POETRY

I want to paint a new picture for you about the nature of truth. We’ve gone back and forth on this and we’re no better for it: Is truth objective or subjective? Is it a matter of God’s Law and not up for debate, or is it a matter of perspectives to a God who welcomes debate? Is there such a thing as ‘your truth’ as opposed to ‘my truth?’

Let’s forget all that nonsense and write poetry today. Here’s my little poem.

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 herself, but keeps the rigid and rough, becoming skeletal and hard. But in the unhurried seasons of life, truth is proud to show you her new colors. New dresses.

Truth is like a lush, green mountain. Like the Great Smokies. 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 and brown. Looking at the dry trees and craggy rock, we start to concern ourselves with rockslides and avalanches--with fragile truths that don’t hold. 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 center, and though ‘light pollution’ can drawn each star out, our stars are a sure thing--reliable. You can keep time by them. You can navigate oceans by them.

Great men like Galileo had their theories and drawings about what’s going on up there, but we didn’t really start learning until we started sending things up ourselves. For millions of years we were her audience; now we are her participants.

Truth is spacious like that. Truth is like a whole universe, ever expanding outward from a single moment. We are contained in it, and we are surrendered to it, 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 mechanical 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. There are truths which are changed by the looking.

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter,” it’s said.

Reality is not a computer and truth is not a coding language and the Silicon Valley boys are not in charge. That sentence wasn’t very poetic. But this is just not a world of ones and zeros, like the world of your iPhone. It isn’t binary. It isn’t 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. No, almost all ‘belief’ is the act of making either/or decisions about profoundly both/and realities.

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, ‘nuggets of wisdom.’

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 love, we see 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. That was, perhaps, the coolest sentence I’ve ever written. Use that phrase at the gas station counter today and see what happens. A three-fold meta-ethic, lol.

In love’s own 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.” She shades me, shelters me, and provides me warmth. She‘s with me in the great garden of my life. We walk together in the cool of day. She shows me new colors every day. She and I have our own language.

You’re back to that ‘God as a girl’ thing again?! some of you are furious with me over that idea. Gendered language is hilariously meaningless when used to describe a formless, spiritual being, who is Love as one-. in-three. But that’s not poetry, that’s just good theology.

Think on a tree, today. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection said that while looking at a tree in winter, knowing that after a little while springtime will come and it will be resurrected to new life, he received such a high view of the providence of God that he hasn’t been the same since. That’s poetry.