True Trust

“None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth. 

The word 'true' suggest a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be 'true.' It is related to 'trust,' and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case.

The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one's trust. Such a situation is not an absolute - it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith and it involves being faithful to one's intentions.”

― Iain McGilchrist, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World"

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Dear Kate,

Are you a liar?  Do you make a decision every morning to be untrue?

When Jesus suggested all we need to say "is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’", and that "anything beyond this comes from the evil one," he was talking about, obviously, matters of black and white, that there is no excuse for us to mix up the two and paint with fifty shades of grey.

Yet grey is all we have in this world, especially when it comes to painting a picture about ourselves.  It's not even that we are dead set on lying about ourselves, but we simply don't have the language to speak truthfully about who we are.

How are you? you asked.  What do you want from me?  What do you expect to hear from me about me?  I am fine, I said, not as in not coarse.  I revealed nothing, even if I tried, because, I dunno, it's too early in the morning, too loaded a question, too trivial a matter, too elusive an I.

Being polite, I am going to tell you linear, fragmented narratives about myself, a few Point-A-to-Point-Bs that happen to occupy bigger slices of my mental space this morning, snippets of life's usual happening that could involve the You in the I without demanding any deeper commitment.  In philosophical terms, my life is the natural outworking of finite causes within the universe, and as such my speaking about myself can only be about my picking and choosing of which finite agent(s) to highlight to you as I see fit for the present purpose.  I walked my dog this morning.  If there's anything unspeakable about me, truthfully, I wouldn't even know.  And I ain't trying to lie.

Yet don't you find it interesting, that you do understanding what I was talking about just now, that there are "unspeakable" truths about our Selves?  How can you understand what you don't know, about me, about what I don't even have the language to convey to you?  How am I, on the receiving end of your unknowing, trust you as a friend, who would "understand" and be faithful to our relatedness that is a further mystifying of the mysteries of You and I, anything but Point-A-to-Point-B?

"In unconcealment dwells hiddenness and safekeeping."

Yours, Alex