What God Wants For Your Life

To recap:

As I said yesterday, my wife and I recently watched the movie, “The Invention of Lying” last night, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that the main characters live in a world where everyone tells the truth and no one lies. Part way through the story, Gervais learns how to lie and he uses his gift to reassure his dying mother that there is “a man up in the sky” and a life after death.

On one level, it could be argued that the film is hostile to religion. It is, after all, according to the film, a lie. And the description that Gervais gives of the man up in the sky to people is the worst kind of theology in many ways. Gervais himself also admits at his mother’s grave side that she is there, in the ground, not in heaven.

At the same time, when — thanks to his capacity for lying — he marries the character played by Garner, it is also clear that their happiness is insured by his capacity to lie. She is a lousy cook, but he assures her, the food is delicious and so does his son, who has also inherited the gene for lying.

It’s this other twist in the plot that struck me. The question that the movie seems to pose is this: “Is it right to lie in an intimate relationship?” On the other hand, these are not people who simply tell the truth, they are people without a cerebral cortex. They have no governor on their brains. They say whatever occurs to them. They consider their opinions, impressions, and experiences as the venue in which truth is found. And they seem to believe that whatever is on their minds is worth sharing.

This is truth without humility (or any other virtue), my truth as the measure of the truth.

Intimate relationships rely upon the capacity for honesty and candor and that level of confidence in another human being can create the opportunity for growth and mutual understanding that we cannot find anywhere else in life. But the kind of truth that the world practices before Gervais’ character learns to lie is far from that kind of honesty. It is truth telling that is brutal, disrespectful, life-denying, destructive and cold-blooded.

I dated someone years ago who was dedicated to this kind of truth telling. She called them the way she saw them. She asserted her right to call them; and she was also supremely confident that she was right — pretty much all the time.

There are at least two problems with this kind of “truth-telling.”

One, the person who takes this attitude also assumes a role that only God can play. We are all fallible and we are all imperfect. To confidently assert your right to judge another human being 24-7 is to assume a role that is not yours to play, no matter how often you are right — and no one is right as often as they think they are.

To own our humanity is to own our own faults, acknowledge our limitations, and foreswear the all-seeing, all-knowing role of God. Intimacy is not a license to run someone else’s life. It is, in some ways, a relationship that obligates us to exercise greater care in the “truths” we share.

In that regard, God is better at being God than we are.

Two, since I’m a first child, overly concerned about doing the right thing, and deeply in touch with my own imperfections, I didn’t really need another God, especially not that kind of God. What we tell one another should never be determined by what we think we are entitled to say or want to say. Intimacy grows when the other person’s needs are more important to us than our own.

If allowing that care and concern to modify what we say to one another is lying, so be it, I suppose — but I’m inclined to believe that it is simply the truth, tempered by love and humility. To cultivate the ability to give another human being that gift is not a bad thing.

Look for opportunities…they are there, today.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 5:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.