Parable of the Igloo

Way back when in high school, I remember going through an existential crisis. My young life's world view had been built around a self-imposed rigidly religious point of view. I was a crazy little conservative Christian up until my freshman year until thing started to fall apart. I was starting to see contradictions pop up that could no longer be brushed underneath the rug. The presence of suffering, the generosity of a God that would condemn good people just for being born in a place without Christian thought, the 'sinfulness' of the fiery urges in myself that seemed both natural and good.

These shadows of doubt finally reached critical mass and led to a meltdown in my beliefs. While I still sought to be a good Christian go to church or attend FCA meetings, it didn't seem enough to mend the hole in my spiritual foundation. The fact that there may be untruths built within that foundation was enough to make the structure fall.

For the longest time, this was the key to my struggles: What is truth? I had based my perceptions of truth on things I had heard as a child that all seemed to agree with each other. Movies and cartoons of biblical happenings made things seem concrete, that all of the stories of the bible had 'happened' and were a part of my reality. When things started to feel wonky to me, I came to resent those movies. They seemed a bit like propaganda rather than teachings. It felt like I had been tricked into believing things.

I've since gotten over such things. I see it as a bit like Santa Claus. I was crestfallen when I found out Santa wasn't real and resentful that I had been lied to. Of course, the lie wasn't insidious and was meant to give me extra pleasure Christmas morning and to give me the Santa figure as an example of generosity. In the same way, my young mind wouldn't have grasped some good teachings about doing unto others if Cartoon Jesus hadn't told me so.

Unfortunately this realization didn't come until much further down the road, and for a long time I fretted over my spiritual uncertainty. It took me years to regain my footing, but by my senior year of high school I had begun to see the meltdown as a positive thing. I would rather live in an uncertain world than one built on the wrong things, built on un-truths.

In my college entrance letter I wrote that year, I mentioned my story and the allegory of the collapse of my spiritual foundation that I mentioned earlier. I remember writing about how I saw my college experience as a time to rebuild that tower on a more solid foundation. This one would be built by me, with blocks of truth chosen by me and not imparted from others.

This allegory has come back to me recently as also faulty. The thing I have discovered since then is that truth is not a solid mass. I think I had unconsciously based the creation of this allegory on the parable of the man who built his house on a rock.

For the unacquainted, two men were building their houses. One chose to build his house upon the sand and another upon a rock. When the floods came, the man who built his house upon the sand had his house swept away while the man who built his house on the rock held tight.

This, as I interpret it now, shows that the man whose life was built on fleeting, meaningless things (money, fame, power, e.g) would be left in ruin during bad times. The man whose life was built on more enduring things (generosity, self-improvement, enlightenment, e.g.) would not be ruined by life's troubles.

At the time of my creation of the 'spiritual foundation' allegory, though, I interpreted the sand and rock as untruth and truth, respectively. I have since, this morning to be precise, come up with a second parable that fits better with my current ideas on truth. Submitted for your approval, the Parable of the Igloo...

"There once were two men who made their homes out of ice. Let's say they lived during the ice age on a glacier, so ice was the prime building material. Ice had always been ice and seemed to forever continue to be ice: solid, cold, and clear. They stacked their blocks of ice nicely, built two ice castles, and felt satisfied with their creation.

Unfortunately, they lived at the very end of the ice age, and soon the temperature rose. The building blocks that had always been solid now began to melt.

One man saw the ice as he had always seen it, as a solid and ever-enduring. As his house began to collapse, he sought vainly to stack even more blocks of ice on top of his melting creation. This would work at night, when it was cold enough to remain solid and stack more, but as the day rose his house would again slowly drip into oblivion.

The second man looked closely at the ice and saw that it was many things. In the cold, the ice was solid, in the morning warmth the ice could become liquid water, and in the afternoon heat some liquid water would rise as a vapor. His response was not to despair at his melting house but to glory in the manifold nature of H2O and learn to swim in what was now a river of his old home. In that water her floated downstream to a better place to build a new home."

It's not a perfect fit, it's got some holes, but I think it's better than my solid foundation allegory for truth. Ultimately, truth is also many things. It is certainly a matter of perception, and multiple things may be true about something at the same time due to this.

A short example is a story I heard not too long ago on the radio. A boy with darkish skin was born two two white parents with light skin color.

• To the boy, who his mother and father were wasn't in question. Two people raised him and they were his mom and dad-- that was his truth.

• To the father, the phenomenon seemed odd but explainable; he had Sicilian roots, so the dark skin must have skipped a generation-- that was his truth.

• To the mother, she knew that when she had conceived her son she was sleeping with two men, one black and one white. She didn't know who the father was until the baby was born and she was already married to the white gentleman. Ultimately she was unwilling to destroy her marriage to pursue the question, which is understandable. The biological father could have been the black man's or her now-husband's, if his Sicilian theory was right--both were her truths.
  

• The scientific truth is that the boys biological father was, in fact, the black gentleman-- a truth that didn't come out until the boy sought out the answer well into his adulthood.
  

The odd thing was that once he did find out, he wasn't particularly bothered by it. He had reached a stage in his life that everyone's truth was equally valid and no one could be blamed. He still loved his mother and non-biological father, he just now had another person he was connected to. In his head, somehow, both truths just 'fit'.

This plurality is much more complex and sometimes hard to wrap your mind around, but ultimately fits our universe pretty well. We live in a complex universe, and while some things are inherently true (the scientific answer of the boy's genetics) other things are a little more tricky (who is his 'father').

A last way that I've discovered of looking at truth as manifold comes to play in matters of explaining the mysterious. My example comes from an interview I heard with an cosmologist, one who studies the organization of the universe. This is a tough topic to postulate on, since the universe is so big and we still don't have the technology to analyze it completely. Just the same, theorists are not shy in throwing out possible explanations...

Our universe is ever expanding. Our universe will get to some point of expansion and the return to itself in a cycle of big-bang/big-crunch. Our universe is doughnut shaped. Our universe is the overlap of two branes of whatever, and other universes occur in other overlaps.

The list goes on, and unfortunately it is very hard to find the true jewel of truth in this mystery. It's impossible to ever get outside our universe and look in to see what it really is. It may be one of those things that we just never know, or maybe it isn't. I don't know.

As the cosmologist was listing off these possibilities, the interviewer stopped him and asked him, "Doesn't it excite you that in creating an explanation, you are giving something that is equally as true as these others?" The cosmologist chuckled and replied, "Yes, but it's also equally as untrue."

In matters of tackling the great mysteries of this existence, it's important to have that mix of confidence and humility. What I may believe is valid, but it may very well be invalid too. In this way, you can't be too literal in what you believe or judgmental about how people find meaning in the mysterious.

These are just a few ponderings I've been stewing on recently. Nothing to do with my AmeriCorps experience, but something I wanted to get out there.