1.
I would like to thank all of you who have prayed for me. I’m lousy at praying, but I do pray for my benefactors, and that would be you. Because your work has been, thus far, very effective. I would like to double-thank those who have been patient in practical matters as my attendance at this or that has been spotty.
2.
Tuesday morning I learned a friend had been deceiving me for some time. Not lying, not outright. She’d made a (perfectly legitimate) decision that she knew I wouldn’t like. She put off telling me, presumably in the hopes it would simply never become an issue. That I wouldn’t, in the end, need to know after all.
2468 Truth as uprightness in human action and speech is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy.
What began as prudence and discretion, looking for the right moment to share the news I needed to know, turned into a lack of candor as the months dragged out. Sometimes I worry about doing the same thing. Is there something I should be saying, and haven’t? It is easy enough to be misunderstood. It is possible to deceive without intending to, without any sin at all.
3.
2469 “Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another.”262 The virtue of truth gives another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty and discretion. In justice, “as a matter of honor, one man owes it to another to manifest the truth.”263
4.
I should note here that my own fault runs more often the other way — I had already strained our relationship by being quite blunt in a matter where I felt absolute candor trumped sparing of feelings. There are long passages in the catechism about the importance of not saying too much. I stink at that.
Even when I am trying to be prudent, to actually shut up and think for a change, there’s always the wondering. Does someone truly need to know this thing I know? Will I be more guilty for speaking, or for not?
5.
2483 Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth. By injuring man’s relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.
So I was composing this post in my head this morning before mass. After, I had the privilege of being outright lied to, in a mortal-sin kind of way, if my fact-checking turns out to be correct. (Completely different scenario, different people.) It was . . . very strange.
But it happens. People do evil things. People who are kind and generous and pious sometimes do evil things.
6.
Why do Mark Shea and Chris Tollefsen get told off every time they point out lying is wrong? I think it’s because we’re so used to it.*
We have a cultural fear of the truth. Faced with a difficult thing to say about even the most trivial matter, we tend to look for away to skirt the truth. How can I get my girlfriend to purchase a different outfit, without telling her this one she loves makes her look awful / is terribly tacky / is exactly the one I’m wearing to the same event?
We are so used to thinking of deceit as necessary for police work, or some similar situation, that it is unimaginable, truly unthinkable, that it might, possibly, be the wrong thing to do. We so fear harming innocent children or the frail elderly with difficult facts, that I’ve been accused of great cruelty for suggesting that such people can, in fact, be given difficult but necessary news in some sensitive but honest way.
7.
And it cannot be denied: the moral life is not the easier life. The freedom truth brings is bought at a cost. A willingness to risk not nabbing the criminal, of making the little girl cry for the rest of her life, of causing grandma’s heart to fail. Or a boycott by angry customers. Or martyrdom.
Mostly, doing what is right is also doing what feels better. What, in the end, makes like easier. Our conscience is clear, our friendships are solid, people want to work with and help others they know to be decent, honest folk. Mostly.
Not always.
Don’t forget to pray for Allie Hathaway, then go read more takes at the home of our lovely hostess Jen F. at ConversionDiary.com.
*Not telling them off. Lying. Though we’re also getting used to telling them off. Curiously, my Mark Shea link has no negative comments on it, at this writing.
Loving this post (in a “im glad you’re my friend kind of way”)… I found it really difficult to not just say the truth but also accept it… I had to teach myself to speak the truth and how to walk that fine line. My parents forgot how to deal with any of this especially during their divorce and sadly still to this day. The military helped me some in that it gave me reasons to value the truth. I did not want to be between a rock and a hard place because I didn’t speak up or completely tell the truth. This was particularly difficult to navigate in the intelligence world and also with people who thought their rank meant they didn’t have to follow the rules.
What I don’t get is when people ask for your honest opinion and then get upset because you answered them honestly just as they asked.
But there are times I don’t speak the truth… especially to people I don’t know and/or can trust. For example, if a random person (I may put coworkers in this group too) is making general conversation like “Hi, how are you?” I will give them a different answer than I will a trusted friend. “Im good” as a response usually is the truth but its not ALL the truth… because strangers aren’t really interested in the details and 99.999999% they are just trying to make polite conversation.
Sandra, thank you for sharing that! One thing I’d say, though, is to distinguish between social conventions vs. not telling the truth. “Fine, thank you,” is a social convention that means, “Well enough that I’m not bursting into tears or punching you in the face, thanks for asking.” And also mentioned here and elsewhere, “need to know” is a legitimate criteria for whether to share information. There’s nothing wrong with failing to answer a question that isn’t anyone’s business.
–> Where I run into trouble, is the, what is so-and-so’s business, and what isn’t? I err on the side of too conversational, mostly. But sometimes on the side of not speaking up.
I know a couple people have had trouble commenting, and I’m not sure what’s going on with WP. In the meanttime, Julie Davis from Happy Catholic e-mailed me with this comment:
We do have a cultural fear of truth, but what really struck me, reading this, is that we have a ”genetic” fear of truth … from the moment of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, they began hiding and lying to avoid admitting the choice they made that was not God’s will for them. So lying runs deep, deep, deep in our foundations. It is part of that invisible war between evil and good, which can strain even the best of us to our limit … and beyond.
Thank goodness for the Church … to help us keep our eye on ourselves. Nothing profound, but that is what bounced through my mind. I am going to be contemplating this post … thank you for sharing it with us.
Eve: “Oh, yeah… sorry about that, God. But look! Now I have these beautiful fig leaves. And in the fall I can get a fall-colored one! And won’t I look lovely? Look at how much fun I’ll have cover… I mean decorating myself. Surely the benefits of my mistake make up for the rest of it. We’ll just forget it ever happened.”
Yep.