Editor’s Note: Vincent Lachina was previously a guest columnist on SpokaneFAVS. We are pleased to now welcome him as an official SpokaneFAVS writer!
Let me start this article by sharing two little stories that I read in a Unitarian sermon once several years ago.
One day the devil and one of his little minions were sitting on a cloud looking down at some humans below when they saw a man walking down a road who stopped, picked up something off the road, put it in his pocket and kept walking.
“What did he find?” asked the minion. “A piece of truth,” chuckled the devil.
“A piece of truth? Don’t you want to stop him?”
“Stop him? Oh, no!” said the devil. “It’s only a tiny piece of truth. Before very long he’ll turn it into some orthodoxy, and then he’ll be helping us with my work.”
In many ways, this little story sums up the history of almost every religion. It’s similar to the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, but with a bigger punch.
In the Hindu story, different blind people came upon an elephant at different parts of it. The one who had grabbed the ear said, “Why, an elephant is like a big leathery leaf!” The one who had hold of the trunk said, “You fool! It’s nothing at all like a leaf. It’s like a long, thick snake.” The one who had bumped into a leg said, “You’re both crazy! I have a firm hold on this elephant and it’s like a strong, rough tree trunk.” And from behind, the one who had grabbed the tail called out, “You are all idiots. Either you’ve never experienced an elephant at all, or you’re lying. It’s not a large thing at all, it’s like a small, stiff rope.”
And I could go on, but the point of the story seems to be clear. Both of these little stories are instantly recognizable to us because they are both about human nature, and that hasn’t changed much over the centuries.
One of the inherent aspects of our human species is that we will never have more than a few pieces of the truth, but we always like to pretend that we have the whole truth — all of it. That one thing alone gets us into most of our problems with each other and with the world, doesn’t it? I could reference our current Congress at this point, but that would be too obvious.
I spent several years studying theology back in my college and seminary days. I came to understand that theology is basically the study of those deep and lasting truths that we are told can “set us free.” But now as I am older, it seems that I have come to think of theology as the study of how each religious thinker managed to find one tiny piece of truth, then turn it into an idea that has the potential to obscure our view of what truth really is. Try being a seminary student and ask your Old Testament professor this question: “Where in the Bible can we find dinosaurs?” You might get a small glimpse of my former denomination’s “little piece of truth” if you can imagine the response.
We as thinkers are left with the dilemma of trying to learn what to believe as we deal with religions that have just a piece of truth. So what then is that elusive “truth that can set you free?” What we would call “the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” That has been a search for the ages, and most religions have sought to identify that and incorporate it into the core of their faith. Here are some examples:
- Aristotle taught that wisdom consisted in choosing the middle road between extremes, because extremes can be either too permissive or too narrow and brutal. The best religious teachers and prophets have always known this.
- In the Koran of Islam, there were no obligatory doctrines about God. Islamic tradition says there have been 124,000 prophets instead, emphasizing that Islam is not bringing a message that is new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with older religions.
- Behind Christianity was the man Jesus, who I believe would be a bit disappointed in what Christianity has become today. Jesus said to treat others the way you’d want to be treated. And even more radically, he said to let the wheat and the weeds grow together, which sounds pretty permissive to me.
- The Buddha taught that when we have to choose between doing the right thing and the compassionate thing, we should always choose the compassionate thing. Why? Because what we think of as the right thing – the truth—often coincides with our own biases.
- Taoism subtly teaches that everything is always in movement — either coming to be or passing away, either moving from weakness to strength or from strength to weakness.
- And the Jews have a uniquely wonderful way of taking some lesson that sounds rigid, then soaking it in human warmth and wit so that it melts into compassion. Like this story that I’m borrowing for the same Unitarian sermon of years past:
A small village prided itself on enforcing the strict laws of the Torah and those who broke these laws were stoned. The village was losing so many people it was on the very of disappearing. They didn’t understand how they could be dying when they were doing the right thing, following the truth. So one of the village elders went to see the rabbi in a nearby village known for his wisdom and explained their dilemma. The rabbi listened, nodded, then said, “Your sin is the sin of ignorance. The Messiah is among you and you are ignorant of that fact.” The elder returned to his village unwilling to believe such a thing. He knew everyone in the village and knew there wasn’t anyone there who could possibly be pure enough to be the Messiah. The other villagers didn’t believe the rabbi either, but just in case, they began treating each other as though any one of them might be the Messiah. You can see the end of the story — the village flourished because they had let go of their tiny little truth and found a fuller truth, and it had set them free.
Can any church or any religion be trusted to know the whole truth when they see it? It raises the question, “Would the founders of the world’s great religions be pleased with the religions founded on them? Would Jesus have much in common with the religion that is about Jesus instead of the teachings of Jesus? Would Mohammad be pleased with Islamic fundamentalism? Would the Buddha be saddened to see how much superstition has found its way into Buddhism?
There is, nonetheless, this thing called truth that is worth pursuing and can still set us free. Today it seems that it must first set us free from the religions that identify truth with their own beliefs and from those people doing the devil’s work by beating others to death spiritually with their tiny little truths. Sadly, they seem to be legion.
One large part of “the truth” is that none of us will ever have all of it. We are all like that person who picked up a tiny piece of truth. Perhaps both the gods and the devils are all watching to see what we will do with that little piece of truth, whether we use it to serve the demons of a lower nature or for the good of our better nature. For me, the final measure of good religion and bad religion is simply this: has the piece of truth we have and the ideals we are following made us a curse or a blessing, whether our presence here has increased or decreased the amount of compassion in the world. If all we ever have is our one tiny piece of truth, we should choose very carefully what we make of that.
