Before I stumbled into graphic design—and later, as a novelist, learned to fabulate as a vocation—I was trained as a journalist. I was taught how to get the story and to how confirm the facts through interviews and research to get to the “truth” of the matter. I remember when it dawned on me the weight the of responsibility to get things right, or as right as humanly possible before deadline. I was sitting through a town hall meeting in a small community in Humboldt County, watching the buxom model’s swimsuit appear and disappear within the barrel of the floaty pen* I was using to take notes.
What should have been an obvious revelation struck me: whatever I wrote down would become the truth of what happened there, for better or worse. In the murky future, anyone looking up what was decided one torrentially rainy evening, would, with any luck, find a clipping from a defunct small paper relating events as I understood them, maybe not one hundred percent as they were, but damned close. Like Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker at the close of Amazing Fantasy #15 way back in 1962, “With great power comes great responsibility;” or, in my case, “With a nickel a word and the backing of likewise exhausted and impoverished cohorts comes… well, we can always print a retraction.”
In the middle of the COVID pandemic, I watched the scientific process become a scapegoat for those unfamiliar with how it works. Official recommendations shifted as more information was received, opening the door to recriminations of malfeasance. The flames of mistrust were fanned by an overheated television media environment and accusations of purposefully misleading the public were ultimately flung in the wrong direction. Science demands that researchers test and retest their theories, and if new conclusions are made after new data is accumulated, the “truth” shifts. Does this make earlier conclusions any less true for the time they were made? The truth is something to be worked toward, it very rarely falls unbidden into one’s lap.
Which brings us back to the Gospels. Are we to take the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—whomever they were written by, or when—as the truth? I think that you do have to work with what you have. If new writings from the time of Jesus were discovered, and stranger things have happened, we should be willing to take them under proper consideration. Would any newly discovered Judean field reports make the existing books any less true? That is an interesting question. At this point, these testimonies, however collected, have something beyond mere truth, they have true power.
Scientist, biomedical-inventor, and mystic, Itzhak Bentov, wrote about consciousness as a field of energy and how the psychic focus of the faithful has a way of imbuing both the animate and inanimate with what—and I’m throwing this in here—Polynesian cultures refer to as “mana,” a supernatural force that permeates the entire universe. Many of the Indigenous tribes of the American continent likewise believe in an invisible force that pervades everything.
Imagine how much mana the Gospels—or the Torah, or the Quran, or any number of teachings with uncountable adherents—have accumulated throughout the millennia. Does this make them The Truth, capital Ts? It certainly does to their various believers, but more generally it makes them all a force to be reckoned with, bending reality toward themselves like leather-bound neutron stars. There can be more than one truth in our many-faceted diamond matrix of reality. It all depends on where you are coming from.
*Floaty pens were fun, but they wrote like crap.
Román Leão 