“’What is truth?’ Pilate retorted.” (John18:38) This in response to Jesus’s assertion that he had come to testify to the truth and that those on the side of the truth listens to him. Having found no basis for the charges leveled against the Nazarene, Pilot’s question led him between a rock and a hard place: do what he knew to be the right thing and release the man, or succumb to the demands of the frenzied mob, all the while with the weight of Caesar’s judgement hanging over his head. Pilate found his truth and released Barabbas, condemning Jesus to death.
Pilate’s question is predicated on the assumption that we can know for sure what truth is. In other words, is there an absolute truth? In human terms, I think not. The little research I did turned up around a dozen theories that seek to define and explain “truth.” With names like “Correspondence theory,” “Coherence theory,” Constructivist theory,” “Pragmatic theory,” and “Performative theory,” is it no wonder that truth is so elusive? With its new-found freedom in the knowledge of good and evil, liberating us from the tyranny of God, we find ourselves mired in a swamp of truth.
Truth resides at our origin. Find our origin and we find truth. The myriad of philosophies and their accompanying theories testify to humankind’s lostness. Religions trace the many paths we have taken in search of truth. Secular humanism and science for many have replaced spiritual faith with their own brand of questing for truth. Step back and gaze on the wonderment that is humankind’s search for truth and you likely will witness the maelstrom of our longing to be reunited with it.
In my blog of July 20, 2018, I wrote, “Poetry comes from the deepest place within, that place where the origin was meant to reside.” Verse is the trail left behind that marks the path taken by the poet in their quest to find the origin. Urged on by an unquenchable thirst, the poet delves time and time again into that secreted place in hopes of coming face-to-face with the origin. Sometimes, they catch a glimpse of it or perhaps are even touched by it; but always they find some piece left behind from when humankind was united with the origin. The anthology of poems they create is a testimony to this endeavor and a chronicle of their evolution of understanding during this quest. As Marcus Aurelius Anderson stated in his book, The Gift of Adversity, “The truth is unchanging, but our understanding of it is ever evolving, because we are ever evolving.”(1)
A.E. Fonner
Truth resides at our origin. Find our origin and we find truth.
(1) Marcus Aurelius Anderson, The Gift of Adversity, (Lexington: Marcus Aurelius Anderson Publications, 2018), 170.
