Dishes Of Glittering Myths
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon Of The Boating Party, 1881
So many of the people I read or hear from these days talk about longing for what is true. We seem to have lost a handle on anything we might agree on together. As I was watching one of our highest officials last night, I said, a little too loudly: “Just give me the truth. I can handle it. Stop framing these numbers to fit a narrative of your choice.”
We seem always stopped in our tracks, silenced, when we hear: “Oh that’s just your opinion.” The truth has become tinged, altered, framed, subjective, suspect. The truth becomes just your opinion or mine. And then we find ourselves doubting even our own commitments to the truth. Doubting has become the fashion these days, perhaps the only narrative on which we all agree.
St. Augustine, in his great fourth-century book Confessions, talks at length about these matters. As the certainties of the classical world crumbled around him, he cries out:
O Truth, Truth, how the deepest and innermost marrow of my mind ached for you. . . . I was hungering and thirsting for you. . . and all they set before me were dishes of glittering myths. . . . Yet I ate those offerings, believing that I was feeding on you. . . . derived no nourishment from them, but was left more drained.
I certainly can relate to this, can’t you? The only dishes set before us today are piled high with those glittering myths, those narratives, the partial truths that appear for a while as the real thing. We’re left with little nourishment, more drained than sustained. It’s all so exhausting.
One of my favorite writers at the moment, Abigale Favale, talks about her sometimes tortured journey as a young woman in pursuit of what is true. She quotes this very passage from Augustine, admitting she has chased after so many “glittering myths,” those grand presuppositions that are supposed to define any respectable intellectual in our postmodern moment. It’s all up to each one of us to determine our own truth. Identity defines everything, female, male, race, class, education, hip or woke, or just plain-old ordinary. Nothing’s true except the angle, the perspective.
And then came the moment of conversion for Favale:
There was something I didn’t understand at the time, a fatal flaw in my religion of reverent doubt. This truth was crippling me spiritually, yet I remained blind to it. That truth is this: No one can love a probable God. A metaphor can be inspiring, enlightening, but it cannot elicit devotion. It cannot save. In fashioning God according to my desires, I had made him impossible to worship.
This is it, isn’t it? We’re emmeshed in all the glittering possibilities of what is true. We’re enamored with many choices, especially the ones we have chosen. We finally conclude we’re caught in a world of probabilities, and when it comes to God, we’ve created God out of all the presuppositions on offer, those glittering myths. He becomes a probable God, a maybe God, a God that’s just your opinion.
Favale finally concludes that the only path to God is through love. We must stop creating God out of all those glittering myths. We’ve got to center our yearning and thirsting for the truth in the mystery of worship and prayer, zeroing in on those places where God resides, waiting for us to come home, waiting with open arms, waiting with love.
I am trying better to silence my ever-chattering mind in pursuit of truth, to come to rest in the strong arms of this God who loves me, the one who loves all his children, who loves his world, who regards every person with dignity, every life sacred, who longs for his children to come together, not with hatred, but with love. This may be the only way to change our exhausting pursuit of truth.
I hope I am discovering another way of knowing, a way that is often beyond understanding, a way of mystery, a way that finds its starting place where the God of love resides. Truth can only radiate out from that center. Stay there, I keep telling myself, that’s where I will find a handle on what is true.