Dearly Beloved,
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
— Flannery O’Connor
On Sunday, I shared with you words from the Rev. Cameron Trimble, as we reflected on maintaining our humanity, protecting and tending those things that are worth living for in the midst of violence and chaos. This week, I want to invite each of you to read Trimble's musings as often as you can. Their substack is HERE.
This week, our own winding wending way through our Covenant to Cultivate Beloved Community (which you can read in full HERE) brings us to the power of words, to the stories that we tell, to the necessity of truth, and to Jesus' invitation in Matthew to let our yes be yes and our no be no.
Rev. Cameron Trimble's reflections on Monday were likewise about the power and importance of telling the truth. Trimble writes:
We are also grieving the bigger rupture, the one that spreads outward like a crack in glass. When the federal government kills someone in public and then asks us to accept a false story about it, the state is not only attempting to evade accountability. It is attempting to reorganize reality. It is attempting to teach us that power gets to decide what is true, and that the rest of us exist inside that decision.
This is now existential. It changes what it feels like to live here....
I do not want to overstate this. I also do not want to understate it. Our situation contains both danger and responsibility. The danger is that we acclimate to unreality. The danger is that we learn to live with public killing as background noise. The danger is that we accept the rewriting of victims into threats as a normal part of the news cycle.
The responsibility is smaller and harder than outrage. The responsibility is to keep our moral perception intact. The responsibility is to tell the truth* without turning it into performance. The responsibility is to refuse the disappearance of a human being into a label. The responsibility is to grieve in a way that does not collapse into numbness, and to act in a way that does not collapse into despair....
So today, I am asking us to do one thing that feels almost embarrassingly simple, and yet is increasingly rare: stay with what is true. Stay with what the videos show. Stay with the humanity of the person who died. Stay with the grief that proves your heart has not been trained into indifference. Stay with one another, because isolation is where unreality spreads fastest.
This is what authoritarian systems want most: for us to stop trusting ourselves, and then to stop
trusting each other.
We do not have to give them that. Grief is not weakness. It is moral clarity. Lament is not resignation. It is resistance. Telling the truth — plainly, together — is how repair begins.
God's beloved, telling the truth matters deeply. It matters in the simple exchanges we have in our personal lives. It empowers us to share reality and to understand the ways in which reality is experienced differently by each of us. It allows us to see and love one another. And, in the larger picture, it makes it possible for us to hold onto our humanity and to resist the oppressive, violent, and authoritarian powers that seek to divide us and use us up in pursuit of profit and power.
Take hope, God's beloved, and hold onto truth. Like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality."
In hope and resistance,
Thandiwe
*Emphasis added
If you'd like to read more by Rev. Cameron Trimble, their substack is: https://www.pilotingfaith.org/
