Capital-T Truth

In my first weeks of college I fell in with the “my mind is my higher power” crowd. Brilliant, imposing, some of them led the school in their majors. Several were first-class debaters. They marched to a rarified beat and I caught up and fell into step. Whatever this group was selling I was buying, itching to invent my truth too.

Pride works like termites: unseen, unrelenting, toppling towers before we know they’re at risk. In my cynicism I lost my certainty in anything to do with organized religion, toppling me into a decades-long search for capital-T Truth . . . only to discover one day that what I sought was the capital-W Word.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.[1]

Read that again replacing “the Word,” with “Jesus.” In the beginning was Jesus. The day I got that the Word in John’s Gospel is not a what but a who—the Good News since the beginning—I was slack-jawed.

Truth is a person.

“Word,” in Greek, is “logos.” And “logos,” says Peter Kreeft, author and Boston College philosophy professor, “is the most profound word in the Greek language or perhaps in any language.” Greeks saw it as cosmic order, cosmic reason, objective reason . . . the meaning and value of everything.[2]

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus told his disciples. And I, imitating the intellectualism around me, pursuing “my” truth, missed it, seeing the Church as a divine killjoy, a mill grinding out arbitrary laws. Deny yourself! Behave or else! Boring! When the lights finally came on, I could see the freedom in restraint, the joy in obedience, and the great adventure in Truth.

“I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches,” David sings in Psalm 119. God’s laws are nothing less than wisdom and love. “Your statutes are my delight,” David wrote. “They are my counselors.”

I dove into learning God’s directives, and the more I learned, the more I heard his voice, the more I encountered his guidance.

Praise God!

[1] John 1:1-4

[2] (Lecture 2, “Plato vs. Machiavelli on Political Philosophy,” Peter Kreeft at 6:48, Word on Fire)