reveries - truth

43. Mastered by Truth

"The act of knowing is an act of love."
"The known seeks to know me even as I seek to know it; such is the logic of love . . . I not only pursue but truth pursues me. I not only grasp truth but truth grasps me. I not only know truth but truth knows me. Ultimately, I don't not master truth but truth masters me." (Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known)

What would happen if each day I prepared to teach I remembered this?

What would happen if each day in class I reminded myself of this?

What would happen if each course I teach were designed with this in mind?

What would happen if each class session I taught I reminded myself and my students of this?

What would happen if I always read literature fully conscious of this?

Would my college have the truly "vibrant community" we say we're committed to in our Vision Statement if we embraced this notion of education as our communal pursuit of Truth--the Truth that (or who) pursues us even as we pursue it (Him)?

How does one assess things like "content knowledge" if we embrace the fact that "to know something is to have a living relationship with it", and that "the act of knowing is an act of love"?

→ 9:40 PM, Mar 4

Kierkegaard on truth
Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only
true explanation of it; the only true way of acquiring it. Truth is
not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts,
but a life. Truth is not a property of thought that guarantees
validity to thinking. No, truth in its most essential character
is the reduplication of truth within yourself, within me, within
him. Your life, my life, his life expresses the truth in the striving.
Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us truth must be
lived.

Therefore, truth is not a matter of knowing this or that but of
being in the truth. Despite all modern philosophy, there is an
infinite difference here, best seen in Christ’s response to Pilate.
Christ did not know the truth but was the truth. Not as if he did
not know what truth is, but when one is the truth and when the
requirement is to be in the truth, to merely “know” the truth is
insufficient – it is an untruth. For knowing the truth is something
that follows as a matter of course from being in the truth,
not the other way around. Nobody knows more of the truth
than what he is of the truth. To properly know the truth is to be
in the truth; it is to have the truth for one’s life. This always costs
a struggle. Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification. In
short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life. The Gospel
says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the
one whom he sent, the truth (Jn. 17:3). That is, I only know the
truth when it becomes a life in me.
- Soren Kierkegaard
→ 12:05 PM, Sep 18

trivial fact about me

I wear a plastic guard on my teeth ($400 something at your local dentist if you can imagine that) when I sleep because my dentist thinks I clench my teeth, cracking them. This little device, he says, is a “deprogrammer.” Jeanie has always made fun of me for sleeping with my mouth open. I’m content to live with these contradictory truths.

I’m reminded of cartoon figures who clench their teeth so fiercely in rage that they shatter in a heep on the ground.

→ 8:43 AM, Oct 10