Truth

Pontius Pilate infamously asked Jesus, "What is truth?" (John 18:38) and philosophers from Socrates through Kant to Erich Fromm have attempted to give their own answers. But I am coming to believe that the incessant exercise of the human power of reason actually takes us further from truth itself, as much as it may seek to know about it.

John Starke, in The Possibility of Prayer, writes:

Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus resisting the powerful and pompous and going to the outcast and the humble... If we want to experience what God does in us and around us, which is quiet and subtle, we must make ourselves low. Prayer is the regular practice of lowering ourselves to better views of his work... It's a strange irony that prayer is the strengthening of an inner muscle that does nothing more than boast in weakness [2 Corinthians 12:9]

Unless we can be still in prayer, and cease from our anxious reasoning, and surrender to God's presence in the space between one breath and another, one morsel of bread and the next crumb, the experience will slip past us, and the memory fail.

John Bellows wrote:

I know of no other way, in these deeper depths, of trusting in the name of the Lord, and staying upon God, than sinking into silence and nothingness before Him… So long as the enemy can keep us reasoning he can buffet us to and fro; but into the true solemn silence of the soul before God he cannot follow us.

In the true littleness of our silence truth for a moment lifts to us the mirror of God. "Faith", said Jennifer Kavanagh, "is not about certainty, but about trust." In our stillness, our unknowing, our very lowliness, is the very place Jacob found: "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven." (Genesis 28:17 NIV)