Live not by lies
We learn that a young Hollywood TV star (of whom we’d never heard) has called the show in which he appears “filth,” & told his fans not to watch it. We suspect this was a poor career move, & are suitably impressed. The lad comes from the usual broken home, found drugs when his parents divorced, & has now found the Seventh Day Adventists, via televangelism. The trendline is looking up, & yet we fear for him, for he has chosen an heroic path for which he had no formation. And while the promises of Christ are true, always, the promises of televangelists are not so reliable. May God ready those who are not ready.
We live by lies, but we don’t have to. This item forwarded by an American reader, contains a further link to Solzhenitsyn’s immortal essay, spelling out what every Christian must do: Passively resist. This, as Solzhenitsyn said, is heroic enough. “The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.”
As a child, of “post-Christian” parents, we nevertheless benefited from a fine example. For our papa persistently lost good jobs, & we came sometimes very close to desperate poverty. But he lost them because he was an honest man. He absolutely refused to tell lies, to participate in lies, or by his lights to live any lie. He took the consequences & of course, so did we. Our mama sometimes wondered about her husband’s good judgement, why he couldn’t just make a “little” compromise sometimes, but her loyalty to him was unshakeable. She had after all married him, having declined to marry some “better prospects” (she was a red-haired beauty; she had lots of choice). She had done so because she had decided, in an inspired & “irresponsible” moment, “You live only once, & I will marry a good man.” She married him indeed in the chapel of a sanatorium, when his recovery from tuberculosis was uncertain, & his career prospects were nil. Christian or not, we came from a good family.
We mention this because the argument is constantly made, by perfectly conservative people, that a man’s first duty is to feed his children. Yes, but not by bread alone. Papa did what was necessary to keep us in food, in clothes, & under a roof, even when it involved personal humiliation. But he would not lie.
A rich Polish Jew we know, who survived the death camp as a child with his mother, by jumping off a train, told us the worst thing to leave your kids is money. Money comes & goes, he said with authority, for he had watched lots of it come & go. “You leave them an example or you’ve left them nothing.”
It is not true that we are powerless. It is not true that politics are the answer. It is not true that we can do nothing because we have failed. These are among the lies for our rejection. It is not even true that we need friends to persist, though friends are very helpful; for there are moments when the truth may cost you every friend, & perhaps even your family. (“Do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the world. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”)
This seems a hard way forward, but as Solzhenitsyn said, hard on the body. For the soul, he said, it is the only way forward, the only path clear. (“My way is easy, & my burden is light.”)
My Dad was that kind of man too, it cost him many jobs, and we had financial troubles growing up. But I am so glad he stood up for truth, he gave me so much more than money could have.
Thank you for this beautiful article.
The entire ethos of the liberal/left is a lie. They watch fanciful movies of themselves in their heads where they are the beautiful, caring and sharing heroes who will build heaven on earth.
The conservative/right folks on the other hand, watch in their heads fanciful movies of themselves where they are public benefactors, perpetually achieving success, building personal wealth and thereby avoiding all the unpleasantness that comes with being vulnerable.
Then, of course, there are those who exclusively watch in their heads only reality movies presented by God. They tend to be humble, holy, decent sorts who go to a heaven where few, unfortunately, are ever virtuous enough to join them.
When I went to college, Solzhenitsyn’s book “Warning to the West” was required reading in a polisci class I took. That was at a large state university. Recently, when I was teaching at a small liberal Protestant college in Pennsylvania, they refused to let me use an excerpt form this book, since it would be interpreted as critical of Obama. Oh, yes, and the President of said college was recently on the cover of Christianity Today. How the worl has changed!
My dady said to me: “If you tell the truth
you don’t have to remember a dam thing!!
These few words provided ever lasting
(well almost) 77 years of common sense.
And a great life so far.
Mr. Currie,
You said it! And the older we get, the more important to tell the truth, because we remember less and less anyway as we drift to that peaceful second childhood that is now recognized in less accurate medical terms.
Or we married types end up like our host here Mr. Warren once spoke of his own parents: “She can’t remember things that happened, and he remembers things that never happened.”
Very touching piece.
As per Don Currie’s comment above, if anyone thinks telling lies is easy, try being a novelist sometime. When you write fiction you have to keep looking back over what you have written to see if any of your characters have just contradicted something they previously said, or worse, done.
Fiction writers would make the best people to hire to be professional liars for government bodies or business enterprises. Trouble is, said fiction writers (if they are really good) could never be trusted not to deviate from the scripts handed them by those in charge.