Thought for the week: Tony Tucker has a truth ache
‘Truth is not simple factuality.’
‘Keep company with those who seek the truth. Walk away from those who have found it’ – Václav Havel.
We live in an age of half-truths and lies, often spoken in the cause of powerful factions and totalitarian societies. And these half-truths and lies are all-too-easily amplified by the confusing babble of online social media. Such distortions are as likely to hasten the eclipse of our human world as bombs and bullets.
‘Facts are sacred’ wrote CP Scott, the founder of The Guardian newspaper. Truth, however, is not simple factuality, though an agreement and acceptance over what counts as proven knowledge is an important aspect of the nature of Truth.
Quakers are made aware of this distinction when they submit themselves to the process of discernment. Like cowboys who are asked to surrender their guns as they walk into the saloon, Quakers are asked to leave their presuppositions, prejudices and favourite hobby horses at the door of the Meeting house. In naked humility we take part in an act of selfless collectivity.
Friends are not there to agree an idea, or act by the will of a majority, or even to find a balance as to what might prove generally acceptable. This is not about finding a consensus of those present.
No: Friends are there to discern the will of God. We might say to wait upon the Truth.
What is Truth cannot be expedient.
We can speak of it as coming from another source. Of it not being a disposable human asset. Of it not being ‘useable’ in any sense at all.
Down the ages, faiths groups, ideologies and other communities have claimed the Truth for their own. This creates a clamour of competing voices, each voice affirming its own Absolute while denying others their own.
But the Truth cannot be ‘owned’, possessed by any.
Indeed such claims deny its essence.
Throughout history, regardless of belief, faithful, authentic acts and lives reveal its presence. In individuals, peoples, communities. Always as a gift of grace, an act of love.
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