Finding Truth
By Sabra Engelbrecht
From now on, brothers and sisters, if anything is excellent and if anything is admirable, focus your thoughts on these things: all that is true, all that is holy, all that is just, all that is pure, all that is lovely, and all that is worthy of praise. (Philippians 4:8)
As I sit down to write this, I’m surrounded by the familiar buzz of my favorite spot for coffee and conversation. Working in ministry, I am often found not in an office or behind a computer, but out in the world meeting with people, hearing their stories, discovering their gifts and passions, and inviting them to a life with Christ. I find people are most comfortable at a table, hands surrounding a steaming cup of coffee, in a space that is busy, with others coming and going. There is something about the activity and the ambient noise that makes us feel safe. Maybe it’s simply the subtle reminder that we are surrounded by humanity.
I hadn’t started at the coffee shop. I first thought to write this somewhere quiet and chose the library - the quietest place I could think of. Except on this particular occasion, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Call it poor timing, or rude librarians, but I happened to hit the library at a time when there were a variety of conversations among staff, each at a volume that could not be described as library-approved. And so, after sticking it out for a while, I packed my bag and headed to the familiar and comfortable – the coffee shop down the street. Apparently, it just isn’t true that the library is quiet – or at least, it isn’t true all the time.
We’ve all experienced these moments when we’ve been confronted with a reality that is different from what we thought was true. Maybe the library is loud. Or, you realize the song lyrics you’ve been singing for years are wrong. (Apparently Starship didn’t build this city on sausage rolls…) Maybe the grumpy neighbor with the aggressive political sign surprises you with an extreme act of kindness. Or, the theology you’ve built your life on begins to unravel when your daughter tells you she’s gay. Even the silliest of these examples can be disorienting because they challenge our understanding of reality.
The past two years have been full of these moments. We had to adjust our understanding of where school, work, and even church take place. We watched an officer, who we thought worked to protect us, suffocate a man before our very eyes. Some told us to distrust scientific experts. These shifting realities and the power of the media has left us skeptical, cynical, and questioning what we believe. At a moment in our history that has been so utterly disorienting we find ourselves asking, “What is ‘true’?”
What is true doesn’t change, it endures.
The concept of truth is commonly associated with what we think we know. At The Gathering, the church where I serve, I often find myself in a conversation with someone expressing a desire to grow deeper in their faith. At the heart of this desire is, at least in part, a quest for truth. When I inquire about their prayer life, they admit they don’t have one (who has time for prayer?!). When I ask about the last time they shared their faith with someone else in a way that forced them to really think about and articulate how faith has made a difference in their life, they can’t name one. Almost without fail, what they are looking for to “deepen their faith” and find truth is another book to read or another bible study to attend. They want to grow in their knowledge of God. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if we approach faith solely as an intellectual exercise, we will never experience the breadth and depth of “all that is true.”
Our knowledge will only take us so far. Too often, it keeps us trapped in our heads, neglecting all that our hearts seek to teach us.
We see this play out in the numerous times Jesus challenged what the people thought they knew. One of my favorite such instances is when Jesus is asked to confront the woman caught in adultery. The religious leaders saw this as an opportunity to test Jesus, albeit at the woman’s expense. It was true that the woman had committed adultery and the law required her to endure a stoning. “What do you say?”, they ask Jesus. Jesus responds with a directive that requires the religious leaders to look within and discover the actual truth. He challenged them to be guided not by their knowledge of what the law required, but by their heart. The truth was that they were all sinful, all broken, and they were all in need of forgiveness. In this dramatic moment Jesus reveals a clue about how to discover the truth. We discover truth through connection - connection with others, connection with self, and connection with Christ.
Purposeful, meaningful connection with others expands both our minds and our hearts. Sit with someone who is dying and you will discover the truth about what matters in life (and what doesn’t). Engage in a conversation with someone different from yourself and, if you are open, you will gain a more expansive understanding of the world. This is why making space for creative dialogue is so valuable. Dialogue may in fact make us smarter, but more importantly it reveals deeper truths about the shared human experience.
However, in order to arrive at these places of depth we must be willing to look inward and connect with our Self. Connection with Self is something few of us make space for. It is often a difficult, lengthy, and painful process. It involves removing masks, shedding armor, and stripping ourselves bare. It is the work of letting go of our ego (who we think we are) in order to discover the truth of who we really are. Father Richard Rohr reminds us that we actually have several false selves -- identities based on things that are temporal and fleeting. Things like education, profession, wealth, and status. Once we move past these understandings of our “self” we will, according to Rohr, “fall into the True Self”. Our True Self is the place of union with our Source where we find freedom and liberation. In this space you are connected to something inexhaustible. Something that endures. Something eternal and true - Christ.
The ultimate moments of truth come when we experience deep connection with Christ. As we journey beneath the layers of our false self, we grow in courage, honesty, humility, and vulnerability. We become like Christ. We discover the eternal divine who dwells within us. As John Phillip Newell has written, “Christ’s soul and our soul are like an everlasting knot. The deeper we move in our own being, the closer we come to Christ. And the closer we come to Christ’s soul, the nearer we move to the heart of one another. In Christ, we hear not foreign sounds but the deepest intimations of the human and the divine intertwined.” In Christ, we find truth.
The truth Paul encourages us to focus on won’t be discovered in purely intellectual pursuits. It isn’t dependent upon our cultural context or societal norms. It doesn’t change based on who’s leading our country or what algorithm is controlling our social media content. Instead, it endures. It is the unchanging Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Sabra Engelbrecht is the Executive Director of Ministries at The Gathering, one of The Carver Project’s Church Partners.