia Service Project mission trip the staff assigned the group I was in to a mobile home in a small town a few miles up the road from Flagpond, in Unicoi County, Tennessee. Normally the staff would have fully investigated a work site to define the work to be done, but for some reason they had not done so this time. The instruction I received on Sunday evening before we started work on Monday was to check out a little weakness in the floor below a window and repair it. Apparently they had noticed the floor gave a little when they walked on it.
Monday morning, after we had introduced ourselves to the owner of the house, visited and mosied for awhile, we took a closer look at the problem. We pulled back the floor covering below the window. The floor disintegrated into small particles. We could have stopped there, repaired the floor and wall immediately under the window, and had an easy week. But we couldn't see the edge of solid flooring, so we pulled the flooring back a little more. The floor continued to disappear. As it turned out the flooring in the entire den and kitchen area was nothing but disintegrated particle board held together with floor covering. So, in order to fix it, we had to remove all the flooring, as well as the kitchen counters and cabinets. Upon lifting the counter top we were treated to the sight of about a billion little roaches scampering to find darkness again. Then the cabinets fell apart. It was then that we discovered the root of the whole problem, a serious leak in the plumbing below the sink. I could go on. It was quite an adventure. But the point is, the truth turned out to be a whole lot more than what the staff had perceived by sensing a weak place in the floor below the window.
To fix what was broken, we first had to uncover the whole truth, as ugly as it was. Believe me, there were moments when we wanted to declare the whole truth discovered and not go any further in that pursuit. Especially when the roaches were revealed. But we had yet to discover anything solid. Replacing the flooring without uncovering and dealing with the whole truth would have been pointless. In this case the partial truth, had we taken it as the whole truth, would have been a harmful lie.
We know how hard it is to deal with the truth in personal relationships. Often it is so much easier to ignore the truth, to put a nice shiny linoleum over it without checking the sub floor, or refusing to look for the leak caused the weakness in the first place. Peeling back the layers is painful, and sometimes scary, like a plague of roaches. A quick patch might avoid immediate pain, but will probably result in a full collapse some time down the road. And maybe the hardest thing in relationships is to remember that each is viewing the same truth, but from different vantage points. How the differing views are used can be the end of the relationship, or a new beginning.
And the same is true in our collective and political lives. There is nothing wrong with differing viewpoints. In fact, differing viewpoints should be encouraged and treasured. The more views we have of the truth the more realistic picture we have of the whole thing. It is when we begin to believe that our viewpoint from our limited vantage point captures the whole truth that we get into trouble.
And as a nation we are in a bit of trouble.
As a nation we owe a lot of money. We need to pay it back. To raise money to pay these debts we need to cut what we spend. That is a valid part of the truth. We need to raise more money, that is, to pay more taxes, to pay the debt back. That is another valid part of the truth.
To claim either partial truth as the whole truth is to transform it into a dangerous lie.
None of this truth stuff is easy. Much of the time I can't see the truth, or I wonder if the concept of truth applies at all.
So I need help.
And maybe that's enough truth for this morning.
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