Surrounded By So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
November 11 2007
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

This all started when I picked up a book at the free book store, next to the dump, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Permit me an immediate detour, a time to wax rhapsodic about that place. It's just a shed, and it is often crowded on a Saturday, when all kinds of people who could afford to buy books go there to either deposit a few bound leaves of someone's truth or to pick some up. It is a place of a little grace, a little light, a little truth -- and you don't have to pay for any of it.

This little shed is a good enough metaphor for this sermon. Today I will argue that the truth is free and small, like a used-book shed in a little town.

So one day this summer I picked up a book that really bothered me. It's not even really a book, just a pamphlet, called Free Radical: A Reconsideration of the Good Death of Scott Nearing. It is a little book with a big idea. Basically Ellen LaConte, who wrote the book, was a good friend of the Nearings. She writes a loving exposé of how Scott Nearing, co-author of Living the Good Life, and Helen, his wife, fabricated stories about how he died. The Nearings were close friends of mine, in the literary sense. Every time I decided I couldn't manage civilization any more, I would reread their great 1960's book about how to live off the grid, in Maine, self-sufficiently and radically.

Living the Good Life lasted for decades as the supreme testimony to turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, without the benefit of bad drugs, using an extreme All-American individuality and vegetarianism.

La Conte's pamphlet is a loving and respectful account of how Scott went into a nursing home for the last period of his life, and how Helen, his spouse, lied about it. She couldn't face the truth that her hero was no longer self-sufficient, especially after he had swore that he would never go into a medical institution, and hadn't for most of his life. She couldn't face the truth that she couldn't care for him at her advanced age. She couldn't face the truth that she had full-time, live-in help. So she made up a story. Ellen, their mentor, friend, and final caretaker, tells the story of the lie. She tells the story with a point of view, which is my message for today.

Most of us catch someone in a lie and get angry and hurt and despondent. "You lied," we will shout. Lies hurt. Secrets hurt. Most people can take the news that their partner is having an affair better than they can take the truth of an intimate having covered up the story.

La Conte finds a reserve respect inside her exposure. She finds a way to understand why Helen had to lie about Scott. To not lie about Scott's final dependency was to call the whole scaffolding of self-sufficiency into question. Helen couldn't call it all into question, she couldn't imagine that it was all a lie, so she kept its truth going, despite the fact that reality had little to do with the truth. Nor did a final dependency question the whole theory of self-sufficiency. But Helen couldn't see that. Note my words. Reality. Fact. Truth. Helen kept the truth of self-sufficiency going despite the facts. Reality was the truth that she had to give lie to. She didn't know how to do anything else.

What La Conte does is to have compassion for Helen and Scott's situation. Like a good novelist, she shows how the decision got made. And like a good philosopher, she makes meaning of it:

What we can learn from Helen's mistaken sense that she needed to be perfect is that the truth IS perfect. Leave it alone. Things as they are, when we understand them for what they are, are perfect. It is our perception of them, our attitude towards them, that often needs revision… needing help is not a sign of weakness, for example.

Note the matter of what trumps truth, which is love. "Helen's love of Scott and then Scott-perfected, was greater than her love of truth." She also points out just how much Americans love to spot clay feet: we love our heroes, but feel better about ourselves if we can prove that they, too, have clay feet. La Conte resists that direction with great beauty and grace.

This extraordinary little narrative of 26 pages, which I found for free at the dump, does a complicated narrative real justice. She never for a minute dismisses her pain, disillusion, near despair at discovering the lie. She makes Helen's self-protecting abandonment of the truth a true grief and pain to her. And then she overcomes it with love. I used to know a woman who always said, "Struck down nine times, get up the tenth." I want to set up a similar system of weights here. Let's say that La Conte's pain at Helen's self-deception and social deception was an easy 900 pounds. She writes to the 900 pounds with an equivalency of compassion and grace, that is at least 901 pounds light or heavy, depending on your perspective. She matches love to truth, without dismissing either.

Compassion does not rival truth as a value, it overcomes it. When we see lies, we do not go round them. We overcome them with a larger force, what Gandhi would call Satyagraha, or truth-force. And what is this truth-force? It is love and compassion, unmerited, not paid for, free and alive in the world. We do not imagine that hate is small so much as know that love is large.

Listen now to Paul speaking to the Hebrews, a people without a nation and in need of both lies and compassion to sustain themselves. He says, "We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses!" The previous two chapters have been naming all the Hebrew Greats: Abraham, and all their own Nearings. When I hear about the cloud of witnesses, I immediately go ballistic. You bet it is a cloud! Some of those guys were real clowns. Very few of them were women. They were not at all clear, in any way. They were not perfect. They made mistakes. They were not true to the faith they knew. Which is why Paul hauls in the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, Jesus, advocating a compassion for the cloud. This to me is the key line of the passage, "For the sake of the joy that was set before us, let us carry on."

There is joy ahead of us if we can see the joy. And Jesus is represented as the compassion that lets us see the joy. La Conte got it. She plowed through the cloud and complexity of her witnesses and arrived at truth, well told. She then surpassed that truth with compassion, which led her to joy.

