Contained
In Jesus Christ Superstar, Pilate says to Jesus, "We both have truths - are mine the same as yours?". A good way to put an obvious thing. My world, probably yours too, is full of words purporting to be truth. Essays, articles, lyrics, web pages, reports, flyers, junk mail, dictionaries, promises, seductions, outbursts. So many words. And we discard more words in a day than we remember in a month, passing them by with our eyes and our ears and our hands and our feet.
But some of the words ring true to us. We follow them, hold on to them, reach and struggle for them, just because we believe in them. Because they strike something inside us and we then use them to shape the truths we create or shape for ourselves, by ourselves or with each other.
I think that is the real truth out there for the likes of me. It may not be something someone else may like or understand, our created truth. But who cares, anyway? They're our truths, little, or big. Little truths like Macs rock, Devon cream is best as a luxury on Sunday mornings with tea in bed, or that REM really is deep, are created by us every day. Others, slightly larger, like, do I want kids, and yes, I do think that homelessness is more important than bombing Iraq come up less often, and require much more thought, more... effort. They shape our days and our lives one often arbitrary decision at a time.
Sure there are some external truths out there. Death. Taxes. Etc. But on a daily basis, most of us more closely live our created truths. We choose, we negotiate, we begin, we create...and then our truth is there. Maybe just for a while, maybe for the rest of our lives. Sometimes we lose a truth, and if we're lucky, we find our way back to it, somehow.
And I think we string these smaller truths together, use them as blocks to make larger ones. I know I do. Larger truths like love and ethics and reason and charity. Growing, fluctuating, damaged, rebuilt, rediscovered, even false, truths. We use them to build or break communion with ourselves, our spaces, and each other. To take steps down roads that we believe lead us to where and how we want to be as humans. They lead us to risk, to hope, to dream and even to fail.
So I'm not too worried that truth is relative. There's little need for all my truths to be universal, because they change, because they might not matter much, because they may be wrong anyway, and because I don't always want them to be. The truths are more personal.
But I don't want to be alone in my created truths, either. The greatest truths for me are those shared and shaped with another, large and small. There, I think truths grow breadth and depth and meaning and color we could not imagine alone. That's the truth that makes my world richer because of the exploring, the examining, and the making. That's the point, for me. To find the people who share some of my truths and who can teach me some of theirs. The rest is negotiable.
2 December 2002