Truth and Deception

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On Friday, my sister Evelyn and I flew to Birmingham for the funeral of our cousin Sharon. It was an emotional, blessed and even a joyful day of family coming together on one of those rare occasions; the awareness within us that, though we hardly ever meet, we are strongly connected by blood with a genuine love shared among us. 

It was a long day that found us at the airport for the return flight that was delayed by about an hour. Delays are normal and fine enough but it’s what the airline does with the delay. And it wasn’t Ryanair just in case people might wrongly put the blame there. 

It’s what they do. They pretend that they are boarding us. We scan our boarding pass barcode; they check our passports and move us on. Things might not be as bad as we thought. But they were. And somewhat worse. We were all crowded on to the stairs and kept standing there for over half an hour, with the door to the tarmac firmly locked, presumably because the plane was not actually ready at all. 

It’s late on Friday, everyone is tired, everyone is perfectly behaved but you find yourself wondering, why the pretence of boarding when it would have been better just to tell us the truth. Why the deception? And why does the pilot announce, “ten minutes to landing” when it actually takes twenty-five minutes? 

None of this matters much in the great scheme of things but you begin to realise that there is a lot of deception going on in this world. In small ways and great ways, we deceive ourselves, we deceive others, become used to deception and begin to accept the lies we are being told, possibly because it is more comfortable to go along with the deception. There are great and tragic deceptions that we also go along with, and we are quite prepared to accept that what is wrong is right. 

The desert of Lent is a place and time where both truth and deception come face to face. The serpent in the Garden of Eden, the Devil, is the “most subtle of all creatures” who takes the truth and distorts it ever so slightly. God had said that Adam and Eve could eat all the fruit of the garden, except the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent suggests that they are not allowed to eat any of the fruit of the Garden. 

Likewise with Jesus in the desert, the Devil seeks to undermine the identity of Jesus. “If you are the Son of God…,” insinuating the Jesus is actually not the Son of God at all. And that is a deception very prevalent nowadays when many people do not believe the true identity of Jesus. 

Giving in to the deception had dire consequences for Adam and Eve. Far from being liberated, they experienced banishment, alienation and sufferings that had not previously existed. Humanity is burdened from then on with a very heavy weight of guilt. A cloud of nameless guilt that clings even when we are not aware of it. It is a hidden enemy. 

Lent offers us the opportunity to enter into the experience of Jesus and through Him to move from deception to truth, the truth that sets us free. He Himself is the Truth. In His presence we can express the truth without fear. And, perhaps, this is one great mistake we make in seeking the truth from others, that we instil fear in them; that telling the truth seems to imply dire consequences, so we avoid the pain of that. Whereas telling the truth to Jesus always results in liberation, as we see with the woman at the well in John’s Gospel. 

I suppose there is nothing more true than grief. We lived the truth of that in a significant way at Sharon’s funeral, as it stirred up griefs old as well as new. Her immediate family will live this grief for a long time to come. They were so close, such a tight-knit group that the breaking of the chain, the missing link will be all the more painful. Life will not be the same again, but they will come to some level of healing and even joy. 

I was struck by the fact that the funeral Mass took place in the church of St. Catherine of Sienna who is one of my patron saints, as I made my final Profession as a Pallottine on her Feast day and it is also the date of our uncle Josie’s death. They were brought up as children in that parish and both their parent’s funerals took place there. So, I think Catherine can be the saint who will help them on the journey of grief, someone they can turn to in their time of need. The church has a very striking wood carved statue of her.

It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.

St. Catherine of Siena


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