Truth

“Forgotten by all who would seek to know, the truth waits patiently for us to care again. Discarded, abandoned, the poor step-child overshadowed by its glamorous cousins—abundance, long life, wealth and fame, success and ambition—the truth has nothing to offer, no gifts to bestow, no promises. It cannot make you wealthy and very often it cannot even make you happy; almost every goal seems more worthwhile, more fruitful, more full of possibility than the truth. And so we have abandoned it. And even when it tugs at our sleeve, we ignore it and hope it will go away. We seek our pleasures and sometimes we even seek our pain, but the truth we do not seek, not often, not well. We try to forget that there is an is-ness to things, that some things are real while others are not, that some things are fact while others are fiction. We even coin phrases like ‘my truth’ to evade the fact of things and to refuse any responsibility for that fact. But the truth matters, and if you seek some higher principle, some universal good that you term the truth, then you will have to also seek that smaller, mundane fact of things that is also rightly called the truth. You will have to care when you lie and you will have to seek to know that you have done that. You will have to wish, even, that things be as they are and not as you would arrange them. You have to want the truth. You have to want that truth in every painful memory, in every secret impulse, in every word you speak, in the very rightness and resonance of the way you live your life. You have to want to know when someone does not love you, and you have to want to see that you do not forgive them for that. You have to want your rage because it is in you, and you have to want to have all your judgments shattered because they were built on illusion. You have to need to see that you are responsible for your life and that what befalls you has you as its source and nothing else. And you have to want to know the depths to which you already love and long for God, as well as all the ways you still don’t. Clear seeing reveals an infinite variety and results, ultimately, in the perception that everything under the sun is beautiful. But at first it reveals painful, difficult lessons. It reveals the side of the truth that you have turned from the most staunchly. It reveals your blindness and your weakness and your culpability, and it reveals that things are not kindness and roses here; they are infinitely more varied than that. Please just want to know, just want to see, just try. The truth is always within your grasp, it’s just not always the thing you think you should be reaching for. But when it seems no other hand will steady you, and no other light illumines the darkness in your mind, I tell you the truth always will. It will not let you down. It will not be the softest thing you have ever held onto, but it, by far, will be the most certain. Seek to know it and one day, without your having realized that it’s happened, you will also love it, and you will not abandon it any longer.”