It’s dishonesty, living a double life, that kills the soul and kills families.”
The unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit begins with lying, with rationalization, with the refusal to acknowledge the truth. But we don’t commit this sin easily, overnight, the first time we tell a lie. The soul warps slowly, like an old board soaked too often in the rain. It’s not the first time it gets wet that makes the warp. We commit the sin against the Holy Spirit when we lie for so long that we believe our own lies. If we lie long enough, eventually light begins to look like darkness and darkness begins to look like light.
That’s especially true of the lie of a double life, when we are no longer honest with our loved ones. If we do that long enough, eventually our betrayals begin to look like virtue, our lies like the truth, and what our families, faith, and churches stand for begins to look like falsehood, death, darkness.
About 15 years ago, a young man, still in his twenties, produced an award-winning movie, Sex, Lies, and Videotapes. The story is rather simplistic and crass at times, but overall teaches the a lesson that could be from John’s gospel: The hero of the story, a young man with a bad history in the area of sexuality, resolves to make himself better by making a vow to never again tell a lie, even a very small one. Like the man who’s born blind in John’s gospel, that vow brings him to health. He gets better, much better. He then sets up a video camera and invites people to come and tell their stories. Those who tell the truth also get better, healthier, and those who lie and hide their infidelities continue to deteriorate in both health and happiness. The truth does set us free.
In her book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows describes what it means to die a “happy death”. To die in a good way, she states, is not a question of whether or not death catches us in a morally good moment or a morally bad one (dying drunk in a bar as opposed to dying in a church). Rather, to die a happy death is to die in honesty, without pretence, without the need to lie about our lives. [Excerpt from Ron Rolhiser’s “The Truth Sets Us Free,” July 2005]
