True to me today.

Life has shown me true truths and false truths.


   Truths have opened flood gates of information in my experience, some of which I truly have valued and grown from. While others have hindered that same process of growth. Yet as I sit here and write this I can’t help but think of one truth that started as a lie, as an inconsistency that I held to be true and right. As Walt Whitman states, “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth”, I agree with this up to the point when the soul questions its own satisfaction. Yet what happens when the truth that rocked us to sleep no longer fulfills that need to be comforted and in turn is now part of the reason we toss and turn at night. For me that same questioning described above occurred during a point when I questioned my morality compared to my learned ethics.
  

   I was about twelve years old, grew up catholic, did my duties as a good ole catholic boy, and believed what I was told about right and wrong, heaven and hell. My ethics, the things I was taught to value and cherish as close as family, started to conflict with what I thought was morally right. Now by no means at this age was I ready to read the Bible, the Torah, The Qur’an, or any holy higher book and understand the true meanings behind the words, but it did seem as though the quote by Lewis Carroll, “What I tell you three times is true” was to be taken as enough proof that my teachings should without a doubt conquer my sense of moral objectivity. And yet I couldn’t buy that, I could not succumb to the idea that one road, one modality of thought was better then another. That one person should be shunned for something they could not control or could no longer hide for fear of discrimination and feelings of self hate. I questioned not my faith, but my education as it related to being what I envisioned as a morally upright citizen. Scriptures that touched on race, sexuality and even slavery were used only when it seemed to enhance what we were expected to learn. It was what we as young men and women were expected to accept without further questioning, and worse yet were cast aside when those same words “corrupted” our young minds. After reading and listening, I much later in life decided on something that satisfied my soul, that satisfied my need for all the parts to fit into each other without too much conflict. While I still haven’t been able to tell myself three times that what I believe now is the absolute truth, I have been able to say it twice.