Metanoia

Until truth gives light to a man's mind, his heart is immobilized more effectively than the feet of a man in the pitch blackness of a strange place. Unless the mind of a man is nourished on truth, his heart is shrunken and starved. If error, not truth, is the diet of the mind, then the heart gorges itself on poison and is doomed to bloated frustration and the writhings of despair. We can reach out only for what we know; if the light of knowledge be false, we can make nothing but missteps. Our hearts can be aflame only with the fuel offered by our minds. Nor can we change ourselves, adapting mind and heart to any light, to any diet; only truth is light for the eyes and the goal for the heart. We are real, we live in a world of real things, our hearts are not to be nourished on fantasies or nightmares but on realities.

Only our very being is more fundamental to us than truth. We must have truth; only then can we begin to live, only then can we rest in beauty's contemplation, and have our hearts first stirred then filled with good. It was the Word, the Wisdom of God, Who became man and lived amongst us, in order, as He Himself said, that men "might have the truth, and the truth might make them free." He was, He said, "the way, the truth, and the life." He lived for truth, and died rather than mouth the lie that would deny his divinity. Without truth, there is no way for a man's feet to walk, no light for his eyes to see, no goal for his living. He is a slave of the lie that has usurped the throne of truth. Perhaps truth has been denied him with ruthless malice, perhaps the denial came through a teacher's naive, wide-eyed, well meaning stupidity, perhaps it was the individual's own cowardly fear of his own humanity and it's demands for courageous living. Whatever the reason, culpable or not, malicious or well meant, the utter fundamental destruction of the lives of men is exactly the same. We must have truth.

God has said so little, that yet means so much for our living. To have said more would mean less of reverence by God for the splendor of His image in us. Our knowing and loving, He insists, must be our own; the truth ours because we have accepted it; the love ours because we have given it. We are made in His image. Our Maker will be the last to smudge that image in the name of security, or by way of easing the hazards of the nobility of man.

The great truths that must flood the mind of man with light are the limitless perfection of God and the perfectibility of man. The enticements that must captivate the heart of man are the divine goodness of God and man's gratuitously given capacity to share that divine life, to begin to possess that divine goodness even as he walks among the things of earth. The truths are not less certain because they are too clear for our eyes. The task before our heart is not to hold a fickle lover but to spend itself.

Without these truths, and the others that fill out the pattern of a man's days, we are underfed weaklings, starving waifs, paralyzed in our living not only by lack of strength but even more by lack of light. To live a man must move by the steps of his heart; and how can he move until he can see and be drawn by the beauty of Goodness and Truth?

My Way of Life
- Confraternity of the Precious Blood