The Redemptive Power of Truth

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Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another
- Ephesians 4:25

We Quakers put a high value on truth telling.  

This might be why we find the current state of affairs so deeply disturbing.   In the last 100 days we've been fed about 492 suspect claims.  Since 2020 who knows how many?  In the tens of thousands that we know of.   And if we combine both political parties in that calculation it's probably a lot higher.  But honestly, I find it hard to tell when I'm being lied to unless I can look in the liar's face. And that's just outright lies; not to mention lies of omission. 

On the right and left of the political spectrum everything is spun for some political advantage. My distrust of everything is at an alltime high. 

So what does a person do in such a fact free environment?  How do we find common ground when the color of the ground is clearly brown, the wavelength of the light reflected from the ground is in the brown spectrum but we are told the ground is blue? 

The delusions of the world are many, but perhaps the way out of this is to have shared experiences.   It is easy to quote what others say or follow the words of so-called leaders, but what is our own experience? 

• If I walk along the shore with a friend and the surf gets us both wet surely we can agree on water and wetness? 
• We can agree on gravity if we both jump off a rock into a lake.
• Maybe we can even agree on some shared language to describe something we both see or experience.

Beyond that I don't know what is true.  Everything else is just second hand news or conjecture.  

The inquiry I am in is this: 

• What is real? 
• Can I trust my senses?  My experience is that the Earth is flat unless I get in an airplane and see the curve of the planet.
• If I hear something, do I trust the source?  How do I even evaluate that? A photo can show one truth and then be cropped to show another.  A statement can also be chopped into sound bytes to have many different meanings? 
• Are there universal truths that I can accept without question?  Such as God is love. 
• Is logic a bastion of truth?  Math?  a2 + b2 = c2  

I think the notion that we are "members of one another" is a guide to truth, but only if we are building that community together. And by together I mean in person; looking into the eyes of another.  Feeling into that person's inner light. 

~ Joseph Olejak