What does this formula of truth needing compassion to lend us joy mean? It means that we can acknowledge that there is a whole lot of lying going on. Permit me to begin with Santa Claus, which none less than Bruno Bettelheim advocates as a useful fiction for children's lives. Others agree. Holly Lebowitz Rossi writes in In Character magazine (Spring, 2007) that the Santa myth helps kids "grow into adults with a more nuanced appreciation for the distinct concepts of faith, belief, and truth." Furthermore, 91% of teens in a UC Berkeley study believe that lying is "generally unacceptable." Given a specific situation, however, many could justify lying to their parents by a process of moral reasoning.¹ (I am sure none of you ever lied to your parents.) And you all know the Greeks' question here: is it OK to lie if no one gets hurt? Or to make someone happy? Or to keep the peace? As Terry Gross said to Katha Pollitt in an interview this week, "Katha, when you gained those 25 pounds did you really feel OK about it? Or did you just think you should feel OK and act like you did?" In other words, do we say mostly what we really think and feel, or do we say mostly what we think we are supposed to think and feel?

We are surrounded by a great cloud of internal and external witnesses. I was with a 75-year-old friend in Miami this week who refused to eat the pasta with red sauce on the grounds that he was wearing a white linen shirt; we were going to a literary party at the Miami Book Fair (where yes, in truth, I spoke -- Jung says we smuggle our biographies into everything and we do). So he had the white sauce. And yup, he smudged his shirt. Should I have told him? As we went into the party? Of course not. Truth is not a master, it is a servant. During this conversation, I told him something about somebody that I probably shouldn't have told him, but I did it for a wide variety of generally moral reasons. He was the one person I knew, being a Midwesterner at heart, who could help this other Midwesterner. It's a long story. So I got him to promise confidence, and he did with these words: "It's in the vault."

Yup. The Vault. Close to the heart. Also a place where we put things that are dead. When the truth about who we are goes into the vault, it comes out as fiction. Sometimes useful fiction. Even moral fiction. But dead truth. Our goal is to keep truth alive and vital and spoken and out. I hate arrogant lines, like "let's go out and speak truth to power," or Keats's "Truth is beauty and beauty is truth." Both are too big for me. They remind me of Barnes and Noble, rather than my book shed. So how about a miniaturist's approach to a small statement about truth? We should speak as much truth as we can bear. As much truth as is possible. As much truth as the great cloud of witnesses did.

There are so many witnesses, so many clouds, so many skies-it is hard to know where to begin. When we lie, we mostly lie to ourselves. It is the truth about ourselves, around ourselves, near ourselves, that we just can't stand. Coming out of the closet comes to mind. There are often extraordinary penalties for telling the truth. People won't like you. They will be outed to their own truth and they may not be ready for that. A lot of times we justify what we don't say with these amazing lying words: "She wouldn't be able to stand knowing that." What we really mean is, "I wouldn't be able to stand her not standing that, so let's leave well enough alone."

I just noticed that Target is using an Advent calendar for its Christmas TV ads. You open the doors and find merchandise inside. Is that a lie? Is hate speech a lie? At a very deep level, it is a lie against love. But when people speak hate speech, they truly mean it. Glen Stassen, Keen's brother, has written a magnificent article in Tikkun, called "Scapegoat Alert," showing how the little lies of hate speech become the big lies of propoganda. The next step is state power. How do states keep power? By controlling so-called information, which is a good word for truth.

Which Americans were telling the truth last week in the big Washington Post study? The 80% who said they thought the country was on the wrong track? Or the 80% who said they were generally satisfied with their own life? So which is true, the country despair, or the personal satisfaction? Can both really be true at the same time? Apparently, yes.

How many people are members of churches, and what really was the attendance last week? Gallup has these wonderful tricky surveys, which basically say that churches, especially mega churches, inflate their numbers with impunity. Why? To make people feel successful and to get more people to come into churches.

We are surrounded, internally and externally, by a great cloud of witnesses. Our own behavior is decidedly marked by that of others. I think of Randall Forsberg, who died just recently. Many of you know her as the astounding researcher who organized the nuclear freeze. With an army of data, she showed just how many weapons there were on the planet, and managed to elicit a response that formed one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- peaceful demonstrations in American history. When the lights went out and the cameras went off her issue, she continued her research. She continued to pursue the truth about nuclear weapons in a world with Attention Deficit Disorder. When the money ran out on her organization (foundations are the most fickle people in the world!), she mortgaged her home and continued. She died surrounded by her mother, her daughter, and her friend. Forsberg is a magnificent example of the scientist who loves facts becoming a compassionate world witness. While we English majors usually tend to belittle the fact side of truth, people like Forsberg provide a good correction.

So what can we do to keep truth in our lives, in a world of jumbled witnesses? We can surround ourselves with people around whose bed we will stand and who will stand at our bed. Our intimates know the most truth about us, and even know the truth that we don't know. We will all be tempted to a lot of lying at the end. Compassion says, "Why bother?" We can read a lot of books, with a lot of different points of view. I know where you can get them for free. Oh, and by the way, there is a spot on your shirt. But don't worry, no one who loves you can see it.

¹ Nathanael Johnson, California, July/August, 2007