[Jesus said]: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. for this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." [John 16:12-15]
The old line of T. S. Eliot says, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." God knows that is the truth.
I was finally getting around to watching the movie Interstellar recently, the 2014 movie by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, and one of the delightful little details woven into their story was the way the robots who are employed in the film's space voyages all have "honesty settings." The human astronauts can adjust the robots' settings for things like honesty, or humor, and the algorithms in their artificial intelligence will shift in response, the way you adjust a thermostat in your house to boost the air conditioning when you are hot, or nudge the volume down on your television when a particularly obnoxious commercial comes on. And at first, the one astronaut inquires about this--why would anyone want a computer that isn't fully truthful with you? And the answer comes back from the robot itself that total honesty is not always safe, nor diplomatic, when dealing with emotional beings--that is to say, with us. So the astronauts and the robots all agree on "90% honesty" with one another... because T.S. Eliot, and Jesus himself, are both right: human being cannot bear very much reality all at once.
You and I know it to be true, too, from our own lives. Nobody likes to hear about their own faults. Nobody wants to have to come face to face with the ways they have hurt someone else... and then own it. Nobody wants to have to show mom the shards of the cookie jar on the floor. Nobody likes to hear about the problems that are lurking over the edge of the horizon. Nobody wants to deal with the plain and simple reality that sometimes things don't go our way, and there is nothing to be done about it.
And so instead, we find all sorts of ways to numb ourselves or block out the unpleasant truths and the undesirable realities that we don't want to face. We give ourselves to addictions, perhaps--drinking or swallowing or injecting things that allow us to forget or ignore the things we don't want to deal with. We give ourselves over to distractions, which are maybe just another form of addiction--I don't want to deal with the heaviness of my heart, or the realities in the future, or the jerks at work, so I distract myself with screens and devices, games and apps and parties and weekends away just so I don't have to deal with what is in front of me. And while a little distraction now and then may let some steam blow off, we increasingly find ourselves tempted to live hopping from one distraction to another, so that we spend less and less time actually face to face with reality.
We find all sorts of other ways of NOT dealing with the truth: if there's a truth--or even the possibility that something may be true--and we don't like it, we have a way of discrediting the messenger, inventing reasons not to believe them, or making things seem much less certain than they really are (I have a way, for example, each year at tax time, of keeping the date of April 15 in a sort of mental fog, as though it is always very very far away...). Lots of folks didn't like the news that cigarettes would kill them or their loved ones with cancers that emerged years or decades later when it was too late to do anything about it, and so for a long time, folks pretended the science was ambiguous. Lots of people trapped in addiction don't like it when their family and friends hold an intervention to get them to face reality, and so they turn on their loved ones and start lashing out at them, rather than having to admit something unpleasant about themselves... and harder still, admitting that their family already could see it, and that they weren't as good at hiding it all as they had thought.
All of this is to say that on the individual scale, and then all the way up to the societal scale, we all have this tendency to want to turn town the honesty levels on life. So what are we to do about it? Is the solution just that we all agree with one another to casually lie or deceive each other when we don't think the other person can handle it? Are we all going to be allowed a couple of freebies in life of things-you-don't-want-to-deal-with that we just let each other live in a pleasant delusion?
Well, that sort of thing may work for keeping the conversation polite at a dinner party, but if a train is coming while I'm stalled out on the tracks, I need to know it rather than be allowed to ignore it just because it's an unpleasant truth. And if the doctor thinks there's a pretty significant chance I'm at risk for cancer if I refuse to use sunscreen and go tanning every week, I'm a damn fool if I hide behind the lack of mathematical certainty by just saying, "But he can't know for sure I'll get cancer--he must be getting kickbacks from Big Sunscreen."
For that matter, too, even in our relationships, our friendships, and our families, just setting our honesty levels at a seemingly acceptable 90% setting is, despite the movie robot's logic, a bad move. It has a way of patronizing the other, if I decide, "Well, she won't be able to handle it if I tell her this, so I'll dodge..." and on the other hand, it puts cracks in the trust, the way covering up an offense usually makes it worse than the original trouble (you'll recall, for example, that former president Bill Clinton's impeachment was over the crime of lying under oath and obstructing justice, not the original affair that he tried to cover up). There's a line from Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner about how lying to someone, or more broadly deceiving them, is really a form of theft, because, as the one character puts it, "You are stealing the other person's right to the truth." We all convince ourselves that hedging on the truth is just a fact of life, and perhaps we all think that if we all agree to a 90% honesty setting, then no one else will burst our bubbles when we are the ones living in an illusion. Sort of a "I won't expose the lie you are living with if you won't expose mine," or "I'm allowed to fudge it with you because I expect you to fudge things with me that you don't think I'll like."
