Lent 2023 Day 2 - Truth

“The truth shall set you free. But first it will piss you off.”

• Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, Ted Lasso

“You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

• Col. Nathan Jessup, A Few Good Men

“Sometimes the truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.”

• Bruce Wayne, The Dark Knight

“The truth rarely makes sense when you omit key details.”

• Yelena Belova, Black Widow

“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

• Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones

“The truth is bigger than all of us.”

• Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984

The truth is a funny thing. If I was to ask someone if they want the truth, I would be fairly assured they would say yes. I certainly would. I would say honestly is more valuable to me than almost anything. I have stated multiple times that I don’t want people to say, “Let me be honest with you” when they are talking to me because that indicates that they are not always honest. We want honesty. 
But what about when that honesty hurts? A doctor says, “If you don’t change your lifestyle, you are going to die.” Through their actions, the patient says, “I don’t care.” I’ve been on the end of that difficult conversation by a doctor, trying to get me to handle a health issue. I’ve also been on the side of a family member, watching someone I love honestly saying they aren’t willing to change. 
We want honesty when it is good. We want the truth when it fits into our lives or agrees with our beliefs. But that isn’t always the case. 

• The loved one who said they would always be there for you betraying you.

• The organization you repeatedly sacrificed for turning out to be nothing like what you thought. 

• The family who should have valued you over anything turning their backs. 

• The friend who said they would fight by your side stabbing you in the back. 

• The company who said you were family letting you go at the slightest indication of it benefitting them financially

Truth can hurt. It can destroy. It can suck so badly. And there are moments when, like Cipher in The Matrix, when you wish you could just get put back into the construct and forget everything you had learned. But we can’t. Time travel isn’t real. We can’t hit a button and go back an hour, a day, a month, a year. We can’t undiscover things. When the curtain is pulled back, when the room of horrors is revealed, that truth is with us forever. 

Over the last few years, I have had to uncover a lot of truths: about myself, the world, the Church, my family. And many of them have been very painful. There have been things that I have had to come to grips with about my childhood and adolescence that have shook me. It wasn’t minor stuff like “Aunt Myrtle wasn’t really from England. She just had a fake accent to sound fancy.” I mean, that could probably disturb somebody. But that isn’t anything like “Hey you know this thing that you always thought was perfectly normal? Yeah, it wasn’t normal. Not only wasn’t it normal, it wasn’t good. It was actually bad. It was actually abusive and the root of some major trauma that you still can’t get past.  Pip pip. Toodles.” Do you know how that reframes your entire existence? Like in Inside Out, there were core memories formed, ways to see the world, and they were messed up. I have spent hours and hours trying to figure out what to do with stuff like that. In some cases, I can’t confront the person because they are literally dead. (I said literally because I didn’t want you to think it was a dramatic “you're dead to me” situation where I stomped off. Sometimes literally needs defined these days.) In other cases, the people are so dispersed that it would be impossible to track them down. And they wouldn’t care anyway. “Hey! You! Yeah, you! When I was seven you taught me some REALLY MESSED UP stuff about US History. And it took me like 40 years to figure it out…. Who am I? You don’t remember me? One of 35 kids in a class you had over 40 years ago?” 

I’ve always been a sucker for Greek mythology. Not so much Roman mythology - that was like the rebooted version to me. We all know reboots aren’t as good as the original. And, if you read yesterday’s entry, you may be surprised that I was allowed to read mythology. I think I was at some point, but eventually I got my hands on it. I remember checking out Bullfinch’s Mythology from the Public Library on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach, FL. I remember that because the librarian said, “You are the only ten year old we’ve ever had check this out - not once, but twice. Way to go, son.  Or should I call you Gramps?” And me and the rest of the shuffleboard gang laughed and chugged our Cuban coffees. But I really enjoyed the book. The earliest comic book. Heroes, villains, people who had crazy powers, really weird individuals, some messed up deities. So, one story that seems applicable is Pandora’s Box. 
David’s Reformed Version is Prometheus, the first human, stole fire from the gods. To punish him, Zeus had a woman created named Pandora. She was given to the brother of Prometheus.  (Look, I didn’t write this. There is already so much messed up stuff in this story, and we haven’t even gotten to the box yet.) The woman herself wasn’t enough of a booby prize (heh heh. See what I did there?) So Zeus also gave her a box / bowl / jar / some kind of enclosed space that a geometry teacher would make us find the volume of. It had a label on it and everything. “Pandora’s Vessel Thing: Don’t Ever Open.” And as we all know, the first thing ANYONE will do when they are told not to open something is to try to open it. Zeus knew this. He snickered to himself and then went and turned into a cow or badger to see how this all worked out. Little did Pandora know, but the container held all of the terrible awful horrendous nauseating misery and evil that existed. You know, aside from darkness and freezing cold - since mankind had only just stolen fire. And clearly they weren’t happy without fire, since they stole it. So the REST of the misery and evil. Roaches. Plagues. Spiders. Tardigrades. Mucus. The word “moist.” Cowlicks. That urge to eat pizza and burn the crap out of your mouth because you know it is too hot but you just don’t care. All of those things. So, Pandora opened the jug and BOOM all of that junk comes out.  And now the world sucks. 
That’s kind of like uncovering truth. You can sit there, and say “I want to open the jar. I reeeeaallly want to open the jar.” And people all around you will say, “No man, don’t do that. It isn’t going to end well.” And you’ll yell at them. “What do you know? It probably has unicorn puppies who fart rainbows in it. That’s why it is all misty and dark and full of lightning bolts and moaning ghosts.” Then you figure out the thing. Truth is found. The jar is opened. Blergh. Clearly, not every truth is bad. Discovering that, for example, Peeps are actually kind of good after spending a lifetime ridiculing them - that isn’t a bad truth to uncover. I’m talking about the mammoth, earth shattering, life altering, mind f-ing, heart rending truths. You can’t go back. 

I guess to make this more suitable to its inevitable adaptation on Disney+, I should put some shine on this apple. Even in the Pandora story, there was something good. The only thing left in the Tupperware container was hope. Just a little hope, shining there all alone. This is where the Pandora story loses its usefulness, because at the end of that - all those horrible things like Morgan and Morgan billboards and pop-up ads on free games - they still were there. So the net result was a terrible thing. But with the issue of truth, as hard as it may seem, the. net result is something good. That little bit of hope that shines out, it shows that somewhere down the line something positive is going to come from all of this. It may hurt like hell for a while. It may make you change everything you knew, everything you trusted, everything you believed. But, in the end, there is hope that things will be better. I’m a huge fan of the concept of hope. I may write about that at some point in this journey. I feel it is best expressed by the theologian Coriolanus Snow from The Hunger Games when he says,“Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous.” And isn’t this journey about giving up fear? (See what I did there? So many callbacks.)

If you were to come to me and ask me if I would go back if I could... If I would take the slingshot around the sun and fly back to the days before I learned the truth… Would I do it? No. No, I wouldn’t. Yes, it may have left the images I had of my past intact. But those were fake anyway. They needed to break because now, now I have a chance to heal from a wound I may not have ever known I had. I can live a better life moving past things I didn’t know were holding me back. I can break free from a prison I didn’t know I was in. (That’s the same metaphor three times. Move on.) That’s the hope that comes from truth. What started this whole entry was a line in Ted Lasso. A counselor tells Ted “The truth will set you free, but first it is going to piss you off.” It resonated. I’ve been there. I’ve been angry at the truth, at the truth teller. But now it can set me free. Once I’m done being pissed off about it.