One True Thing: Reflections on staying true to truth and being kind

In a conversation about my blogging aspirations, a friend once reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s tactic for pushing through writer’s block: he made it a daily goal to write one true sentence.

I love the simplicity of that ambition — the solid commitment to take one baby step forward every day, holding oneself to a defined task. But not necessarily an easy one.

Well I suppose you’d find it easy if you’re content to catalogue frivolous facts: My eyes are brown. The curtains need washing. My dog is lying in the grass. In other words, if you’re sticking with insignificant truths.

Speaking about things that are important, however, can be daunting. The fact we need laws to protect whistle-blowers proves it can be a hazard. And in an era in which everything is political, including the personal, it’s hard to speak your truth without crossing a battle line. This is the conundrum for all the would-be truth-tellers who don’t have a legal shield to incentivize their courage and inspire their conscience.

I’ll admit, as our society continues to polarize through the factional pull of propagandized “news” from legacy and alternative media, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the challenge of knowing and speaking what is true. I find myself dwelling on the problem of staying true to truth in a hyper-reactive, dogmatic world — and balancing that act with my conviction that it is better to be kind than right.

What’s a sincere person to do?

When the Covid lockdowns began in 2020 I started reading the Four Gospels, beginning with Matthew. I figured a daily dose of Divine truth would help me stay focused on the longview, namely that the purpose of this earthly existence isn’t to be comfortable, it’s to grow spiritually. To wake up to the ways in which we create hurt and cause harm when we are led by our unexamined thoughts and desires. We are here to seek the path that leads away from self-absorption towards connection with God, through others.

I was also looking for hope. Equanimity. Comfort. A way to hold the loss of normal life and my shaken confidence in our future well-being. I figured the example Jesus offers might help clear my vision, restore my soul.

Maybe it’s the times we’re living in of perpetual screen-mediated drama, or maybe it’s just me having never read all the Gospel narratives beginning to end, back to back, but my experience was to see the Lord’s life play out in my mind’s eye in Oscar-worthy cinematic splendor — like watching an IMAX so compelling it sucks you into the action and keeps you riveted even though you already know the ending, even though each gospel offers the same script slightly altered. Truly, every time I read I felt immersed in the story, moved by the action and awed by the thought of being alive in that moment, witness to the spectacle of Jesus’s miracles and the cult-celebrity it brought Him. Witness to the inspiration and riddles of His preaching that challenged the world with a new way of seeing and being. Witness to His fearless critique of the authorities, calling them out on their shallow piety and heartless hypocrisies.

Talk about speaking truth to power.

Of course, He was ultimately cancelled for it in rather spectacular fashion by today’s standards.

But also, of course, not really. Two millennia later His name, life, and teachings are still revered, discussed, and followed around the globe, serving as the foundations of a prominent expansive civilization — and all without the aid of our modern social media networks to help His (initially subversive) ideas survive, spread, and thrive. That alone might be considered a miracle. Or maybe it’s just the inevitability of truth.

In any case, I’ll admit to being a fan-girl of truth-tellers who are willing to do what Jesus did: forfeit their own peace and safety to stand for a better world, to defend the truth they know, to sacrifice for justice. Heroes like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Václav Havel are some of the more obvious examples because their legacy is so recent and bright. And many might argue that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are current incarnations of that same righteous impulse to risk harm for honesty’s sake, despite — or perhaps because of — the wholesale campaign to malign and persecute them for having dared to blow a whistle, expose inconvenient truths.

But through history there also have been unsung heroes, everyday schmoes like you and me, who, in the face of uncommon pressure and at severe personal risk, have steadfastly refused to live by lies, to sacrifice their principles for security’s sake, and they are the ones who, in their invisible, uncelebrated courage, intrigue me the most. Because they represent the model I wonder if I have the mettle to follow were I to be similarly tested. And given the expanding erosion of Western values and institutions that have protected the individual conscience from the impositions of authority, that question no longer feels so academic as it once did, a couple long years ago.

But I have a larger question.

If it is better to be kind than right, how do I manage my relationship with truth when it feels like wielding a sword? How do I stand for it fearlessly without forfeiting connections wrought by love — by kindness and compassion, by forgiveness and mercy? How do I balance humble recognition of our inability as imperfect humans ever to know truth perfectly, against my awareness that truth exists to light our way to good? That it is a lamp unto our feet that requires defending in service to justice?

The conundrum for me is that even while I believe that truth and love operate as one, actually are one — like two sides of the same coin — they often seem in conflict with each other because the truth can hurt. By its very nature truth is solid, unyielding, which is exactly why it makes such a good sword with which to defend what is just and good.

Happily, in the perfect way of God’s Providence, I found perspective at the end of a Sunday service not long ago in which my pastor offered a prayer that included a deeply useful articulation of how we are spiritually led by different kinds of truths — those that uplift, that heal, that confront, that instruct. This parsing into categories opened my thinking to more clearly recognize the complexity of how truth functions in the service of love. Which, honestly, isn’t something I was completely unaware of. But being reminded that truth is qualitatively faceted to meet the demands of love in the particulars of any given moment felt clarifying and inspiring. A truth that both instructed and uplifted me.

I have more thoughts about truth and truth-telling in this bewildering era of information saturation, splintering norms, and disappearing institutions. But for now I am resting in the gratitude that comes from feeling spiritually fed. And I am cultivating my awareness that truth exists on many levels in service to myriad uses which really only appear to conflict; they all share good as their end. Mostly, I am trying to stay focused on my personal role, which always is to notice my intentions with regard to how I am thinking, thus how I am speaking and acting. Because if I seek to be an instrument for good in this world, an instrument of God, the quality of my own energy — the degree to which it is selfless rather than selfish, reflects love and kindness rather than anger and contempt — is what will qualify my impact in the long run.

All of which is to say, I remain a work in progress, along with the rest of humanity. I guess that’s one true thing I can always say.