A fundamentalist pastor in my past once quipped, “And the truth shall set you free…but first it will make you miserable.”   I still like that.  “Truth” is out there but we are so far removed from it and we carefully guard against its intrusiveness.  Hell, “Truth” when it visits just scares the hell out of us for it makes us aware of our finitude and our tendency to be utterly self-absorbed and smug.   W. H. Auden put it this way:

And truth met him,

And held out her hand;

But he clung in panic to his tall belief

And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

And, yes, I’m still “shrinking away” daily.  BUT, I do believe Truth has me….as it does us all…and it is patiently doing its work on me.  Though I don’t have “truth”, I do have confidence that “Truth” has me and has all of us.

And I conclude with the wisdom of Leonard Cohen:  Oh bless this continual stutter of the Word being made flesh.