There have been times in my life when I’ve wanted truth to be something unmoving – a bit cold maybe, but fixed, and as a consequence, containable.
This is a desire for comfort.
For example, when my grandma died, it would’ve been nice to know (as a solid, concrete thing) that she was going to heaven, and also the exact sort of heaven she was going to. I would’ve liked to read the details about it like nutrition facts on a cereal box.
It would have been comforting.
By the same stroke, it would be nice to pin down the arguments for all I believe, to systematically reason out the reasons for everything. I’d like to, step by step, fit my thoughts into place like numbers on a Sudoku puzzle, so that I could talk about the value of democracy, or the correct view of gender, or the superiority of light roast coffee, and have it all aligned into perfect rows, impossible to debate or doubt.
This, again, would be comforting.
But I don’t think that version of truth is really true.
Right now, I’m reading Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. It’s about a small town in slow motion. It paints big themes in minuscule, intimate, and sometimes (if I’m honest) boring detail. But none of it is nailed down, which makes it difficult to summarize or explain.
I’ve read a few of Berry’s explicitly-stated thoughts on things like politics and farming policies and racial reconciliation. I’ve found them to be generally true, and I’ve generally agreed with them.
But I agree with his stories more.
I think that truth, rather than being cold and unmoving, is like a butterfly.
It’s best known in motion. You grow to understand it by watching how it moves in light, by seeing its lilting changes of color. If you want to, you can certainly pin it down and put it behind glass – there is even good in doing this – but you won’t really know a butterfly until you’ve seen it flitting across the grass and flowers, sufficient in itself without your study, beautiful by being alive.
All truth, I think, is like this.
Big ideas, like love, obviously are. Try to define love and you’ll lose its meaning, but watch it move in a story and it’s clear as day. But even academic, solid-seeming truths, like the mathematical formulas you learn in school, are this way: They look motionless in print, but they’re best understood in the buzzing movement of atoms or the cloud-fizzed trail of a rocket.
This isn’t to say that everything is relative, or that some things aren’t, in the strictest possible sense, true. Truth, real objective truth, is as undeniable as the sun.
It is to say, though, that the final truth at the bottom of all others was – is – a person.
A person is more likely to break our attempts at containment. But a person (thank God) is more able to comfort us, too.
