What is truth? (Reflections).

I had one of those moments, on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, when no answer felt like an adequate response to the question asked of me. Through the receiving line came a church member who asked, `What is truth?' Taken aback for a moment, I stumbled and then answered, `Well ... you know it when you see it!'

As I mull over my answer, I don't think that it was all that bad. I recognized the query from John 18:38, when Pontius Pilate asked the same question of Jesus. Like the Buddha, who was asked what enlightenment is and responded by lifting a flower and saying nothing, Jesus' response was simply to remain silent. A wise and enlightened leader might let truth speak for itself. I know I am not that wise. So why not a few more words on the truth?

I have used the word `truth' in prayers or sermons as a way of talking about what really matters, our ultimate concerns, and what lies beneath the surface of our emotional fidgeting or our jockeying for attention or power. Truth comes through the veil of the everyday, sometimes in moments of holy silence, sometimes in unspeakable instants when we know something has happened deeper in our souls than what we experience most of the time in the rush of the day. And how elusive these momentary luminescent moments can be. Sometimes we think we have firmly grasped the truth and the whole meaning of life and then, like a slippery fish, it swims off into the vast sea only to leave us confounded.

Then there are those who believe the truth is firmly in their grasp. Some claim that truth is exclusively theirs. I believe this approach is foolish if not dangerous for those of us less certain who seek humbly to piece our experience of truth together over a lifetime of hard spiritual work and discipline. The silence of Jesus with Pilate and the Buddha's flower response to his disciples teach us that truth should not be made into a weapon of destruction. To believe we own the truth can lead to violence or intrusion or believing that we ourselves are gods. The point is that the search may lead us to the well and that those who cultivate room in their souls for radical openness and a willingness to be moved will be the ones to know it.

Anias Nin wrote this piece of wisdom to help us with our search for truth:

`There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.'

This seems to me an honest depiction of any search for truth. Don't we get it slowly, in bits and pieces, in moments when we see what it means to be alive, when the universe gives us a glimpse of the meaning of life? Don't these continuous revelations of truth shine through the murky days in myriad ways, allowing us a peek at Nin's mosaic, one tile at a time? Maybe one day, by collecting or working on these momentary fragments of illumination, we will know the `Truth' and it shall set us free.

I guess if I have to have an answer another time for the ancient question about the meaning of truth, I might say the same thing: `You know it when you see it,' or better, `It might take a lifetime to know it.'

The Rev Daniel C Kanter is the Minister at the First Unitarian Church in Dallas, Texas.