I had an idea for a blog post, but just as I was about to start writing I got distracted by browsing through some old stuff that I’d written. I found this thing from 2007 which, while needing a bit of work, is probably better than what I was going to write…
You are standing in a twilight room inhabited by three sleeping children; two boys and a girl. You move first to the cot in the corner where the girl sleeps, dreaming the dreams of babies. She sleeps on her front, her nose pointing up towards the bars. You take the blanket that’s draped over the end of her bed. It’s too big as it is; you fold it in half and then, clumsily, wrap your daughter in it. Despite your ham-fisted efforts she doesn’t even stir. Even at this very young age she has already decided that sleep is a safe place to be.
Next you move across the room to the bunk bed. On the top bunk sleeps your eldest son. He’s wrapped up tightly, sleeping soundly. You notice that his teddy, Winnie, has managed to tumble from the top bunk on to the floor so you scoop him up and place him back on the bed. Your motives are not entirely selfless; you are simply trying to prevent a nocturnal scenario involving a child who wakes you because he can’t find his teddy in the middle of the night. Having done this you bend down to the bottom bunk, where your youngest son snoozes. He’s contorted in all manner of uncomfortable shapes, like a mannequin constructed entirely from set squares. Legs and arms protrude from the covers and yet he sleeps peacefully. You take a second to adjust the duvet so that he won’t become cold in the night. Job done, you move towards the door enjoying the surge of emotion that fills you; the beat of your heart that reminds you that you would throw yourself on a grenade for any one of your children.
The Bible calls it ‘love’ and makes it the benchmark for every single relationship that we are a part of. It’s easy with your children. It comes from some deep, dark genetic place. But not everyone calls this ‘love’. The word does not come easily to their lips because they serve a different god. They speak instead of a protective drive on an instinctual level; the suicidal service that comes from nothing more than a desire to promulgate your genes and preserve the family bloodline. Love doesn’t exist. It’s nothing more than a blurry label attached to very solid evolutionary desires – as though we can really be expected to believe that we have evolved to the point where perfectly good breadwinners will happily lay down their lives to create helpless orphans who are free to starve to death tomorrow. They have no poetry in their soul. They speak of ugly truth.
Truth can be many things. It can be insightful; clear; obscure; hard; painful; extreme or one of many other things – but it can never, never be ugly. When Jesus spoke of truth he spoke of himself and he spoke of ultimate reality. Truth must always be beautiful, as he is. Beautiful truth is a tautology; ugly truth an oxymoron. When those ontological reductionists speak about us as though we are nothing more than a random collection of base drives and instincts I think ‘ugly truth’. There is another way of describing ugly truths; another name for them. Lies.
