This morning, with such public figures as Sam Dash, Ken Starr, Bill Clinton, and Sadaam Husein putting my sermon topic, Truth and Consequences, into the headlines, I thought I might invite our attention a little closer to home. I thought I might play a bit with the way truth and fact sometimes collide, with the ways in which we are tempted to lie, to our children say, or to our parents or friends, for what may seem, may even be a higher good. This is actually quite a difficult subject. For instance, at a dinner party this week, twelve members of this congregation had almost twelve different opinions about how much we should tell our children about our own pasts. A complete recitation of all the facts might take them off the hook and weaken our authority. A revisionary take on our past -- I did it but I didn't like it -- is not likely to be very convincing. For instance, "I didn't inhale." Don't go there. On the other hand, a bald faced lie in service of a higher truth can set us up for an even more mighty fall.
Let me begin with a story from my own family. It is a story from long ago, but it may help frame this morning's tale.
Benjamin Church was a loyalist. He was loyal to the king. You will find his story in chapter two of every book devoted to the history of great American traitors. Benedict Arnold is chapter one. Benjamin Church, chapter two. This is not quite fair really, almost an insult to my family. Benjamin should have been given the first chapter. After all, he was a traitor long before Benedict Arnold.
Benjamin was a doctor, poet, philosopher, and newspaper editor. With Samuel Adams' circle as his closest friends in Boston, Benjamin was privy to the revolutionary councils from the very beginning. As tensions grew between the colonies and the crown, he boldly decided to hurl himself into the breach between his monarch and his friends.
Benjamin's first gambit was as a self-effacing as it proved to be ineffective. In his weekly paper, under his own name, he wrote half-articulate and unreasoned rabble-rousing articles calling for revolution. Then, under the pseudonym Tom Thumb, he wrote thoughtful, tightly reasoned replies arguing for restraint. All this did was to make him a hero among his friends. George Washington promoted him to surgeon general of the Revolutionary Army.
At this point, he took more drastic measures. He wrote a series of letters in code to the king, begging him to lift the hated tax. To deliver these letters safely he had to entrust them to someone in whom he had complete confidence. He chose his mistress. This was a mistake. If you get nothing else out of this sermon, as Bill Clinton could surely tell you, mistresses often turn out to be far more trouble than they're worth.
She was caught, of course. They took her to Samuel Adams' house where Adams interrogated her and decoded the letters. Benjamin was promptly arrested, tried and convicted by revolutionary tribunal. The problem was out nation was so new that we had no precedent to instruct us how to punish traitors. Not wanting blood on their hands, our patriotic forebears removed Benjamin Church under cover of darkness and put him on the first boat to Bermuda.
Loyalty is a tricky issue. Benjamin was loyal to his king even as he betrayed his friends. It's not likely, but had his messages gotten through, the cause of both might have been served. Let's say the king had relented and canceled the hated tax. Instead of being relegated to the second chapter in a minor book on traitors, Benjamin might have gone down in history as a patriot and hero who risked his life for a higher cause.
We have to be careful here. There is loyalty among thieves, even as there is loyalty among patriots. But who is a thief, and who is a patriot? Depending upon your perspective, the heroes and the scoundrels are interchangeable.
The problem with loyalty is the flip side, betrayal, always shadows it. Like duty (remember the Nuremburg trials), it is a dependent virtue. Not only are we judged by the nature of our loyalties, by the lies we tell in service of a higher truth, but also by their consequences.
I'm happy to report that Benjamin Church was loyal in the old-fashioned way. He paid for it. His ship sank on the way to Bermuda.
So, let me try to bring this home. You have just learned that one of your children's friends has been suspended from school for smoking marijuana. The time has come for a serious conversation about the dangers of taking drugs. One danger is obvious, and poses no real difficulty. Your child now knows that those who get caught taking drugs get suspended from school. But then he asks you, "Did you ever smoke marijuana when you were young." Here are some possible answers.
"No." This is true because you didn't. You are now excused from the rest of my sermon.
"No, never." Never is an indication that you are lying.
"Yes, but only once." Even if true, this answer sounds so implausible that your child will believe that you are lying.
"Yes, but I didn't like it." Ditto.
But let's try the truth -- I can only speak for myself here -- and see how that works.
"Yes, son. As a matter of fact I loved marijuana. I loved playing chess stoned, and listening to Mahler stoned, and writing poetry stoned (though I had to throw it all away, it was so bad). But I really don't think you should try marijuana, because it much more dangerous now than the marijuana I smoked. It can be laced with who knows what, heroin, cocaine, and is so much stronger that we're not really even talking about the same thing."
