Painting new pictures.
Truth is like a tree. It’s rooted and it’s grounded, but it’s dynamic--not static. It’s always growing. Always changing. In the cold and cruel reality of our suffering, truth loses the delicate parts of itself, but keeps the rigid and rough, becoming skeletal. But in the unhurried seasons of life, truth is proud to show you her new colors. New facets. New perspectives.
Truth is like a mountain. In a fertile time, it is clothed with new life. But in the winter of our pain, truth is stripped bare and appears bald-faced. Looking at the dry, craggy rock, we start to concern ourselves with rockslides and avalanches--with fragile truths. Some truths just don’t ‘hold up,’ as they say. But the mountain remains.
Truth is like the night sky. What we see of it is new in every moment, but what we know of it never changes. It’s all revolving around a central star, and though ‘light pollution’ can drawn them out, our stars are a sure thing. You can keep time by them.
Great men like Galileo had their theories and formulas about what’s going on up there, but we didn’t really start learning until we started sending things up. For millions of years we were her audience; now we are participants.
Truth is like a whole universe, ever expanding outward from a single point. We are contained in it, and we are surrendered to it, but we barely understand it, and we will never know its end. Truth is on the march and cannot be stopped.
Truth takes various forms in various phases. I’m talking quantum stuff. You know, like how a particle becomes a wave at the moment of observation, or whatever? I can’t explain why or how that happens, but neither can anyone else really. There are truths that require a second look. All is not as it seems, so look with fresh eyes.
Reality is not a computer and truth is not a coding language. This is not a world of ones and zeros, like the world on your iPhone. It isn’t binary. Black and white. Yes or no. Good or evil. Right or wrong. Right or left. Up or down. East or west. Male or female. Jew or Gentile. Slave or free. Most all ‘belief’ is the act of making either/or decisions about a profoundly both/and reality.
Belief alone can’t help us in gray areas, but truth can.
Truth is like a loving Father. I don’t know about your dad, but mine let me make my mistakes and then helped me learn from them. That’s truth. It isn’t so concerned about the little half-truths we all come to believe in response to suffering. But it won’t let us labor long under an outright lie. Lovingly, correction is always provided. Yes, truth even disciplines at times. And it gives good gifts.
But truth isn’t everything. Goodness and beauty have their say, too. Truth, goodness, and beauty. Can anyone think of higher ideals than these?
In the Trinity, we have a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit working together to co-equally promote the virtues of truth, goodness, and beauty. Truly, these three exist as a kind of three-fold meta-ethic governing all reality. In his Being, each of these virtues can co-exist in perfect harmony. And in historical Christianity, we find the spiritual practices that lead to an experience with a God who is Father, Son, and Spirit. One-in-three.
God, herself, is a great tree. She’s rooted, and she’s grounded in what is true, but she’s dynamic--not static. That’s how a God could, “grow up like a tender sapling, like a root out of parched ground.” He shades me, shelters me, and provides me warmth. She‘s with me in the great garden of life. He shows me new colors every day. She and I have our own language.
Some of you will get hot under the collar that I just referred to God as ‘her.’ I did that to provoke you. Think on it for a sec: Gendered language is hilariously meaningless when used to describe a formless, spiritual Being. But that’s beside the point.