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Speeches

Sharing the Truth

Talk at the Eternal Life Church Teacher Forum - Louisville, Kentucky

There is an old story which revolves around the Latin phrase, Nemo dat, quid non habet. This means, "No one gives what he does not have." It seems that a Capuchin Lay Brother was working in a garden hoeing the weeds one summer day when he was approached by an inebriated man who said, "Father please give me a blessing." The lay Brother explained, "I am not a Father. I am simply a lay Brother. I do not give blessings; I cannot give blessings." The inebriated man insisted, "Don't try to fool me. I want your priestly blessing. I will not go away until you bless me." Where upon the Lay Brother waved his hand over the man and said, "Nemo dat, quid non habet."

The phrase has a significant relevance for our topic today, Sharing the Truth. We cannot give to others a share in the truth unless we, ourselves, first possess the truth. And, by a strange paradox, the truth, particularly the truth of our Catholic faith, is of such a nature that the more we share it with others, the more we receive it back ourselves, and the fuller and richer in our own possession is that which we actually give away.

To begin, let us go to that mouthful asked by Pontius Pilate, the question that has been asked by human beings probably from the inception of the human race, and which will be asked into eternity the question, "What is truth?" And then, let us examine how sharing the truth is an important way in which we obey the second great commandment that Jesus gave to us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and in this way to make real and concrete and thus authenticate our love of God with all our heart and mind and strength above and beyond all things.

It is said that all speech, in order to be intelligible and rational, must have a listener, and if possible, a respondent. A question, then, can be rightly asked, to whom was God speaking when He said, "Let Us make man in Our image and likeness." A recent writer has observed that one speaks because speech calls upon someone to answer, and this call means that language is, in a root sense, a vocation. The solution to the question of God's listener in the assertion of the Book of Genesis, put in God's mouth, "Let Us make man in Our image and likeness" lies in a tri-alogue of the Holy Trinity, and a beautiful and wonderful revelation that man is created into a conversation already and eternally underway. Since Almighty God cannot deceive nor be deceived because this would be incompatible with His perfection and truth, and a desire for truth is imbedded in the very fabric of each human being, this is why Saint Thomas Aquinas said, "The human mind is made to know truth and its ultimate perfection is to have inscribed within it, the entire order of the universe and its causes." Saint Thomas says that the true is the good of the intellect, and the false, its evil.

In the fullness of time, when God spoke His definitive, final and exhaustive word to the human race, and when He gave in Jesus Christ the total gift of Himself to us, He accompanied this self-giving with the completeness of Divine Revelation. Saint Paul said that in Jesus are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Our Lord Himself said, "For this was I born, and for this did I come into the world, to bear witness to the truth." So Jesus, then, comes to give us the fullness of God's truth, but there is something even more profound that must be considered when we try to answer the question, "What is truth?" because our Redeemer came, not simply to give us and tell us the truth, but even more importantly, to be the Truth, for He said, "I am the Truth." Jesus is the purveyor of the fullness of God's revelation, but He is also in Himself, the Truth of that revelation.

Sharing the truth, then, means sharing the realities that God has revealed to us in and through Jesus Christ, but more importantly, it means the sharing of Christ, Himself.

Our own grasp of the truth comes about through the use of human reason, and even though our intellect and will are weakened by original sin and our own sins, God's grace often heals these wounds, and enables us to conform our minds better to reality, and hence, to possess the truth. But the truth also comes to us in basically the most important way, by reason of God's telling us, and even in places and ways in which we do not understand things that go beyond but not contrary to our reason, we grasp on the basis of belief. Faith, then, is the doorway to the truth, and when we posses the Catholic faith, we possess the fullness of God's divine revelation in its integrity and its beauty. In our common use of English, we often use the term believe to mean "suppose" or "guess", as in the example, "I believe it might rain tomorrow," meaning I guess or suppose it might rain tomorrow. However, in our religion, we must understand belief to have an entirely different kind of meaning. "Believing" in our religion means exercising the virtue of Faith. In the Act of Faith, the Act of Belief, we attain knowledge, not simply a guess or supposition, but knowledge, and sure knowledge, on the basis of God's having said something to us, and our grasp of it on the merit of His testimony. In attempting to see our duty in love, to share the faith with others, we must have a very clear attitude of our own, understanding that religion, and particularly our Catholic religion, can never be reduced, as it sometimes is in our culture, to a mere matter of taste or opinion. This kind of error was described very eloquently by Cardinal John Henry Newman, in the last century, and truly there is a very real application and perception of it even in our time. The Cardinal said that "liberalism in religion is the view that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth, that we are not more acceptable to God by believing this than by believing that, that no one is answerable for His opinions, that it is enough that we sincerely hold what we profess, that it is a duty to follow what seems to us to be true without any fear lest it not be true, and that we may safely trust to ourselves in matters of faith, and have no need of another guide. These kinds of errors are refuted certainly, by the truth of our Catholic Faith, which proclaims that there is a truth then, that there is one truth, that all religious error is of itself of an immoral nature, that its maintainers--unless involuntarily such--are guilty in maintaining it, that the mind is below truth and not above it, it is bound not to descant upon it but to venerate it, that truth and falsehood in religion are set before us for the trial of our hearts, that our choice is an awesome giving forth of lots on which salvation or its rejection is inscribed, that in the words of the Creed of Saint Athanasius, before all things it is necessary to hold the Catholic Faith, and that he who would be saved must think thus and not otherwise."

