I'm not sure how to introduce this post in a manner that effectively communicates what I want it to communicate so bear with me as I trudge along anyway.
Frank Weathers has two interesting and related posts up... one two days ago and the other yesterday that will serve as a backdrop to where I'm going next.
They're both about the HHS Mandate and the need, from Frank's perspective and one I agree with, for the Archdiocese of New York, led by Cardinal Timothy Dolan who I respect, to come clean about allegations being made by the New York Times that strongly suggests Cardinal Dolan is opposing something now that he's in essence been doing for quite some time. Please see the two posts if you're lacking information about any of it.
What I found fascinating is something Frank found in a book by Thomas Merton called No Man is an Island on truth and its complexity:
Truthfulness, sincerity, and fidelity are close kindred. Sincerity is fidelity to the truth. Fidelity is an
effective truthfulness in our promises and resolutions. An inviolate truthfulness makes us faithful to ourselves and to God and to the reality around us: and therefore it makes us perfectly sincere.
Sincerity in the fullest sense must be more than a temperamental disposition to be frank. It is a simplicity of spirit which is preserved by the will to be true. It implies an obligation to manifest the truth and to defend it. And this in turn recognizes that we are free to respect the truth or not to respect it, and the the truth is to some extent at our own mercy. But this is a terrible responsibility, since in defiling the truth we defile our own souls.
Truth is the life of our intelligence. The mind does not fully live unless it thinks straight. And if the mind does not see what it is doing, how can the will make good use of its freedom? But since our freedom is, in fact, immersed in a supernatural order, and tends to a supernatural end that it cannot even know by natural means, the full life of the soul must be a light and strength which are infused into it supernaturally by God. This is the life of sanctifying grace, together with the infused virtues of faith, hope, charity, and all the rest.
Sincerity in the fullest sense is a divine gift, a clarity of spirit that comes only with grace. Unless we are made “new men,” created according to God “in justice and the holiness of truth,” we cannot avoid some of the lying and double dealing which have become instinctive in our natures, corrupted, as St. Paul says, “according to the desire of error.” (Eph. 4:22)
One of the effects of original sin is an intuitive prejudice in favor of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition, and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
The sincere man, therefore, is one who has the grace to know that he may be instinctively insincere, and that even his natural sincerity may become a camouflage for irresponsibility and moral cowardice: as if it were enough to recognize the truth, and do nothing about it!
How is it that our comfortable society has lost its sense of the value off truthfulness? Life has become so easy that we think we can get along without telling the truth. A liar no longer needs to feel that his lies may involve him in starvation. If living were a little more precarious, and if a person who could not be trusted found it more difficult to get along with other men, we would not deceive ourselves and one another so carelessly.
But the whole world has learned to deride veracity or to ignore it. Half the civilized world makes a living by telling lies. Advertising, propaganda, and all the other forms of publicity that have taken the place of truth have taught men to take it for granted that they can tell other people whatever they like provided that it sounds plausible and evokes a kind of shallow emotional response.
Americans have always felt that they were protected against the advertising business by their own sophistication. If we only knew how naive our sophistication really is! It protects us against nothing. We love the things we pretend to laugh at. We would rather buy a bad toothpaste that is well advertised than a good one that is not advertised at all. Most Americans wouldn’t be seen dead in a car their neighbors had never heard of.
Sincerity becomes impossible in a world that is ruled by a falsity that it thinks it is clever enough to detect. Propaganda is constantly held up to contempt, but in contemning it we come to love it after all. In the end we will not be able to get along without it.
This duplicity is one of the great characteristics of a state of sin, in which a person is held captive by love for what he knows he ought to hate.
effective truthfulness in our promises and resolutions. An inviolate truthfulness makes us faithful to ourselves and to God and to the reality around us: and therefore it makes us perfectly sincere.If this doesn't impact you, might I ask you to read it again?
This blog is called Brutally Honest largely because I'm someone who has, for quite some time, dare I say most of my life, been in trouble for my tendency to be frank, something I see to be virtuous and necessary in this day where duplicity seems to be the trait du jour.
But Merton has clearly called me out in that my honesty, my frankness, my bluntness, all in pursuit of what I consider to be virtue, might in fact, by instinct, be much less that truthful.
I was, I am, gobsmacked at the moment by the revelation.
It's something I need to seriously chew on and digest.
For my soul's sake.
Maybe you do as well.
Carry on.
