There's a world of difference between truth and facts.
Facts can obscure the truth.
- Maya Angelou, poet, born on this day, 1928
Br. Douglas Brown, of the Order of the Holy Cross, was a long-time friend. Sadly he dropped dead a few months ago, age about 60, from a “massive” heart attack. One Sunday evening in the mid-seventies, at Solemn Evensong and Benediction at St. Thomas’s, Huron St., Toronto, he was the preacher. For almost 30 years, I remember clearly one thing he said: “Scripture does not have to be factually true, but it must be true to the facts.”
I remember watching him from the sedillia. And when I heard those words, I knew he had said something crucial, and truthful, and freeing. Something that I had thought for a long time, but had never articulated so beautifully. Maya Angelou clearly understands too and expressed it beautifully. Facts and truth are not the same thing - and facts can obscure the truth.
Does it matter that everything said in all the World’s Holy Scriptures is factual? About Krishna? The Buddha? Moses? Zoroaster? Jesus? Muhammad? Are the words said about them more important that what the words convey? I don’t think so - especially if we fight over the “facts” trying to prove ourselves right and others wrong, while missing the meaning of the holy lives they point to. Does it matter if Jesus was born in Bethlehem or in Nazareth? No. What matters is that the Mystery called “God” is present in all of Creation.
We live in an age where we are prisoners of “facts” - and our souls are withering because of it. We would rather argue about the “facts” of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead than rejoice with all our human brothers and sisters that neither death nor evil can kill Life and Love, and give our lives to secure this gift for all. Pitiful. Not, to my mind, what God desires.
“Facts” are only hints pointing to truth. Once the truth has been seen, heard, imagined - the facts fall away and truth in all Its beauty floods into the world.
It is not facts that will set us free. It is truth that will set us free. Let us not, as do many posing as religious people these days, obscure the truth by making an idol out of facts.
Brian+
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