‘I think Light dawns gradually and I often wonder, in 100 years time, what truths will have become obvious?’ Photo: Taras Chernus on unsplash
‘What is truth?’ asked Wallingford Friends, and Moya stayed for their answers
‘If I ask if my bum looks big in this, do you have to say yes?’
Once a month, Wallingford Friends hold Meeting for Learning after Sunday worship. On this occasion, as we all sat around on the eighteenth-century benches, drinking tea and eating flapjack pastries, the theme was ‘Truth’.
As an opening provocation, one Friend said that, before joining Quakers, he’d lived with a landlady who had cancer. ‘I didn’t bump into her that often, but when I did, she looked a little worse each time than the time before. Still I always said – You’re looking well! So my question is: are white lies ever compatible with the Truth Testimony?’
That sparked more confessions of white lies told to spare hurt feelings, including a story about a neighbour who fancied himself as an abstract artist. When he sought praise for his new masterpiece, one Friend found herself finding more and more creative ways to avoid giving her true opinion: ‘Very striking’; ‘A bold statement’; ‘Interesting choice of colours’.
It was pointed out that these were not technically white lies, she’d just refrained from going on to say ‘but I don’t like it’. There seemed to be general agreement (with a nod to Wittgenstein) that if you have nothing good to say, saying nothing may be best – and that this is perfectly compatible with the Truth Testimony.
Examples were shared later of Friends who take the Truth Testimony to extremes, arguably crossing into rudeness. If I ask if my bum looks big in this, do you have to say yes? Or the elderly Friend who went out of her way to disillusion a five-year-old about Father Christmas. A particularly common example of this is correcting other people’s grammar. One Friend said she routinely did this, when she was fresh out of school and eager to show off what she knew, but now she’d think much harder about how it might make the other person feel, and whether she was really being helpful.
An online Friend pointed out that we often use the truth for our own purposes. Should we worry more about ‘black truths’ than we do about the white lies that are often motivated by kindness?
Someone else questioned this, saying that in her own experience, fear is more often the motive than kindness. When I say ‘Sorry I’m late, the train was delayed,’ or ‘I didn’t see your message, my phone was turned off,’ that’s because I don’t trust the person I’m talking to enough to admit the truth. Similarly with the artist neighbour, why didn’t I feel able to say ‘I prefer representational art, so I’m not the right person to appreciate what you’re trying to do’? What’s the worst that could have happened? I assumed he’d be upset. I feared he wouldn’t like me as much. But what if it had opened space for a more meaningful conversation? I think that’s what often happens with white lies, they cut us off from potential connection and if we use them a lot they can become an addiction.
A less lighthearted tale was of an autistic foster child who threatened a Friend’s grandson while his mother was staying with them to recover from a miscarriage. The Friend ‘gave notice’ on her to social services, meaning she was transferred to a therapeutic boarding school, where she did quite well. Years later this child, now an adult, phoned up to ask if that was why she’d been transferred. The Friend said no, she hadn’t given notice on her, it had been a social services decision. This was a lie, but twenty-seven people had given notice on that child and she needed to feel that someone hadn’t, and had seen something of value in her. ‘Which is true,’ I found myself muttering under my breath. ‘You didn’t give up on her, you still value her.’
After being reminded we were still in a worship sharing phase, and not to lapse into conversation, Friends regrouped and tackled the question of speaking truth to power.
A consultant engineer spoke about the difficulty of going into a room to tell a group of powerful people that the project they’ve already invested millions in is fundamentally flawed. ‘Those are hard truths to speak, but I find it helps to remember the feeling of being in Meeting for Worship and how it feels to speak there – without any drama or concern for self. I find the more I do that, and the more time I spend in Meeting for Worship, the more natural it becomes to speak from that place. Not worrying about how my words will be received but how well they express reality. In fact I prefer to call it the “Reality Testimony” rather than the Truth Testimony, because it’s not fundamentally about how we use words. It’s about how we connect to something beyond words’.
Another Friend picked up the same idea, talking about how naked we are when we give ministry and how important it is for everyone to have spaces where they feel safe to be so exposed. We’re concerned about falling standards of integrity in public life, but we need many experiences of speaking truth, and having it heard and affirmed in a safe space, in order to become brave enough to continue speaking up in the face of hostility or mockery.
Someone on the legal team for the Grenfell fire investigation found it very challenging how all parties try to shovel blame on to the others. When truth has become obscured, we count on the processes of law to excavate it for us again, but how willing are we as individuals to admit mistakes? How accountable am I willing to be? Can I see that I did something wrong, and own up to that?
Another Friend pointed out that truth always has a moral dimension. ‘We talk about people in the past being unaware of truths that are now clear to us (such as the evil of slavery) and therefore doing things which we can see now are wrong. I think Light dawns gradually and I often wonder, in 100 years time, what truths will have become obvious? And what things, which I am obliviously doing now, will be seen to be clearly wrong? I don’t know if there’s any way for us to see beyond the limits of our own time and culture though.’
Arguably, early Friends did manage this – and someone who’d just read a book on Margaret Fell pointed out that her conception of truth focused much more on the inner than the outer. If we can connect strongly enough to our inner truth and let it fill us, then it will also shine forth from us in everything we do and say.
The Friend who’d offered the original provocations then concluded ‘I often think about people like Rosa Parks: the truth she made manifest by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, and how the ripples from that action spread out around the world. In the past, Friends found a way to speak truth to power about slavery, which helped end that awful trade in human lives, and inspiring figures like Martin Luther King Jnr and Gandhi found powerful ways to show the true nature of racism and colonialism. I often wonder whether, even at our age [most Friends present were over seventy] there are still truths we can stand for that would have power? And how we could do that?’
Moya is the local development worker for four Area Meetings in Thames Valley.
