Dispatches from Fr. Charitas

Thursday, April 26, 2018

There is a commandment that reads, “You will not bear false witness.” Growing up my parents indicated that this referred to lying, but as my understanding has matured I have refined my understanding. Now those words have within their meaning … “giving the false impression, providing not the whole truth but a distorted or tainted version of the truth, covering up, looking the other way, twisting the truth, offering words with alternative meanings, conjuring illusions and fostering delusions.

To bear false witness … This sinfulness becomes the more sinister when used defensively or used vindictively.

The sin of false witness usually begins with one convincing themselves that the false witness is somehow true. Oh, there do exist outright liars … but most false witness is rationalized along the way.

I must confess that I lie now and then. I urge myself not to life, but in the fear of the moment, in the fear of being exposed, in the fear that I have not control of the circumstance … I sometimes desperately resort to lying, not criminal lying, moral lying, but never bearing false against another. But then again … maybe I have, and I have rationalized it away. That is the way of false witness … we convince ourselves that it is for the better.

Always in His Service,
Fr. Charitas de la Cruz