Truth is dangerous, and many if not most cannot handle it directly. It cannot be told; it must be discovered. That's why truth is so often presented to us in a parable, or via metaphor.
We also can be mistaken, enshrining a falsehood or misrepresentation as "the truth", and when contradicted (as we can see in the news over the past few days) we get angry, label and dismiss, turn to jello in our safe place while hurling burning tar at the one or ones who dared to violate the sanctity of our world view and its assumptions. Anything but listen, as a rule.
Truth is an onion. It has layers, and in the right circumstances can bring you to tears.
Today, the innate wrongness and hatefulness of various isms (some old, some new, some still entangled the caul of their birthing) in some circles is considered manifest truth...so true, it's truer than true, and no dissent or other opinion can be broached. Load the label gun, click, peal, place, and dismiss...the labeled ones have no truth, speak only lies, and may not be entirely human. But then you encounter truth in a person...as a person, and it gets more complicated.
In my youth I knew an old man who belonged to an old conservative denomination in the South. He used the "n" word without a second thought. Named his little black dog, "N" boy. He would teach his grandchildren that when speaking of black folks in more polite terms, it was preferred to say "nigra" rather than the "n" world.
By today's standards he would would be deemed some sort of irredeemable hate spewing racist who probably beat his wife on the sly, and who had the scandalous effrontery to vote for non liberal democrats at election time. He would have been dismissed without a second thought to who he was, or what he for...just another white religious bigot no one has to pay the slightest attention to...and if they do, then they are racist too.
Yet, in his person he was more complex than a label. In 1968 during all the unrest associated with the civil rights movement, that year. One Sunday, two or three black families sought to join the all white church to which he belonged. They walked the aisle and asked to be received in fellowship. It caused an uproar (discreet of course). The men of the church gathered in emergency session to assess the matter and to make a recommendation. There were four very prominent men in that church who opposed letting them join. Yet that n world using old man spoke up for them. He said if they were there simply to agitate and protest in order to provoke a reaction for the news, then welcoming them would defuse that situation and in few weeks they would lose interest and go away. If, however they were sincere, and they were Christians who believed as that church believed then their church had no right to refuse them, whom Christ had accepted. The vote was taken, the recommendation for acceptance was made, the congregation ratified it, and they were all welcomed as new members. After a couple of weeks, they never came again. As for the four men who voted against admission, they all died of cancer within 4 years, and the old man who swung the vote lived nearly another 15 years.
The truth embodied by that old man...the full complexity of his life and character confound the stuffers of today's social bento boxes. He is a dangerous sort of truth, one that can no longer be safely acknowledged much less welcomed face to face in the public square.
Where there is no room for truth, no heart for it, where there is room for only one face in the mirror, we must content ourselves with stories and parables, hoping perhaps that they might serve to enlighten the inner eyes of another, and soberly, cautiously searching out those stories that might serve to enlighten our own.
