Thought for the Week: What is Truth?
Jill Allum considers the nature of truth
Pontius Pilate asks Jesus the question ‘What is truth?’ and does not wait for an answer. Do Quakers walk away? Can we face the truth about ourselves? Do we even know it? When I was seventeen, I was part of a group of twenty or so young church people. Once a month, after the evening service, we went to an elder’s home. A doctor from Claybury Mental Hospital, near London, came over to Shenfield, Essex, to sit with us and just let us talk. It was incredible what came up and how we learnt about each other’s truth. He never appeared to ‘lead’, just to listen and, through his listening, we learnt to listen.
I have been reading Doug Gwyn’s Seekers Found, which was published in 2001. As I reached the last section, ‘The Conversation of Truth’, my mind said, ‘Yes! This is it! This is how we should be conversing with Quakers all over the world.’ We are in a period of fear, brought on by climate change, nuclear weapons, a possible future holocaust and mass migration. If we Quakers cannot communicate, how can we expect the rest of the world to? Issues are global now.
Eighty-five per cent of Quakers in the world are evangelical. They are Bible seekers, Christ-centred, aware of evil, sin and the need for salvation. Do we even know them enough to work together? Doug Gwyn says: ‘The masses are left to seek truth in a din-filled marketplace.’ Are we people of Truth? Are we prepared to share our Truth across the din-filled markets of the world?
Liberal, evangelical and conservative Friends withdraw into their comfort zones. ‘This trend is dangerous,’ says Gwyn, ‘we seek to avoid’ those different from us, ‘those we fear… we are strongly polarized today… as we discredit one another our seeking will be in vain… Truth is a disreputable word in the postmodern era.’
The question ‘What is Truth?’ has always intrigued me. It especially hit home when I was doing a diploma in theology and we looked at phenomenology, our tutor’s favourite subject: ‘Truth is what that man standing there says it is!’ That man may be a tribesman looking at his wooden idol. That statement absolutely staggered me, but I loved it.
Doug Gwyn also said: ‘We must remember that we are on holy ground as we listen to others describe their best understanding of truth, of the sacred. Our task is not to believe or disbelieve the truth as they know it, but to hear it as fully as possible.’
It shocked me when two of the Quaker Quest team came to run a training day for our Meeting. When it came to groups, they said: ‘Quakers stay out of the groups – they talk too much!’ What a condemnation! Back to Doug Gwyn, who said that ‘…we are still in the wilderness of uncivil disassociation and enterprises at cross-purposes with one another… This is where our conversation must begin: We need to sit in the same room, month by month and share our deepest truths and listen humbly to the deepest truths of others. It may be a global forum but modern methods are here for our use. We need structure and questions and leaders to guide us, but surely of all the churches and secular bodies, Quakers worldwide have the skills to take a lead’.
Truth is at stake. We must have communion with one another, as if for the first time. God only knows where this will take us.
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