Good is not the opposite of evil. Truth is. Being good - or acting good - does not find and eradicate the evil that is within us. Truth does. When someone loves us enough to tell us the truth, it usually makes us angry first. But if we are open to the truth, we will see it and we will be set free from the lies we have been telling ourselves.
Prayer is a call to truth. It is an invitation to open our hearts to God and to ourselves. If we will set aside our wish lists when we pray and instead, just commune with God and converse with him and listen to him, we will begin to see many truths. And it will - as Jesus said - set us free.
Being good is fine, but ultimately, being good is about our own egos. It is about showing others that we know the rules and know how to follow them. But truth is knowing when we should break the rules. Truth is knowing when the rules have been twisted and hurt more people than they help.
From "Pastrix," by Nadia Bolz-Weber:
"There's a popular miscocnception that religion, Christianity specifically, is about knowing the differeence between good and evil so that we can choose the good. But being good has never set me free the way truth has. Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, hecontrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I've substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth."There it is. Everytime we hear truth, death and resurrection is involved. There is just no getting around it. If we want that new, abundant, joyful life that God wants us to have so badly that he became flesh and showed us what to do... if we want it, we have to die for it. No amount of being good will do it for us.
"The truth does crush us, but the instant it crushes us, it somehow puts us back together into something honest. It's death and resurrection every time it happens."
Father,
Help us to find truth so that we may die to ourselves and become new and free. Amen.
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