It's interesting, holding all of this up against the words of Jesus from John's Gospel. And what gets me is that Jesus is no fool about our human fragility when it comes to dealing with truths we don't like, or can't yet comprehend. He doesn't tell his disciples there on the night of his betrayal, "Well, you guys had better buckle up because I'm gonna give it all to you right now, and there will be no getting off of the roller coaster until I've said it all." But neither does he hedge with these closest friends of his. He is, after all, utterly honest with them about his own upcoming arrest and death, and even the reality that he can tell they will all bail out on him when he needs them most. Jesus doesn't flinch when it comes to telling these guys things that are surely not easy to say, nor to hear. He doesn't even hold off in the garden when it comes to his disappointment that they can't even stay awake with him for an hour--he tells them honestly that it is hurtful, because Jesus doesn't do the 90% honesty setting.
And surely that is, at least in part, because genuine forgiveness is only possible, and certainly only meaningful, when there is real acknowledgement of what was hurt and what is being let go of. If I just make a single blanket apology to you for all time, "I am sorry retroactively and in advance for all the things I have done, will do, or might do that could hurt your feelings..." the forgiveness feels just as vague. But when we dare to name, "This is how I was hurt..." so that I can also say, "This is what I am letting go of... and this is how we will start again new..." now we have something solid. In a very real sense, being forgiven is just as hard as forgiving, because being forgiven--genuinely forgiven--means facing the truth rather than putting a blanket over it and pretending there aren't lumps under there. Real forgiveness doesn't just say, "I'm over it--let's just not talk about it," but rather real forgiveness says, "This is what happened. This is how I felt. This is what I'm not going to hold against you anymore. This is how we are going to be okay again" Jesus knows it, and so his approach with his disciples is the honesty--the truth-telling that makes forgiveness possible.
And all of that brings us to the gift of the Spirit. Jesus sees the Spirit as part of God's answer to the human tendency to dodge or ignore unpleasant realities. Jesus doesn't hedge or lie or misdirect his followers, and in fact, he probably shared more with them in that upper room than they thought they could handle. But Jesus also knows that there are indeed things they are not able to bear...so he makes them a promise. They will be given the Spirit--whom Jesus calls the "Spirit of truth," tellingly--and the Spirit will allow them to find the courage to hear and understand more and more fully as time goes on. It is never that Jesus lies or fudges with his followers, but he does give them what they can grasp in the order than makes sense, just like a math teacher doesn't start teaching calculus until the students have gotten a grasp of basic arithmetic, and then algebra, and then a smattering of trigonometry. It is not a lie or a deception when the kindergarten teacher starts with, "this is the number 2--count with me, One... Two.." and nobody protests, "Why are you covering up the truth by not starting with polynomials or differentials?" But neither does a kindergarten teacher think, "Well, I'll just stop at the number ten with these kids, because they might not be able to handle the idea that there are numbers higher than the have fingers to count on."
So for us today, how will we know if we are listening for the voice of the Spirit? Well, in all honesty, if we are ever totally comfortable with our read of the world and our picture of "how things are," it is probably a sign that we have stopped listening to the Spirit. The Spirit of God, Jesus says, will keep leading us into "all truth." That means there will always be some stretching, always be some pushing, always be some movement beyond what we thought we could handle--probably much like you felt each year in high school as a new level of math was taught to you. The Spirit will do the same--always leading us beyond, always pushing us to be able to bear more of reality, even when it includes things that we don't like at first. And conversely, if there ever comes a point at which we tell ourselves, "I have now mastered the truth, and I can handle it all, and it's just everybody else who can't see or recognize what I understand..." it may well be a sign that we have stopped listening to the Spirit and just built ourselves a little fortress to hunker down in, from which we can ignore anything else that might complicate or destabilize our picture of the world.
The Spirit, in other words, will always make us squirm a little bit, even while holding us in an unfailing grip that will not let us fall. If we are daring to let the Spirit lead us, even beyond the 90% honesty level into "all truth," then we should be prepared to be stretched.
Today, let the Spirit move us to see more than we thought we could handle, and to be willing to be honest and vulnerable with one another.
Lord Jesus, you have promised us your Spirit to lead us into all truth. Give us the courage to let your Spirit stretch us where we need it, day by day and moment by moment, in speaking and in hearing the truth.
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