28 March 2018
Wednesday of Holy Week
When you realize that someone has been lying to you, then you have some problems. Can this person’s behavior be changed? How are you to understand statements from this person: past, present and future? And yet, when it is you who are the one telling the lies, then there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem at all. On the contrary, at that time it seems like the lies, if anything, are the solutions to the problems.
We all have some schizophrenia about lying. We don’t want the lie, except that we also do want the lie. On the contrary, what we really want is the truth, except that we also don’t really want the truth. To be saved from this condition, we need more than help. We need salvation from God. “The Lord GOD has given me a well-trained tongue, …Morning after morning he opens my ear that I may hear” (Is 50:4). We need God’s help to express the truth, whether to ourselves or to others. Scripture calls this the well-trained tongue. We need God’s help to perceive the truth. Scripture calls this the ear that hears.
The daily practices of the Church include methods meant to sharpen our appreciation for the truth, such as mass and vespers and lauds. These liturgies include great truths that are both spoken and heard, training both the tongue and the ear.
We may participate in these liturgies even if we are deceitful, even if we are caught up in webs of lies, even if we are not paying any attention. These liturgies are means for us to ask God to bless what is good and true in us and to purge from us what is false and evil. God alone has the power to save us.