Deep Truth
I listened to a new On Being podcast episode this week, in which Krista Tippet is speaking to Justin Vernon, the artist better known as Bon Iver. The music of Bon Iver has long been a kind of music that speaks to some deep and unnameable part of me. The best of it reveals longing and connection I can’t quite explain. Music has the potential to convey an embodied recognition of my most essential self, the wounded and aching parts and the romantic, hopeful layers, too.
Tippet and Vernon speak of the difference between factual truth, that which can be tested and proven, and “Deep Truth,” which is spoken of in physics. This is the truth that we feel as embodied, and, unlike factual truth, its opposite is also likely true.
I understand a lot of life through this wisdom—these deep truths that hold the potential for their own opposite. This can feel challenging, but what if believing this could assist our ability to witness whole stories?
Today, some of you are celebrating Easter. Yesterday, I spent my morning considering the coming day, and sitting with a meditation on what is written about the Saturday before Easter from the perspective of the mystic John. It is written: Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb…
Prior to listening to this, I was contemplating all of the silence there seems to be in the world right now from God, wondered what it might mean to wake up to the celebration of Easter in the midst of the sting of injustice and heartache.
Then, I heard the mystic’s words: In the place where there was death, was a garden.
I could feel this truth in my body: death and renewal; horror and creativity; chaos and order; crucifixion and new life, all of it side by side. In the place where there has been one, is also the other. The opposite of one truth, also true.
Friends, my deep truth may not be your own, and to that I bow my head in humility. None of this is necessarily factual. Or maybe it is. I know it as an embodied reality, a truth that seems to live outside of time and isn’t dependent on a season or a particular day. However, today I will sing about it, look for signs of it, and witness the prayers of others for their own truths to unfold into being. Perhaps somehow, some way, the truest truth is the space where we do not forget to see both—death and the garden, side by side.
for Easter Sunday, excerpted from Kate Bowler's blessing
Oh God, I stretch out my hands to you
in this early Easter darkness.
I need you to pull me up
and set me on my feet again,
for I am weak and tired...
Blessed are we who stretch out our hands to you
in doubt and grief,
in sickness of body and mind and spirit,
our prayers not fully realized,
rejoicing...anyway
carrying forth the realized hope,
singing our allelluias great and small,
while it is still dark.