So as a bi-vocational pastor who sells home security systems for ADT I end up spending a LOT of time in the car. Today as I was driving I was listening to my Regina Spektor CD, specifically the song “Samson”, and had a thought I wanted to share based off a line of the lyrics in her song. Toward the beginning of the song she has a line that says “beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth”. It’s truly a beautiful song and I love it, but hearing that line today got me thinking about “truth” and whether or not it is actually something that can be used in the possessive sense.
This is what I mean. I don’t believe that truth is something that is “relevant” to a specific situation or personal viewpoint. I believe that there are such things in our universe as “ultimate truths” or “absolute truths”. This can be easily argued with something as basic (but amazing complex) as the law of gravity, but I actually want to dive into the thought of how this relates to us in our personal relationships with each other. I’m not sure the phrase “my truth” is even an accurate statement. While something that we hold in our belief system may in fact be a truth, I’m not sure we have the right or ability to take a possessive stance with that position as belonging to us. And simply because we believe something to be the truth doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. For example, a recent study showed that 17% of people polled in Australia put “Jedi” as their religious belief system. This might be “their truth”, but it’s not a truth.
Which leads to the idea of are we living truthfully or fictionally? What I mean is that I don’t think the truth is something that we can dictate in our own lives, but we have been lead to believe that this is so. Which is not a truth and therefore has opened the door to allow those of us who desire to do so to live in a completely fictitious existence. This may seem somewhat “ethereal”, but it got me to thinking about the idea that if we live our entire lives outside of the truth, have we truly lived at all?
ie. It is an “absolute truth” that human beings must breathe oxygen to live. If someone decides this is not true and attempts to live without oxygen for an extended amount of time, they cease to live. I think this same principle applies with other, less obvious truths. Take, for instance, someone who refuses to live their life according to the truth that the most valuable thing in this world is our relationships with God and others. Someone could live a semblance of an existence outside of this truth, but I would argue that without this truth being relevant in our everyday living we wouldn’t be living at all.
I think this might be one of the reasons I enjoyed the seasons and the ending of LOST so much. I suppose if I was going to take possession of a truth about that show this would be it. “My truth” about LOST is that it was one of the greatest shows ever made and had one of the most beautiful and well thought out endings I have ever seen. It’s been a while since any form of media has been able to achieve an emotional response from me like the responses I had multiple times while watching that finale.
peace,
Greg
