In With The Old.

Some of the biggest disappointments in my life have stemmed from the realization that something I thought new and cool and unexplored was, in reality, old hat. I remember, for example, the time I climbed Mt. Whitney with my boy scout troop. I returned to the pitiful elevation of 3,000 feet a hero, walking as tall as the mountain I had just scaled. After all, so few people had accomplished such a feat. I was like Emilia Earhart or Neil Armstrong. Yet when school started that September, I recall that during my first class, our new english teacher Mrs. Bowen had us play Classmate Bingo in order to better acquaint ourselves with each other. During the course of the game, Mrs. Bowen asked if anyone knew the tallest mountain in the contiguous 48 states. My hand shot up like a rocket and I exclaimed, "It's Mt. Whitney in California! I climbed it!"

"Me too," Mrs. Bowen replied in a heartbeat, "twice."

Suddenly my golden mountain lost its luster. It looked more like a mountain of lead now. I mean sure, I had climbed it... but who hadn't? Mt. Whitney, as I had just learned, was old news.

Now, as a 20-year-old white male living in America, there are certain thoughts and ideas I am exposed to on a regular basis. Yet the coolest and most alluring by far -- head and shoulders above Kanye West, MTV, and the partying scene -- is the idea of relative truth... The concept that Truth (note the capital T) is a fickle, tenuous, moving, amorphous concept whose definition invariably, by its nature, changes from person to person.

In short, Truth to one person is not always Truth to another.

This idea fascinated and enthralled me, as it does with millions of my peers. I mean, gone are the days where any shmuck on the street could spout off what Truth is. Truth is so much more complex than that, you see? Truth can't possibly exist within a single religion. Why, just look how many religions there are in the world! This concept, when I was first clued onto it in high school, was so... hip. It's what all the great thinkers of our time are soliciting. It is in movies, books, magazines, and TV shows. People eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Yet most promising of all, It makes our world safe, quiet, and happy. If the Truth confessed by an angry Christian and the Truth proclaimed by a fanatical Muslim are both true, then there's no reason to fight. What's true to you is awesome, and what's true to me is fantastic. There's no need for conflict in our utopia anymore.

As such, one of the most profound disappointments of my life came when I was listening to a message on the Gospel of John a while back. The pastor explained that Jesus had just been apprehended by the Jewish elite in the Garden of Gathsemane and beaten all night. The plotters decided that the best and most hands-free method of killing Jesus would be to send him before the cruel and unforgiving Pilate. All the Jews had to do was say that Jesus was leading an insurrection, and Pilate (who was in charge of brutally putting down any threats to Caesar,) would take care of the rest. Accordingly, the plotters hand Jesus over to be investigated.

While I was listening to the pastor read the discourse between Jesus and Pilate, an interesting few lines of dialogue caught my attention. Pilate asks Jesus if He is proclaiming to be a king (a direct violation of Roman law, as only Caesar was king.) Jesus replies, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." Pilate remarks, "What is truth?" and then leaves to go talk to the Jews.

What is truth? Pilate is asking that of Jesus. What is truth. Mrs. Bowen was telling me that she climbed Mt. Whitney twice as Pilate was asking Jesus that rhetorical question. And suddenly, this amazingly entrancing idea that Truth is in the eye of the beholder was loosing its charm. The concept that Truth is relative isn't new at all. It isn't the latest thing and it wasn't thought up by our clever little generation. Pilate was tracking with it in year 10. And here we are in year 2010 acting as if this is all the rage. It was at that moment that I saw this idea not as a great leap forward in human thinking but a step sideways in our search for answers. It isn't some intellectual progression of thought, it's a regression of mind back to archaic thinking.

I said that this was one of the biggest disappointments in my life. This is true because it had been something that I had poured my intellect into for years, dazzled by the "new" shine it emitted. Yet it was also one of the most freeing realizations as well. Now that relative Truth wasn't any more progressive in thought than the concept of absolute Truth, I was able to think through my own beliefs more clearly. I wasn't worried about sounding old-fashioned or out-of-date when I proposed that Truth is a set, definite thing.

The idea that Truth to you is true and Truth to me is also true was an idea Pilate had going through his head. It seemed to be Jesus who was suggesting the new way of thinking... The revolutionary way of thinking. This example serves as a microcosm to why I decided to follow Christ. I wasn't interested in keeping alive some ancient, outdated set of beliefs. I didn't want to become part of a worn-out tradition. Instead, the life and the teachings of Jesus appeared to me as a breath of fresh air from the cloying stench of pop culture. Jesus told me to share instead of horde, and I agreed that that was a better way to live. He asked me to respect others before I took the best for myself, and I agreed that that was a more mature method. He told me that Truth is out there, solid and unchanging, even though sometimes I have no idea how to decipher it, and I agreed that that was a more wise understanding of things.


Thanks for reading,

-Daniel K