This by the way is true. In my case, all of it. But if I were my own son, I would take permission from part one and dismiss part two.
Which takes us back, as it were, to square one. Truth and consequences.
So what do we do? Let me begin with this. I have no inclination to tell my children all the things I did but shouldn't have done when I was young. After all, it might give them ideas. And besides, our children learn far more from their own mistakes, than they ever will from ours. On the other hand, I don't want to be a hypocrite. So I have to balance truth and fact. Truth and fact are different. Fact is truth devoid of meaning. Truth is fact shaped into something meaningful.
Try this example. Galen mentioned it to me, and I find it both troubling and useful. You are on your deathbed. Your husband of forty years is at your side. It has been a wonderful marriage, almost as good as a marriage could possibly be. But you have to tell him before you die one secret that you have kept for thirty years. For a brief time, you fell in lust with a coworker and had an affair. So right before your dying breath, you say, "Honey. I have to tell you this. Do you remember Jim? Thirty years ago. I had an affair with him. I just couldn't go to my grave without being honest with you about that."
This is not truth and consequences, it's facts and consequences. The truth is they had a wonderful marriage. The truth is also that, once she shares her long ago betrayal -- and I don't blame her for this, she's thinking about her own soul -- the fact of the betrayal may so intentionally and yet powerfully hurt her husband, that at the very end of their life together, the bond between them, broken only once before, is broken again.
Facts may be a science, but truth is an art. Let me put this in a different way. Honesty lets us come clean to others, truth lets us come closer to others. We consider their needs as well as our own. Our spouse's needs, our parent's needs, our children's needs. The woman on her deathbed was honest to a fault. She was a fact teller not a truth server. It would have been a little more complicated had her husband asked her right before she died if she had always been faithful to him. She then would either have had to lie and harm herself, or tell the truth and hurt him. With these as the alternatives, I strongly suggest that this question be struck from your list during your last hour on earth with a loved one.
But lets go back to our children, or our grandchildren. The subject is drugs. I'm not going to lie, but I have no problem with skipping a few facts. What I have done is tell, as best I can, the truth. I shape this so that it will have as much credibility and impact as possible. The truth has to do with both them and me, not just me alone. It is factual, but also laced with meaning. Take the meaning away, and the facts will only intrude, not serve.
So here I what I have said.
"When I was growing up, I never faced the temptation of trying cocaine or crack. But I did smoke marijuana quite a few times in college and enjoyed it. The problem was, I enjoyed it a little too much. My sophomore year was basically a waste. In part because of the seductions of marijuana, I spent most of my time skipping class and writing bad poetry. I didn't know how bad it was, of course, because marijuana affects one's judgment. Even the cover of a Skippy peanut butter jar seemed interesting when I was stoned.
"There was another problem. Whatever they say, once you try one drug, your resistance to the temptation to try another breaks down. So one day, I took LSD. Fortunately, that very day my mother called. Given that I couldn't hold up my own end of a rational conversation, she knew that something was wrong, and I confessed. Then she did a very good thing. She told me that if I didn't absolutely promise never to take LSD again, she would get on the plane, fly out to California, and withdrew me from school. Not only that, but she would also tell my father. That was the end of my drug career.
"Some of my friends were not so lucky. The fellow who graduated first in my high school class went to Harvard, and set up a little LSD lab in his room. During his sophomore year he licked his LSD covered fingers and lost his mind. He has been in a mental institution ever since. Other friends followed the pleasure of the moment until time ran out for them in different ways. They dropped out of school, and out of my world. I don't know what they are doing now. Some sure have recovered and rebounded. Others, just as surely, have not.
"The hardest thing about growing up is balancing freedom and responsibility. All of us do irresponsible things. I certainly did. You will too. But, with a little luck, and a little help from my parents and my friends, I managed, if somewhat slowly, to grow up.
"I wish I could say that I have completely grown up. I haven't. I still think thoughts I shouldn't think, and do things I shouldn't do. It's hard being human. None of us gets it completely right. Not you. Not me. Not even your mother.
"I also wish I could spare you the pain you will suffer when you do things that later you realize you shouldn't have done. I can't. But I can share my experience, at least what I learned from it. Maybe someday, when faced with a hard choice or temptation of your own, you will think twice about it. I hope so. Perhaps, in some strange way, my own experience will prove helpful."
I hope this has been helpful.
Amen. I love you, and God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls 1998.