The Question of Truth Does such a thing as truth exist? If so, how do we define it? Is it relative, dependent on culture or worldview, making one truth as good as another? Can truth guide how we live and work and respond to the chaos overwhelming the United States today? The topic is huge. To explore it in depth would take a book. But there are some simple ideas we can look at. For instance, Michael Glanzberg, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, notes that philosophers have devised many ways of understanding how we know truth from falsehood. One way is to use the correspondence theory of truth.…
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The Courage of Jephthah’s Daughter
The Unnamed Daughter Jephthah’s daughter has no name. That’s not unusual for biblical characters. Men and women alike are unnamed. The Wise Men, though important and respected, are identified only by their station. Many women exist as appendages of their men, such as Noah’s wife, Lot’s wife, Haman’s mother, and Samson’s mother. Others are named for where they lived: the Syrophoenecian woman, the Queen of Sheba, the Witch of Endor. Like men known as the Shepherd, the Rich Man, the Good Samaritan, the Friend, the Guest, the Builder, and dozens of other archetypal individuals, these people have no unique identity. Jephthah’s daughter is in good company. But for someone without…
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Opinion, Fact, and Truth
Truth from Out of the Void At a Recovery Church circle a few months ago, someone asked, “What is truth?” “Truth is core; it’s how everything starts,” came the first answer. According to the Hebrew Scriptures, everything started with chaos. Over the deep spread “a formless void and darkness” (Gen 1:2). That chaotic vastness still thrums in the background of space. [1] Like the swirl of emotions that allows us to nurture bonds and love our children, this primal music is part of our being. We are stardust; we are the incipient chaos. Does truth reside in that wildness, in those feelings? Vital and compelling, they can lead us to…
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Waking Up and Creating Beloved Community
Out of the Pigpen In my work as a chaplain, I have met many people who could not get out of the pigpen. At Universalist Recovery Church, we’ve explored the parable of the prodigal son a number of times, using it to understand forgiveness, restorative justice, the importance of play, and most recently, the power of having a voice. Today we look at what it takes to wake up, get out of the pig sty, and create beloved community. As you may recall, in the parable of the prodigal son, the younger brother, after wasting his entire inheritance, accepts work tending pigs. He sleeps with them and eats what he…
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The Chaos of Our Time, Listening, and Forgiveness
Chaos and the Naivete of Forgiveness Given the chaos breaking out across our nation and in the world, the rise of a hateful nationalism, and the brutal attacks on human decency and human lives that have been encouraged by our own president, it seems naive to write about listening and forgiveness. In less than a month there have been two major mass shootings; Christine Blasey Ford continues to receive death threats; our president has named Matthew Whitaker, a critic of the Mueller investigation, as “acting” Attorney General; and as he has always done, he undermines our democracy and foments crises that almost seem designed to divert our attention from important matters such as…
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Kindness and “Projective Disgust”
Kindness in Folk Tales A common theme in folk tales is the younger brother or sister who is kind to the needy fish, or old woman, or bird and thus is rewarded, while the selfish older brother or sister is punished for being mean. The moral of such stories is that kindness pays. Today, you would think that hardly anyone had read those old stories. When I told my husband I was writing a column about kindness, he said, “You should call it, ‘Kindness is Dead.’” He was referring, of course, to the loud and angry voices of extremists so prevalent in the United States and around the world. These…
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Memorial Day and Healing Our Souls
Giving Away Our Wealth Jesus spoke of sacrifice. For instance, as Stephen L. Carter reminds us in his book Civility, there was the time Jesus told the rich man that to get into heaven, he would have to give away all his belongings. As one might expect, the man could not bring himself to do so. From this we learn that wealth can become an idol, distracting us from our true work which, according to Carter, is to love and serve the divine. We also learn about the importance of sacrifice. We’re encouraged to give up whatever gets in the way of union with the divine. Lest we think that, because…
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The Least Will Become Great
The Least Among You When the evangelist Luke writes in Chapter Nine of his gospel that “the least among all of you is the greatest,” the sentiment is not new for the reader. In Matthew, for instance, when he’s berating the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy, Jesus says, “The greatest among you shall be your servant,” and “whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matt 23:11-12). [1] Humility was probably not a popular concept back then. It’s not particularly popular now, either, at least not in Western cultures. In hunter-gatherer societies, however, being humble is often more acceptable. Frans de Waal gives an example of such humility from the !Kung…
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Money, Money, Money
A Disease of the Heart In the 1500s, a lust for gold and silver drove the Spanish Conquistadors to feats of horror that would appall any normal human being, or at least one not caught up in the frenzy of a powerful addiction. Not unlike many for whom their drug means more than life itself, Francisco Pizarro [1] was said to be modest, gentle, and affable with his countrymen or with those who won his favor, but ruthless with any Peruvian who interfered with his passion for wealth, power, and control. [2] His compatriot and cousin, Hernándo Cortés [3] was just as obsessed. As historian Inga Clendinnentells us, he mockingly justified the theft of precious…
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We Are Nothing But Love
The Illusion of Beings in Need According to A Course in Miracles, God is love and only love, and since we are the same essence as God, we, too, are only love. Anything we experience that is not love – pain, evil, ugliness, judgment, hatred – is an illusion. Only love is real and true; everything else, we imagine. Such a theology can be twisted to blame those of us whose illusions are filled with misery. From a New Age perspective, we might say that we are not enlightened enough. We need to deepen our practice, pray, purify ourselves. In a similar way, Jesus’s teachings have been twisted to condemn the poor and…