This I Believe

NPR has an ongoing program called "This I Believe."  I think it is a revival of something they did decades ago, and now they have celebrities and plebians alike writing essays about their beliefs.  Earlier tonight I was thinking that my particular belief system is in turmoil right now, and it might be good just to get some things in writing to start to organize myself again.  I’ve done this a couple of times on OD, so I think it’s turning out to be a good way to check in with myself and take stock of where I stand.

I believe in truth, and I believe it can be described in clear and simple terms.  Some people say that truth has been corrupted, twisted to allay the consciences of people who don’t want to adhere to an unchangeable moral code.  Some people say that truth has been stripped of its singular power to delineate right from wrong, good from evil, by the claims that everything exists in a continuum and that taking sides is narrow, rigid, closed.  Some people say that we’ve forgotten the truth, and that all we need to do to get this country back on its feet is to reclaim and restore the truth to its rightful place.  The truth, as they say, shall set us free.

I don’t disagree.  Not with any of that.  But I think that truth is wrongly used as a standard by which choices are measured, when it is actually a catalyst for owning up to the life you want lead.  Is it the truth that by requiring recitation of the unabridged Pledge of Allegiance in public schools we are forcing children to make a public oath to the Christian God?  Is it the truth that depictions of sex and violence on television and in other media are responsible for promiscuity and rebellion among young people?  Is it the truth that the public has a vested interest in whether or not a woman raped by a family member can make a choice to avoid further psychological trauma by safely and legally ending a pregnancy?  I don’t know.  None of us really do.  And that’s not what truth is for, anyway.  Truth can’t decide these things for us in the collective; truth merely describes our process.  How will we decide what to do when faced with these and other difficult problems?

Let me go back to what I said at the start: I believe in truth, and I believe it can be described in clear and simple terms.  And nothing in the last paragraph is that easy.  In fact, very few of the decisions we have to make in our lives are clearly right or wrong, good or evil.  There are elements of both in almost every tough choice we have to make.  If I believe that, then it is almost impossible to name anything of this human existence unequivically true or untrue, good or bad, right or wrong.  A man who changed my life spoke the only truth that I can’t question: Love is all you need.  Well, that was John Lennon, but he was paraphrasing someone else: Love your neighbor as yourself.  There are no qualifiers.  There are no standards.

So I can’t waste my time trying to decide if you, or you, or you over there are worthy of my love.  I can’t be bothered trying to figure out if you have the same feelings I do about guns, or war, or women, or gays, or immigrants, or cars, or birth control, or any of that other stuff.  I have to love you no matter what.  That’s not easy, but it’s always been worth the effort.  You have to risk the possibility that you might have to change your mind or discover that something is in fact not what it had always seemed to be.