It is exceptionally important to keep in mind constantly that sincerity is an important quality, attribute, and virtue in every life, and in every aspect of life including religion. However, sincerity must never be confused with the truth, and the people who are sincerely wrong can be set upon a very dangerous path of life, leading to eternal doom. An engineer who builds a bridge and is sincerely mistaken about the necessary calculations of the holding power of the cables that keep the suspension from falling, might, for all his sincerity, causes grave harm and serious damage, and even loss of life. Similarly, in religious matters, we must keep in mind that truth, while it should be accompanied by sincerity, is not necessarily interchangeable with sincerity.

No high school chemistry teacher, in his or her right mind, would tell the students armed with "sincerity" to go into a laboratory and play around with the various substances and chemical found there with "sincerity" enough to guide them, nor is it adequate to leave to the "sincere" perception of an individual what is sometimes for that person's good. Otherwise we would not have to place warnings on bottles of various kinds of poisons. In this connection, it is good to observe too, that in religious matters partial truth can be as bad or worse than total falsehood.

In Nebraska, where I live, it is common to use rat poison to eliminate the rodents that can depredate the harvest. Rat poison, for the most part, 90%, is pure, wholesome and delicious food. It is the 10% that contains the strychnine and the arsenic that does the killing and the poisoning. So in religion, there can certainly be partial truths, and these can be vehicles through and by which we can establish a relationship with those who lack the fullness of God's revelation in the Catholic Faith. They can be stepping-stones to further dialogue, but, at the same time, unless an extreme caution is exercised, they can be a source of grave spiritual damage.

In regard to sharing the truth of our Faith with others, we must keep in mind how necessary it is for us to possess and deepen that Faith, how necessary it is for us to proclaim the Gospel as much or more, by the way we live and act, than by words and convincing arguments. We must also keep in mind the absolute need for compassion and kindness in all our evangelical work of sharing the truth and spreading the good news of Christ, of bring Him, Who is the Truth, to our friends and neighbors. The aphorism of Saint Francis de Sales is particularly apropos, "It is easier to catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar." Excessive polemics and arguments can generate an enormous amount of heat; at the same time they lack the power to generate an adequate amount of light. We must not equate caution, prudence, kindness and compassion, however, in sharing the truth with others, with diluting that truth or compromising the fullness of what God has told us, and the richness and beauty of our Catholic religion. In our work of sharing the truth, we have the advantage of much assistance from our Holy Father and from the Bishops. At the Fourth World Youth Day in 1989, Pope John Paul II said, "To be Christians means to be missionaries, to be apostles. It is not enough to discover Christ, you must bring Him to others. You must have the courage to speak about Christ, to bear witness to your faith through a life-style inspired by the Gospel. The harvest is great indeed, for evangelization, and so many workers are needed. Christ trusts you and counts on your collaboration."

In the recent National Plan and Strategy for Catholic Evangelization, entitled, Go and Make Disciples, the Bishops of the United States said that all Catholics in our country must first, work to bring about in every Catholic an enthusiasm for faith in such wise that in living their faith in Jesus, they freely share it with others. They have a duty as well, to invite all people in the United States, whatever their social or cultural background, to hear the message of salvation in Jesus Christ, and come to join us in the fullness of the Catholic faith. And finally, they spoke about the need to foster Gospel values in our society, promoting the dignity of the human person, the importance of the family, and the common good of our society so that our entire nation may continue to be transformed by the saving power of Jesus Christ.

In our work of sharing the faith, we must constantly maintain a strong attitude of humility. It is the fundamental virtue on which all the supernatural structure of a virtuous life must be built. Helping us in this regard are the eloquent words of the Second Vatican Council, "All the children of the Church should remember that their exalted status is to be attributed, not to their own merits, but to the special grace of Christ. If they fail, moreover, to respond to that grace in thought, word, and deed, not only will they not be saved, but they will be the more severely judged."

