In his session this afternoon, Jimmy speaks on truth. In his talk he gives us permission to wrestle with the truth, but urges us not to settle for less than it. Jimmy Mitchell: Truth Revealed Jimmy is from Nashville and is founder of Love Good, a company which supports and invests in artists and songwriters with the goal of evangelizing culture with beauty that is rooted in truth. The logo for this company is a heart with an arrow through it. Beauty pierces the heart and, once wounded, the heart cannot help but want to trace that wound back to it’s source. The wound often in our culture is truth. The source? God.
Jimmy firmly believes that “Beauty can save the world. It is an incredible tool in the evangelization movement, but if it’s not rooted in truth it will not ‘wound’ the soul enough for that person to want to trace it back to it’s source.” He speaks of three men who greatly influenced his search for the truth.
Pope Benedict XVI
What is truth? What does is mean to believe in the Church’s objective truth? More specifically when that truth is a Person?
These are some of the questions Jimmy found himself asking when he entered college and began his search for truth. Up to this point, his “truth” was rooted in an understanding that everyone had their own truth. Nothing was definitive, everything was objective, if you believed it and lived it well then it merrited being called truth. The world believes in a truth of relativism.
During his senior year of college Pope Benedict XVI came to America and spoke these words: “A dictatorship of relativism does not recognize anything as definitive. It’s ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”
In a society where the highest of all virtues is tolerance, Pope Benedict’s words are helpful in understanding the dictatorship that is relativism. He preaches that truth is on objective reality and calls out what our culture has settled for (relativism). The Church, however, has a different goal: the Son of God, the True Man. He is, and always has been, the measure of true humanism. The measure of truth. To seek truth is to opt into the fullness of life. To opt into joy, freedom, and the glory that was won for us.
Winston Churchill
If Pope Benedict XVI is helpful in understanding the dictatorship of relativism, then Winston Churchill is helpful in knowing how we can battle that dictatorship. His words fall during a time of war, when most people’s approach was to appease the enemy, to simply make peace with the “dictator”. In Churchill’s case, it was Hitler during WWII, for us, it is the battle for truth and all those who go against it. Churchill claims: “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in it’s mouth.”
If we do not start calling out the dictator of relativism in our society today it will clench everything that we hold dear and true and eventually destory it. Relativism does not set anyone free. We are set free by truth, specifically, the objectie truth of God’s love. It is only in His love can we taste the glory of what it truly means to be sons and daughters of a King.
GK Chesterton
GK Chesterton once said: “It is always simple to fall. In fact there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, but only one at which one stands.” He understood the immensity of how easy it is to buy into falsehoods. How many ways in which we can fall short of truth. There is only one way in which we can stand in truth. That way is the Church.
There is nothing more exciting and adventurous than the truth of God’s love . It carries the church through the centureis but also carries you; through every blessing, joy and trial of your life. The gospel states that everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin. Slaves do not remain in a household forever, but us, sons and daughters, will always remain. As beloved children of an everlasting God, we have been blessed with a Church who is a good Mother. She will always show up with all of the answers; but first we must seek them.
To conclude, Jimmy urges us to ask for the grace to believe in truth and not to settle for tigers that already have their mouths around our neck. He urgres us to stand strong in the truth of God’s love.
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