The honest Jello

Why do you say "truth" like it is a rock that you can stand upon? You seem to think that using that word gives you something solid to hold in your hand and ponder before, perhaps, throwing it at some unsuspecting nincompoop's skull. But what if I took that away from you? What if the truth turned out to be... fiction?

I'm not making this up. Even physicists say that simply by observing an event we change the event. The act of perception necessarily leads to an out come of "here" or "there" being picked out of the millions of simultaneous possibilities. That doesn't even get into how this feeble bunch of neurons inside our skulls massages what it sees based upon what it already knows and understands - or assumes.

When I was little my well intentioned parents took me to church every Sunday and on all holy days of obligation. Lining the walls of this church were the Stations of the Cross as they had been conceived by some 1960's era relief sculptor. I looked at those stations with my child brain and assumed they were about Jesus taking a long walk and loosing weight. In the earlier stations, covered by his robe, Jesus looked portly. By the end when he is stripped and hung on the cross, he is thin looking. The artist didn't put the hands and feet of the crucifiction into the image.... the sculpture frames only his thin, naked chest. The cross Jesus is supposed to have carried also didn't fit into any of the tableaux. I thought he was carrying some school books. The nails being driven into his wrists looked like a pile of lolly pops. I saw what I could and my nimble grey matter filled in the details out of my own life and what I saw on TV.

I'm sure we said the stations of the cross on many a Good Friday. I should have known the story. But i didn't. Saying the stations or praying the rosary was more about keeping up with the ferocious rhythm of the old ladies filling the front rows of the church. I saw those stations hanging on the wall when I came back to St. Mary's as an adult and only THEN realized what it was meant to be. If you had asked me what was truly in those pictures on the wall, I would have answered one way as I was small and another as I grew older. At both times I would have been telling the truth.

And then there's the truth we want to see. We have the obfuscating factor of desire and expectation. Mom is SURE that I said this or that or that some such bad thing has happened. But she created those details in her mind out of wishing for or fearing that such would take place. Now, you think I'm going to call my own mom a liar?

So maybe the truth isn't such a solid thing at all. Look in your hand, that absolute you are holding has just turned to jello. Throw it and it's only plastic. It adapts to the surface where it lands and then melts away.

But there are absolutes, right? There is a thing that is our rock upon which we can ground a total understanding, right? There is a truth to be had out there, in a God, right? We just can't seem to manage to get very clear on what that God is saying. But God is truth, right?

God? GOD? God invented jello.