Once one is appropriately humble, sharing the faith and being successful in this requires a knowledge of the need to stay in the state of grace and to give over to prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit the absolute primacy in all matters of missionary life and evangelization. Passivity and quietism are not meant by prayer and giving over to God the work that has to be done since God Himself has told us and continues to tell us through His Church that we must be the instruments and channels of His purposes. However, we must remember the words of Saint John the Baptist who told us that God, if He wants, can raise children to Abraham out of the stones, and while He chooses to use us and to need us, in the absolute and ultimate sense, He does not need us. We depend totally and utterly on Him.

Finally, let me say that one of the truly grand effects of sharing the truth with others is that it liberates those with whom we successfully share this truth. Jesus said in the 8th chapter of the Gospel of Saint John, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." This is extremely important because we cannot, in the true sense of the word, be free unless we understand freedom, not as doing what we want, but as being free from external coercion so as to do what God wants. Also, in the New Testament, Saint Paul, in the 4th chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, tells us that we have the obligation to speak the truth in love. God, Who is at once both Truth and Love, calls us to minister in the Church to all people, and it does not serve the cause of either truth or love if they do not interpenetrate each other. Truth is not truth unless it is accompanied by love, just as love is not genuine love unless it is accompanied by truth.

To paraphrase the poet John Donne, "Human beings are never really free unless they are chained by God's commandments, just as they are never really pure until they are ravished by God's love."

I have been fascinated recently by an article written by Leonard Sullivan, who is the Master of the Westminster Catholic Evidence Guild in London, England. He does a great deal of work in sharing the truth and assisting others to share the truth of the Catholic Faith. He suggests that when opportunity presents itself, a Catholic can go about sharing the truth by very boldly saying something like this, "This is a proclamation of Jesus Christ. The stakes are high, either life in the friendship of God, or death in sin. You have heard something of the truth which God wants you to have. You may need to know more before you are in a position to accept or reject what He wants you to have. Deliberate ignorance, however, is the same as rejection. Each of you must make your own decision, and this can decide where you spend your life after you die."

As far as motivating Catholics to share the truth with others, Leonard Sullivan, taking a leaf from the technique of the Screw Tape Letters, of C.S. Lewis, sets forth what the devil would tell his demons to do in order to impede evangelization and the sharing of the truth of the Catholic Faith. Leonard Sullivan says, "The devil says to his demons, `This is the way you go about doing your damage. 1) Remember that half truths or innuendos are even better sometimes than lies. 2) Tempt people to do good in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, someone with an unused talent for outreach in the parish should be encouraged to do the flower arrangements along the altar. Those already using their talents in outreach should be guided to take on other things which are relatively useless. 3) Tempt people to admire the view of the Christian horizon through tinted glasses so they will be mesmerized, stay put, and do nothing. 4) It is very hard to get convinced Christians to commit serious sins, so suggest minor sins. Keep telling them venial sins don't matter, and then leave them to their own inertia. They will drift so far from Jesus Christ, they won't want Him even at the hour of death. 5) Encourage people to promote peace in a pompous self-opinionated way. Use the fact, that, in spite of the crucifixion and in spite of being baptized, people are still prone to sin. This tactic can result in a lot of in-fighting for the cause of peace. 6) Get people to talk, write, discuss and argue about sharing the faith in a way that will make sure they do little or nothing. 7) Remind them that if they actively try to share the truth of the Catholic Faith, they may cause offense other Christian churches. So, tell them it is better to do nothing, offer a watered-down, lowest common denominator Christianity, the kind that wouldn't make a self-respecting can open one eye. Encourage people to preach to be just a decent sort of person and set a good example, and then, the congregation will turn itself off and leave Jesus Christ out of their Christianity. Encourage any kind of activity that will make active Christians think they are busy and will steer them away from Jesus Christ. Finally, encourage false humility, so that Christians will underrate their value to Jesus Christ in His work of building up His kingdom. Make Christians feel useless, so that they will want to do nothing.'"

Leonard Sullivan concluded his presentation with words from the Prophet Jeremiah that I certainly would make my own. The Prophet said, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you came to birth, I consecrated you. I have appointed you as a prophet to the people." Jeremiah immediately made excuses, "But Lord, God, look; I do not know how to speak. I am a child." But the Lord replied, "Do not say, `I am a child.' Go now to those to whom I send you and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, as I am with you, and I will protect you. It is God Who speaks."

Jeremiah heard and obeyed, and so should every single Catholic hear and obey, and share the truth in love with every human being. We must love every one of our fellow human beings on this planet so much that we love them into the Church, that we love them into the embrace of Christ in time and in eternity.