Photo by Sodanie Chea

By Ajung Sojwal

The phrase “truth decay” is being used a lot these days, especially on NPR. When I first heard the phrase, it stopped me in my tracks. How did we manage to come to this place where the word decay is used so frequently to qualify truth? Truthfulness as a virtue is no longer valued much, it seems, in our public discourse, which has brought me to this place of wondering what truthfulness looks like in my personal life. Looking back, I can see that truthfulness in my life has been informed and guided deeply by my faith. In many ways, faith for me has been about finding the courage to embrace truthfulness.

I have often struggled with Jesus’ call to his disciples to have a child-like faith. It is not so much the difficulty of a child-like faith as we become increasingly intimate with the responsibilities and anxieties of adulthood, rather it is the transparency of a child that’s rather difficult to emulate in adulthood, which bothers me as I try to understand Jesus’ call. I now realize that my experience of “growing up” for the larger part had to do with finding ways to protect that transparency, so much so that even in my journey with God I had become more guarded.

The kind of fearless truthfulness that Jesus calls me to, I am learning, is not truth-telling; it is discovering that God-given transparency once again. To be able to see myself for all that I have allowed myself to become, to let loose ambitions, values and acolytes that I imagined would qualify my life as well as my faith in God. My life and faith had become quite opaque and there were times when it was hard to recognize Jesus in others and in the world, which I found, is not helpful in practicing the love that Jesus commands us to have.

Truthfulness for me has increasingly become about recovering my first love for Jesus. I have found that the first love for Jesus is always in danger of being overshadowed by some form of “truth decay,” where I begin to increase and He begins to decrease. In this new season of the Church affirming my leadership, having called me to be rector of a historic church, I am acutely aware of my need to be transparent with myself.

Jesus already sees through me; the challenge is for me to see through myself and acknowledge that it is not my church, not my vision, not my plans, not my harvest and not my kingdom! There is a certain freedom in realizing that ownership of the ministry I have been called into belongs to God alone. The truthfulness I long to cultivate in me, I hope, is like what Merriam-Webster defines “transparent” to be: “Having the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are seen clearly.” I hope the bodies lying beyond my transparency will be the Trinity — the community of God.

Ajung Sojwal is Rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Hempstead, NY.