Listen As If Love Mattered

This past two years I have been thinking a lot about lies and truth, fakes news and facts. We live in a time when we are being taught to not trust and believe experts. We are being told that when you don’t like the information, because it would cause you to have to change your policy and practices, the information is false, fake, a lie. How do we discern the truth in a time when the truth is up for interpretation? I spent ten years of my life studying political philosophy, asking big questions about how we understand our world, people, and the way we relate to each other. I have read philosophers from Foucault, Derrida, Plato, Marx, Augustine, Aristotle, Descartes, Machiavelli, Mills, Kant, Hume, Locke, Sartre, Hobbes, Rousseau and these are just the ones on the top lists (excluding all the non-European and female philosophers). There are a range of answers to this question about what truth is and how we discern it. I was always a little skeptical about the answers given in the 20^th century. For these postmodern answer believed that truth is relative and dependent of context. This means that when someone says I don’t believe your fact because my truth is different: there is no way to speak of universals, facts that go beyond you personal or individual tribe. While I appreciate the democratization of truth so that there is not one group whose truth is THE truth, by opening up new voices to be heard. But I miss a universal truth. It was probably why I was always partial to Plato. Plato believes there is a Good, a Truth that is discernible and can be known. But the arguments that philosophers have about truth are very different from what we are experiencing when we are throwing around the words false, fake, lies. We are using these words to discount arguments and facts we don’t like. We seem to believe we can create our own facts, our own truth. How can my truth overrule your truth?  

Parker Palmer shared this poem the other day and I think it speaks to this question about how to tell a lie.

How to Tell The Truth”

   by Paul Williams (“Nation of Lawyers”)

When you just have to talk,

try being silent.

When you feel reluctant to say anything,

make the effort

to put what you’re feeling into words.

This is a place to begin.

Pushing gently

against the current

of your own impulses

is an effective technique

for dislodging

and discovering

your truth.

How to tell the truth?

Taste it

and remember the taste in your heart.

Risk it

from the bottom of your love.

Take the risk

of telling the truth

about what you’re feeling.

Take the risk

of telling your loved one

your secrets.

It’s true

you might be misunderstood.

Look and see

if you’re willing to trust

yourselves

to misunderstand each other

and go on from there.

When someone speaks to you

and you feel yourself not wanting to hear it

try letting it in.

You don’t have to agree that they’re right.

Just take the risk

of listening as if they could possibly be speaking

some truth—

and see what happens.

Listen as if.

Listen as if you can’t always tell

what the truth is.

Listen as if you might be wrong,

especially when you know you’re right.

Listen as if

you were willing to take the risk

of growing beyond

your righteousness.

Listen as if

love mattered.

The poem ends with some advice I hope to remember: "Listen as if love mattered." Can you imagine what might happen if we did?

Lead me in your truth, and teach me,
   for you are the God of my salvation;
   for you I wait all day long. Psalm 25:5

You desire truth in the inward being;
   therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. Psalm 51.6:

Listen as if love mattered.