By Andrea Lingle

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” (Philippians 4:4)

“I wish there was a school of unlearning.” (Mackesy)

Do you ever feel that there is a whole world of knowledge just beyond your grasp? If you could separate yourself from the mundane, constant hum of the dishwasher and the notifications and the bills and settle yourself in a sufficiently oak-paneled, book-lined room, you could create order out of the chaos. If there was a way to stem the tide of what is, you could search through the countless minds of the past and present and figure out what is real: what really matters.

But books do not fully capture what is most deeply true. Language can’t even do that.

I say that as a writer.

Never have my thoughts been exactly captured by language. The words manage to say both more and less than what was intended. A bit more revealing and a bit less fundamental. Which is a bummer.

In our search for what is deeply true, fundamental, and real, there is a stripping process that feels necessary. To find out what really is, we must discard what we cannot know for sure. The chaff is winnowed away. The old varnish is peeled away leaving the naked wood beneath. The earth is turned. Things are unmade before they can be made new. This process is very uncomfortable for me because, for me, knowledge is a shield. Knowledge is my defense against the spinning, bottomless vault of uncertainty that threatens to engulf me, but there is an end to what we can know for inside-out-certain. And, perhaps, it is in the neighborhood of this fuzzy “end” of what we can know, that we begin to see the vast expanse of what might actually be.

Which is why the quotes that open this essay are so important. There must be another way to investigate truth. Something that is more wedded to rejoicing in all things than to knowing all things. As we embark on this journey of trying to see past what is to what IS, it seems I, for one, must spend some serious time unlearning the art of knowing to walk more deeply into what is true.

Truth is tough. It is hard to find, difficult to prove, and tends to stiffen the most flexible back. Finding something universally true has filled the pages of philosophical tomes. It haunts the four-year-old in all of us: but, why? Why is truth true? Instead of spiraling into something I certainly can’t solve, I will, instead, change the definition. Sometimes when we use the word true, we mean: that which stands well over time. 

When I was a teenager, I got deeply enamored by dry rock wall construction. I felt that there was something deeply authentic about a wall that stood for generations without the aid of mortar. A good dry-built rock wall is true. It stands.

When Jesus was asked what was true, his reply was love of God and neighbor: on this the whole thing stands (true). Now, we all know that loving each other is hard. Sometimes living in community, big or small, takes grit and determination. You find yourself standing in a stream of sludge, wondering why you don’t just get out. Emotions get bruised, opinions get brandished, truth seems far away. But, as you wade through the mire, you find that the bottom is sure. True. Love of God and neighbor. It takes courage to rejoice in the face of what is. To seek truth is to trust in what proves true.