Truth Seizes a Few

Whether you seek it consciously or not, truth will seize only a few at a time.
That’s pretty much the meaning of the twin parables of the Found Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:44-46). The other point is that you typically have to shed a lot of dead weight in favor of embracing the truth. The most valuable truths often demand a radical departure from the past.
It’s not a question here of which truth, but something you simply cannot escape. The Army guard who converts to Islam after seeing how the Gitmo inmates cling to their Islamic faith has discovered a great treasure. So far as I know, Holdbrooks the only one talking about it out of all the guards who’ve worked at Gitmo. The point is too many people never think about it in the first place.
Lesser truths are still worthy of pursuit if only because they could help move you in the right direction. Then again, it may lead to some of the most frivolous stuff. So long as it’s offered as fluff — plenty of my blog posts are just that — that’s fine. Such is the conversation of humans who don’t feel threatened by anything significant. Trying to make it sound important, and getting others to take the discussion seriously, is a little disturbing. The bikini-or-not question made a big splash on my FB page through linkage with a friend. None of those discussing it are likely amenable to my input, since I have embraced one of those shockingly different treasuries of truth.
Wanna stop men staring out you, babes? Don’t go swimming in public places. A slinky one-piece is still exposing way too much if you are shapely, and way too much in another way if you aren’t. Ripping away Western social assumptions offers a totally different response, because it’s a totally different morality. And virtually no Western Christian realizes that the morality of Jesus is at least superficially much closer to that of Islam than anything they might imagine. That’s because when it comes to the broader question of human sexuality, Islam shares a broad common assumption with Ancient Hebrew beliefs — and with reality itself, if you ask me. I won’t miss Western Civ when it finally passes away.
My whole life long, I’ve been torn between searching and bumbling. Sometimes I stumbled along, poking at the earth for things I never understood. At other times I had a burning desire for things I hadn’t seen. The truth for me, the understanding that offered peace and sanity in a crazy warring world, was some of both. It didn’t arrive all at once.
Either way, if there were any real truth in Western Civilization, there would be precious few people looking for pearls or capable of recognizing treasure when they dig it up.