Your Truth, My Truth, and The Truth
She’s the one who started it!
Nuh-uh! I was minding my own business and was fine until he came along!
OK. You’re both punished.
One kid’s word against another is my least favorite parenting game. Their stories won’t match, not even over their dead bodies, so I dismiss them both, play the unilateral power card, and make it my story.
You’re both at fault.
I don’t know what went down, but that’s irrelevant.
A simplified but universal example of one event told three different ways. Her story, his story, and my story. Or, her truth, his truth, and my truth. Which story is the true one? Mine. Why? Because I’m the authority.
This is how I see The Truth in the religious sense of the word. In the sense that we are often more comfortable seeing it. If someone could just tell us what the truth is, then we can all agree and not be bothered with conflicting facts.
We are enormously uncomfortable holding more than one truth in our hands.
This is why religious Truth is an easy way. Yes, going against our human nature to adhere to the divine and perfect Truth is hard. But at least it rewards us with the comfort of seeing everything one way and permits us to dismiss anything that doesn’t match it. We’re absolved from the even more difficult work of empathy, putting ourselves in another person’s shoes, hearing another voice, stretching our minds to consider other possibilities, or in the very most horrifying case, admitting that maybe someone else’s story or truth is valid and has a place alongside our own.
If there’s only one Truth, then it perfectly explains why things are the way they are, no matter how they got that way, or what the final result is. Everything can be explained. If we can’t explain things, or there’s more than one reason why something happened, it’s confusing, feels unstable, and there’s too much room for interpretation.
My brothers think that growing up on a ranch was the most idyllic offering a child could ever wish for, and I believe it is nothing short of torture. Which is true? We all ice-skated on frozen ponds in the winter and plunged into them from a rope swing in the summer. We rode horses, four-wheelers, and drove pick-up trucks before we had a license. FUN, right?!
Oh, yeah. Especially for my brothers. Those isolated moments were fun for me too, but nobody wants the long list of reasons why a ranch upbringing was my bane. In short, nothing about ranch life was conducive to using my stage skills in New York City. My brothers can thank their upbringing for translating their skills to their professional and personal lives. Apart from the work ethic and mucking in when I have to, I argue that anyone who spends their days in the rigor of a ballet studio will also gain the discipline necessary for work ethic and doing the hard things when you just can’t hold your leg at a 45-degree angle any longer.
My sentiment for the ranch days has nothing to do with my brother’s. We did the same things, we lived the same life, but we have different truths about how we lived it.
The same thing can be said for our church cult. Lots of us wax nostalgic about the friendships we made and maintain to this day. The sense of community. The way we got lost in praise and worship. The talented music team. The way we were all held to The Truth.
Holding us to The Truth came at the cost of silencing our voices and dismissing people’s experiences with sexual abuse, financial extortion, using people to exhaustion, praying the gay away, limiting people’s freedoms, controlling people’s families, creating division between young adults and parents, cutting people off, shaming - a countless list of truths.
The valuable lesson I learned from decades of only believing in The Truth, is that it is a tool for control, a pacifier for incertitude. It is absolute only in its opaqueness. What I understand now is that my truth is reality. Your truth is reality. Even if our truths do not match each other, they are both real, valid, and have a place alongside each other. I don’t need to give up mine for yours, or for The Truth, and you don’t need to give up yours.
Our truth is our story, it is our experience, and it is real. No one can take that away or say it isn’t so. The other fun thing we can do with truth and story is creating our own. There’s no obligation to religious Truth if it doesn’t serve us in a positive way and if it negates another person’s experience. There is room for all the truths.
The parenting game of he-said-she-said is a pain. I usually take the easy way out with The Truth, Parent Edition:
Ya both done bad, I don’t wanna hear it, the end.
It is infinitely challenging for me to sit with each of them, hear out their whole story, and figure out a way for us all to continue with both realities of this is what happened, no it didn’t. It’s awkward, uncomfortable, takes so much work, and usually feels unresolved. But I’ve done it before and we end up moving forward, respecting each person’s truth.
I know it’s outrageous to suggest not clinging to an ultimate Truth. It means anyone can say anything they want to say, and how do we know if it’s true or not? My goodness, what chaos! A pearl-clutcher for sure.
In my experience, the result of unequivocally clinging to an ultimate Truth is chaos and hurt. Accepting individual truths, listening to one another, and making efforts toward empathy and understanding is the most peaceful and positive attempt at the truth that we can make.
