By Fr. Roy Cimagala *
WE have to be duly warned about this fact of life. When we deceive others, we may succeed to a certain extent to attain the purpose of such deception. But never forget that deception will always come back and will inflict greater damage on the deceiver.
A quote from St. Augustine’s Confession expresses this well: “They love truth when she shines on them; and hate her when she rebukes them. And since they are not willing to be deceived, but do wish to deceive, they love the truth when she reveals herself and hate her when she reveals them.
“On this account, she will repay them so that those who are unwilling to be exposed by her she will indeed expose against their will, and yet will not disclose herself to them.”
St. Paul already made reference to the grave consequences of deception. “Evil men and impostors,” he said, “will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” (2 Tim 3,13)
The Book of Proverbs more or less say the same point: “His own iniquities will capture the wicked, and he will be held with the cords of his sin.” (5,22)
In the gospel reading for Monday within the octave of Easter, a sample of deception is made. (cfr. Jn 28,8-15) “They gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him while we were asleep.’”
Because of this deception, many of these people who did it and their descendants could not accept the full truth about Christ. Deception always has a boomerang effect. It’s about time we review the crucial relationship between God and our capacity to stick to the truth or to distort it.
Nowadays, with the plethora of data and information, we have to remind ourselves constantly that truthfulness is not a matter of simply confirming these data and pieces of information to our own designs. We need to process these raw data by leavening them with the love of God and submitting them to God’s will and designs.
To put it bluntly, we can only be in the truth when we are with God. Outside of him, let’s wish ourselves sheer luck, because the most likely thing to happen is to slip from the truth. It's like chasing the wind. For all the excitement and advantages a Godless pursuit of truth gives, everything will just turn out to be vanity.
With this new phenomenon about the so-called fake news, which is actually a rehash of the old evil tactics of disinformation and misinformation, of giving partisan spins to issues, we should feel the urgent need to be united to God to be really truthful and fair in resolving our problems.
Truthfulness therefore starts with our relationship with God, and with how well we maintain that relationship. This is something we have to realize more deeply, since very often we get contented with mere human criteria for truthfulness, that are often subjective, incomplete, imperfect, and vulnerable to be maneuvered and manipulated.
When we are not with God, then we can very easily play around with the facts and data, and pass them around as truth, but serving some self-interest instead of the common good, for example.
We justify such behaviour as a privilege of our freedom. But would that be freedom when one is plunging himself to the bondage of untruth and deception? Would that be freedom when it is exercised to violate the will of God who is the giver, the pattern and end of freedom?
* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
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