Tattered Truth

The Spirit of Truth.

That’s the name Jesus uses for the Holy Spirit in our Gospel today.

Jesus sometimes uses other names:  the Advocate, the Paraclete,

Or simply the Spirit.

St Paul sometimes refers to the Spirit of Christ.

But repeatedly in todays Gospel, Jesus refers to the Spirit of Truth.

The Spirit that he will send in his place.

Jesus says this spirit is 

The Spirit of Truth that proceeds from the Father.

This Sunday, this Feast of Pentecost, is all about that Spirit coming to us.

Coming from Heaven to dwell with us here on earth.

Coming to replace Jesus in his human physical presence on earth.

The disciples were distraught at the thought of Jesus leaving.

But he assured them that it was better for them—better for us—

That he return to the Father, and send the Spirit in his place.

The Spirit who he said, will guide [us] to all truth.

There’s quite an emphasis on Truth.

With the Spirit of Truth guiding us to all truth.

Most importantly, guiding us to that Great Truth.

That Jesus is the Son of God, one with God and one with the Spirit.

And that he came to reconcile us to God.

Jesus prayed that we too might be one with each other,

And one with him.

In addition to the greatest truth, there are many other important truths.

Truth itself is important.

Something within us drives us to quest for the truth.

T0 strive to know and to understand all that is true.

The Spirit aids us in our quest with his gifts of:

Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Knowledge,

Fortitude, Piety, and Fear (Respect) of the Lord.

All of those gifts are tied directly to truth.

We search for truth.

And yet, we all know how to ignore the truth.

We sometimes even knowingly avoid the truth.

We tolerate lies.

We even lie ourselves.

We hear a lot these days about the devaluation of truth, 

The post-truth era.

Some even say that there is no objective truth; all truth is relative.

You have your truth, I have mine.

Those who say that seem to confuse truth with opinion.

Years ago, Pope Benedict warned

That we were losing our commitment to objective truth.

We seem a lot closer to that condition today.

We’ve always tolerated lies to some extent.

Some lies seem justifiable.

And maybe they are in rare and extreme circumstances.

When you’ve seen Jews hiding in the attic next door,

And the Nazi’s ask you if you’ve seen any Jews in the neighborhood,

The answer should be, No.

Some lies seem trivial, inconsequential.

Not significant enough to care about.

What harm can they do?

Where should we draw the line 

On tolerating some variance from the truth?

We often stretch the truth for effect,

In humor, sarcasm, exaggeration and cynicism.

But if it’s clear that that’s what we’re doing, is there any harm?

Advertisers are allowed to exaggerate the benefits of their products.

Politicians slant their statements for their audiences.

We all know that and expect that.

But it’s still effective—we don’t detect it when it plays to our blind spots.

That kind of tampering with the truth has been going on forever.

There have always been lies.

There have always been people who try to distort the truth.

People who try to prevent others from knowing the truth.

But it seems much worse today.

I don’t remember there ever being such a blatant, public 

Disregard and apathy regarding truth.

And I’ve been around quite a while.

We had the Yellow Journalism of the late 1800’s.

Newspapers knowingly spreading false and exaggerated stories.

They did it primarily out of greed—
Sensational headlines sold more papers.

But with total disregard of the harm they were doing.

Going so far as to incite war.

With the Internet and smart phones, and television and radio

Today’s fake news sources are far more numerous.

And they’re motivated not only by greed,

But by a malevolent determination to create confusion and division

And to obscure truth.

And yet, despite so many distortions and lies

From important sources on critical matters,

There seems to be a very weak effort to defend the ideal of truth.

Yes, there’s outrage from those whose positions are attacked by the lie.

But there’s far too much indifference and tolerance

From those whose positions benefit.

And from those who don’t see that they have a stake in the matter.

Should we give up on truth?

Can we convince our society that truth is a most-essential value?

How much disregard of truth can we dare to tolerate?

The decision is up to us.

Maybe it’s time to strengthen our own commitment to the ideal of truth.

Time to clamp down on our own tolerance of lies.

Think hard in any situation before deciding that it’s okay

For us, ourselves, to distort or deny the truth.

Maybe it’s time to hold others to a stricter standard.

Including advertisers, and politicians, and broadcasters.

Time to speak out when we see others being untruthful.

Maybe it’s time to treat spin doctors like other doctors.

Holding them to an oath to do no harm.

Maybe it’s time to have our anointed prophets sound the warning,

And go out to defend the sanctity of truth.

That’s the job of the prophet.

To spread the truth.

To see where people are going wrong, and to speak out about it.

To work to correct the problem.

Many of the biblical prophets balked at the call.

Like Jonah who tried to run away from his mission to Nineveh.

They didn’t want to be prophets, it was a dangerous job.

Prophets were too often killed for speaking out.

Fortunately, we still have prophets to send out.

Modern-day prophets who have been anointed for this very purpose—

To go out and promote and uphold the truth.

It will be difficult work.

But they’ll be up to the task.

Of course, we are those prophets.

Anointed at Baptism.

And told to live always as priest, prophet and king or queen.

Mankind will get through this crisis of truth.

The Spirit of Truth will see to that.

He’ll guide us to all truth, great and small—to a world of truth.

But we prophets are called to do our part.

Pentecost Sunday

Jn 15:26-27; 16:12-15   Read this Scripture @usccb.org