Fourth Sunday of Easter
Father Phillip DeVous
Guest
Just a few short years ago, a moral panic cascaded through the chattering classes, sacred and secular, as they announced we had arrived at a “post-truth” society. There was more than a little truth to their concern, however tardy the recognition. Our post-truth reality, however, long predates the recent issues and developments the talking heads found so unnerving.
It occurs to me that our post-truth condition has morphed into an anti-truth metastasis. We deceive ourselves if we think the “natural” state of mankind is truth. Truth, in its greatest and most significant sense, is always a grace and Revelation. This is an uncomfortable reality to contend with in our age dominated by pragmatism as the highest good, which tends to suffocate the sense of the spiritual.
Recently, I was reading parts of an excellent biography of Václev Havel. Havel was an intellectual, playwright, anti-Communist dissident, the last President of Czechoslovakia, and then the first President of the Czech Republic after Czechoslovakia split up. He was a man who, by his temperament and the circumstances of the Communist domination of his nation, was disposed to thinking seriously about what was true when all around him was dominated by lies, especially lies born of convenience. He was a man who risked everything to avoid living by lies. In the biography, I encountered Havel’s arresting exhortation: “Therefore, faithful Christian, seek Truth, listen to the Truth, hear Truth, love Truth, speak Truth … until death”
The seeking of Truth should be the morning star of the life of a Catholic. Our Blessed Lord clearly thinks we are capable of the Truth when He says, “my sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they know me.” This is a call to a living relationship with Truth Incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and his body, the Church. Our Holy Communion with Jesus Christ is built upon the conviction that truth is something that can be known, received, understood and lived by us — that is why it is both a revelation and a grace!
This is no small thing to have in an anti-truth age. The anti-truth society we inhabit and whose air we breathe is informed by the paradoxical assumption that there is no truth of any kind, while at the same time presuming and demanding that one’s every emotion be recognized as an absolute truth, requiring total submission from everyone around me. That is a pretty good summary of our contemporary situation of anti-truth.
Without an orientation towards truth, we cannot “know that the Lord is God” because we cannot receive the grace or see the Revelation that Truth brings. It should come as no surprise that as the grasp of the of post-truth civilization tightens, with ever more people submitting to the power of anti-truth, that we would see less true goodness because we think truth a fiction. The result is that beauty and authentic love become ever more difficult for us to perceive because we have lost the vision of God.
In ways we perhaps we never could have anticipated, this is a painful time to live, when so much appears to be false. It is in the time of the great distress of the post-truth era, and the anti-truth ferment which characterizes it, that God’s Providence has designated for us for us to live and to bear witness.
Witness to what? That God is real. That the Lord is holy. That we are his people, the flock he tends. That Christ is alive. That his word is true. That Christ remains with us. To living the Truth with integrity. We witness to the world, raising our voices, proclaiming: “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified!”
How do we witness to this? We repent! We seek the forgiveness of our sins! We pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit! We stay faithful to the Truth revealed to us in the Word of God, taught to us by the Church, and verified by the witness of the saints. We seek to live obediently to God’s commands. We stay close to Jesus Christ in His Word and the Holy Sacraments. We pray fervently and regularly. We give generously to the poor and protect the vulnerable. Fundamentally, we witness when we refuse to tell lies, no matter how comfortable, convenient, or socially acceptable the lies might seem.
Father Phillip W. DeVous is the pastor of St. Charles Borromeo, Flemingsburg and St. Rose of Lima, May’s Lick.