Living a lie

I’m moving house this week so have rushed this post a bit, but I trust in my haste I have not sworn falsely.

The eighth commandment, as found in the old testament of the Bible-

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.”

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church points out, this teaching is relative and deepened by the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five:

“It was said to the men of old, “You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.”

This commandment helps us to respect others by being honest about them and not saying things about them which are not true. In a deeper way it helps us to live in the truth and respect the truth in every way in our lives.

When I was twenty-one I started to try in earnest to live the most honest life I could, and this desire and effort on my part meant looking at myself honestly, including all the parts of me that were false. At twenty-one that was a lot, even physically when I looked in the mirror at the bleach blonde hair and little dress I felt like a complete fraud. 

I could say I was living a lie, in a sense, but it’s not so much that I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t trying to be something I was not, but I felt incapable of living a good life in accordance with my true self and had become a slave to bad habits and negative lies I believed about life and humanity.

I had been quite introspective as a teenager and had some inherent sense of who I was, but felt restless. Time that wasn’t filled with activity had to be devoted to seeking or smoking drugs. I even consciously acknowledged that I had to get out of my own head so I didn’t have to face what was inside it.

Thank God He used what was to follow to give me the opportunity to change.

I’d say one thing which was fundamental to change was realising that truth is more certain than I thought; I would have thought truth was more open to interpretation than it reasonably can be in reality.

Realising that truth can be certain means that we can discover it, and this inevitably means we also see ourselves in a more realistic light. Which is sometimes difficult or painful, but also leads to a more authentic, honest life.

It is helpful to realise that truth being relative is a logical fallacy, because then the search for truth can be made more confidently. If we think there might be an infinite number of possible realities then we can never have hope of knowing what is certain. The search for truth is then as meaningless as a recreational activity because it is just theoretical speculation, rather than an actual intellectual pursuit.

If truth is relative, then it is a certain truth that truth is relative. So, that in itself means that truth cannot be relative, because it is certainly true and not debatable that truth is relative. It makes no sense.

For much of my life I believed that truth is relative and yet refused to believe anything as being true that did not rely on empirical evidence. How could anything be proved, even empirically, if truth is relative? Nothing could be proved or certainly known.

We can change things about ourselves and the world too, all things are not fixed in stone; we can have different opinions or interpretations of things, but things also are a certain way too, and there are certain truths which we can seek and know.

My search for truth started originally when I was young but got interrupted when my ignorance and loneliness led to feckless hedonism in my mid-teens.

When I stopped hiding and started searching again (at twenty-one) I tried to improve my self-knowledge through introspection but also read things around psychology, history, philosophy, religion etc.

My search for the truth and desire for self-improvement brought me to the Catholic Church and I have a close friendship with Jesus Christ because of what I am willing to suffer to live an authentic, honest life.

I am more similar to how I was aged fifteen than I was in my early twenties. I may have dipped into the Bible at times but between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three I never opened the Bible with a desire to seek the truth. In fact I probably thought I knew better because I had read it before… as though that is proof that it isn’t true.

I said in my first blog post that my search for the truth became seeking a person, Jesus. It is is because I seek Him that I can be myself.

My identity as an Atheist was a false understanding of myself because God exists. It is possible to be an Atheist intellectually if you don’t think God exists; because of the lack of faith that is authentic, but it is always an ego thing because it is certain God exists. Therefore, all Atheists are living a lie, they just believe the lie.

If we don’t know the truth, then we cannot be honest. This is why I need God to be my authentic self, because through my relationship with His son I know the truth and so can be who I truly am.

Jesus gives me courage to be disliked, without disliking myself because of what others think of me. He helps me love people who dislike or mistreat me.

He helps me to love and appreciate others who I think are better than me, and not to feel bad about myself if I feel I am not good enough.

He helps to humble me and see others as better than myself if I wrongly believe I am better than others.

He takes what is good in me and makes it better, He helps me to overcome the things in myself which are not good, which I cannot change by my own efforts.

He helps me to remain faithful to God by avoiding sin and forgiving me when I sin.

Sin is an unpopular word, it upsets people. It upsets people who don’t believe it exists more than it upsets Christians because we know God is love and forgives us for our sins through our relationship with Him and the Sacraments.

Another way we refer to sin is bondage, as in sin is like a trap. We get trapped when we sin, even if we only do it once, but when it is a habit and so much of a habit that it’s like a part of our personality it becomes even more of a trap.

Jesus says:

“I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

I am free through my relationship with truth, Jesus. I can now live an authentic life by following His way, and sharing in His life.

I believed the lies about myself and others for most of my life, that we are not worthy of love. That people are rubbish.

I believed the lie that God doesn’t exist or care about us. That people who believe in God need to because of emotional and intellectual immaturity, or because of strong cultural influences.

I believed the lie that sin doesn’t exist, so I couldn’t be set free from the trap and healed.

I came to know Jesus, even as an unbaptised atheist, firstly by reading the Bible.

“Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

I did not believe the words of the Bible straight away, but I returned to it. I understand much more of the Bible now because of my union with Jesus Christ in prayer and through the sacraments.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

True to His word, fourteen years after I first tried to seek understanding by reading the Bible, I did see that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life.

If I had been baptised as an infant, raised in the faith, received the sacraments etc. then I could have had the faith, hope and love I experience now in my authentic life with Christ, but like so many my parents didn’t have the life themselves to pass on to me.

That is why I am so grateful to God that I have failed and suffered in my life, because if I hadn’t then I would not have needed to seek the truth nor recognised my need to change for the better.

I hope my fellow truth seekers will also be set free by the life that Jesus invites us to share in.