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Once a Christian was in the habit of speaking some truth. Christ, appearing in a vision, spoke, “Sir, discontinue speaking that truth.” “But,” replied the man, “it’s the truth.” “Yes, it is,” replied Christ, “but it’s not the whole truth.”
A man prayed, “God, why is there so much war and conflict in the world?” A voice spoke, “My son, for many a man is willing to die for a version of truth, but few have the courage to live for the truth.”
A famous Zen Master said that his greatest teaching was, Buddha is your own mind. So impressed by how profound the idea was, one monk left the monastery and retreated to the wilderness to meditate on the insight. There he spent twenty years as a hermit probing the great teaching. Another monk, traveling through the forest, came by. The hermit monk learned that the traveler had studied under the same Zen Master. "Please tell me what you know of the Master's greatest teaching." The traveler's eyes lit up. He said, "The Master is clear about this: Buddha is not your own mind."
Truth is a never-ending journey of discovery. Seeking Truth through truths, we move from incompleteness to more completeness, in a dialectical exploration. We should never assume our present knowledge is the Truth, not in totality, for Truth is Infinite, while we are finite and fallible. We discover this by a continual revision of our ignorance and our oft mistaking of error for truth. The man or woman not ready to be humbled by acknowledgement of personal ignorance and error is not prepared for the arduous journey of Truth.
In this life we shall never attain the Truth, not in our mind, but we can carry it in our heart. And we can live with the Truth, in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Who is the incarnation of Truth.
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In many of the churches there is a deep fear of learning. There is a lack of understanding of the nature of Truth expressing as truths. Persons struggle with the relationship between reason and revelation. Sitting on a personnel committee, a man angrily spoke to me. Representing other parishioners, he declared that he only wanted to hear the Bible. This man represents many in the churches. These persons have never come to appreciate the unity of reason and revelation, the natural and supernatural as one means of the Word.
St. Thomas Aquinas (b. c. 1225) distinguished between truths known through reason and those ascertained by revelation. He taught that reason and revelation cannot contradict each other. Why? Both come from God. The “light of faith … does not destroy the light of cognition” (Commentary on the Trinity, Trans. Rose Emmanuella Brennan). This to Aquinas was an example of the unity between grace and nature. Grace provides revelation; nature provides cognition.
One danger of the contemplative life is abandoning the reading of great thinkers and writings. Being immersed in Love does not mean that the mind does not need to be nurtured by the great philosophers and theologians. The contemplative does not abandon the joyful journey of marrying nature and grace through learning. She is daily to relish the words of not only Scripture but, likewise, the words of a great thinker. She embodies and witnesses to the wedding of grace and nature in a perfect Marriage of intellectual and affective, and unitive, fecundity. She avoids spending time on the commonplace religious writings that fascinate the unspiritual persons. The shallow and overly sweet writings, popular because they appeal to the spiritually immature—which includes the vast majority of Christians in the States—are not for the contemplative. Drink from the deep wells, not the shallow pools.
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