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To believe and live with Truth and Reality.

 

By Kathleen de Bruyn

 

What is Truth? Do we as modern people view the world as it is, in a realistic way or through an ideological lens? A Question answered ages ago, suddenly resurfaces in the last century or more. The modern world-view of which we have all fallen trap to, to a certain degree have twisted and intertwined the two term, truth and relativism into each other that the fault line have almost completely vanished. Phrases like ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ are used to defend a persons worldview and belief system. The reason for this is because we do not really know why we believe what we believe or that we are convinced that each person defines his own reality. Dangerous phrases like this that define how we view the world distorts our understanding and interaction with reality.

 

So how are we then to view the world?

 

What happens is we view the world and who we are through a subjective lens that distorts?

 

A lens twists and distorts an image as we look through it, so will our subjective view distort us and, we will then as a result distort the world into something that it is not meant to be.

 

We change the world around us by how we view ourself and the world.

 

There is as much truth to reality and who we are as there is Law of Physics.

To explain this, let’s use the analogy of a rocket scientist, that aim to land on the moon. Now by what means will he achieve his aim? Does he jump in and built the first thing that comes to mind, bigger better and stronger? Will he reach his destination? No, of course not, he will miss the mark. He will be a fool to use this approach to built his rocket. The approach he needs is to go back to the foundation, the Law of Physics.

 

The Law of physics is very unforgiving. It does not care what your subjective view is, or what you belief it to be true or not. Whether your intellectual understanding is aligned or not. The moment the rocket is built upon the right calculations, then and only then will he be able to reach his aim.

 

This is what we call right praise. To set our aim according the Truth, the Highest Truth. “Truth is to align our understanding of an object to the reality of the object.” is the words of St Thomas Aquinas. Simply to view the world as it is.

 

 

If we then need to live with truth to prevent a distorted world view so that we can have our aim the right way, we need to ask what is the highest truth? The truth on which everything is built, the source of all things?

 

“That ultimate truth is God” Quoting St Thomas Aquinas here

The foundation or metaphysics of everything.

 

The Catechism of The Catholic Church (CCC) states the following in paragraph

 

 

The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the "hierarchy of the truths of faith” The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men "and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin"(CCC234 )

 

The Old Testament attests that God is the source of all truth. His Word is truth. His Law is truth. His "faithfulness endures to all generations."Since God is "true," the members of his people are called to live in the truth. (CCC 255-256.)

 

 

 

Now that we know that let’s go to the next step. Who is God and how are we to relate to Him if He is the Highest truth?

 

Let’s refer to Genesis for a moment. It says that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. (Gen 1:1) He is the creator, the author of everything, the life giver. The source where everything comes from.

 

How should we then relate to God and who are we then if he created us?

 

Lets jump to Genesis 1:27 “God created mankind in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them.”

 

If He created us and He created us in His image who are we then?

 

If we are created in His image we should see ourselves in God and God should see Himself in us. It is a direct gaze between God and man. We stand in Full communion with God. Meaning: there is nothing obstructing between us and God. As God is, so we are.

 

Now, you ask yourself the question, are we in this relationship with God?

 

No, it is the result of the fall. When Adam and Eve fell into sin they lose their sight of God. That direct gaze between God and man became a smoke curtain, blinding us to His goodness and in effect, us losing sight of who we ought to be and is. We missed the mark. Lost our aim. This is what we call sin, directing our gaze else where and losing sight of God.

 

How are we to reconcile with God and redirect our gaze if we have lost sight of Him that we do not even know where to look? We have become blinded by the smoke curtain.

 

Who is the first one to stretch out His hand in an act of reconciliation?

The earth shattering verse: Gen 3:9-10 “but the Lord called out to man and asked, 'Where are you?' Adam answered, 'I heard your powerful presence moving in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid'".

” It was God that reached out, into our blindness to reconcile with us and start the greatest act of love: The history of salvation, that would reach it’s highest point on the cross.

 

A excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI, Meditation during the First General Congregation of the Twelfth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (October 6, 2008)

 

“Only the Word of God is the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is the one who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is the one who builds his life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to build life.

The following verse says: "Omnia serviunt tibi". All things come from the Word, they are products of the Word. "In the beginning was the Word". In the beginning the heavens spoke. And thus reality was born of the Word, it is "creatura Verbi". All is created from the Word and all is called to serve the Word. This means that all of creation, in the end, is conceived of to create the place of encounter between God and his creature, a place where the history of love between God and his creature can develop. “

 

Man cannot save himself, he cannot reach out to God by himself. It is always God who reaches out to us first. For this reason we dare to call Him Father. He lifts us up out of our blindness into the light, like a father helping his sick child and loving him even more in his weakness.

 

Through the history of Salvation God directs us back to Him, restoring that direct Gaze between us and God, drawing us up into Him.

 

Pope Benedict the continues:

“Omnia serviunt tibi". The history of salvation is not a small event, on a poor planet, in the immensity of the universe. It is not a minimal thing which happens by chance on a lost planet. It is the motive for everything, the motive for creation. Everything is created so that this story can exist, the encounter between God and his creature. In this sense, salvation history, the Covenant, precedes creation.”

 

God is not this distant figure, standing at a distance and watching us all on this tiny planet suffer. Our size compared to the universe doesn’t make us insignificant to Him. We are his creatures and part of His creation.

 

His love for His creatures is so great that he not only restores that direct gaze between us and Him but through His son that is the summit of our salvation, draws us up into Himself into heaven.

 

 

Bishop Graham Rose wrote in his Covid 19 Musings on the sacred heart the following:

And so he came to speak of all that exists as being drawn into the Cosmic Christ. His vision has helped us to appreciate the depths and heights of the promise Our Lord made in Jn 12: 32 “ When I am lifted up from earth, I shall draw all men to myself”. Is it not classical Christianity to understand ourselves as invited and drawn into the Mystical body of Jesus Christ and thereby to make our home with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the very Godhead? How ‘big’ is that! I wonder if we do not sometimes slip into thinking that Jesus Christ, since ascending into heaven, his earthly work done, has gone into temporary retirement and will only resurface for His Second Coming. But what of His ‘work’ at the right-hand side of the Father? We are at home with both the Galilean Good Shepherd and the Cosmic Christ.

 

To end, the last logical question is to ask. If we will never experience that full unity with Christ on earth and do not have access to that image that we are made in, how should we live then?

We live according to the teachings of Christ and how the Lord have revealed Himself to us through the History of salvation. By having this tiny glimpse of who God is like a curtain moving in the wind and only revealing a ray of light behind it. To live by that and in cooperation with Him and allowing that tiny ray to penetrate our soul and let go of ourselves in God, we will one day see Him Face to Face.

 

 

The last words to take with you and ponder on from the CCC 30-31

 

30Let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice."Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness. But this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, "an upright heart", as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God.You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power and your wisdom is without measure. And man, so small a part of your creation, wants to praise you: this man, though clothed with mortality and bearing the evidence of sin and the proof that you withstand the proud. Despite everything, man, though but a small a part of your creation, wants to praise you. You yourself encourage him to delight in your praise, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

 

31Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of "converging and convincing arguments", which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These "ways" of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.