Oh Lord, Make Me True!

Cultivating Calling and Pilgrimage is a meandering column documenting the pilgrimage of faith. It’s an occasional letter arriving in the mail from that shabby, wandering uncle you only see a few times year, describing the odd bits and bobs of books, songs, stories, people and places that have struck his fancy, put a lump in his throat, or kept him putting one foot in front of the other toward the Face of Jesus, that Joy set before us all.

Once upon a time, when little Matthew Clark was in fourth or fifth grade, his elementary school held an art contest. Young Matthew’s brother Sam, seven years older, had always been a gifted artist and recently had drawn a spectacular picture of a fire-breathing dragon. A thought occurred to Matthew, “What if I entered Sam’s drawing in the contest but said I had drawn it?” The thought quickly became a plan, and the plan was pretty soon an action. The stolen drawing was submitted to the teacher, the lie was told, and Matthew waited. 

Of course, you can guess what happened next. I’ve watched my nieces and nephews, in the blind confidence of youth, tell lies they felt sure were impenetrable, but which were, in reality, hilariously obvious to every adult in earshot. So, Matthew got caught. Somehow the adults had seen through what had felt like a flawless deception.  

I learned pretty quickly, especially in childhood, that lying didn’t get me anywhere. I learned because I tried it! Even the times when it did work a little, the ache of living in deception was heart-wrenching. I hated that feeling. I couldn’t have explained it to you, but I could painfully sense that untruthfulness was cutting me off from the people whose love I longed for. Lying separates us from reality itself. It makes us untouchable, because the real us isn’t really in the room at all. But I wanted to be connected. I hungered to be lovingly enfolded in something real—a kind of knowing that included my whole self. Lying made that impossible. It just wasn’t worth it. 

But, as little kids are growing up, they put everything in their mouths to see how it tastes, and we do that with things like lying, too. We try it out. Does it work? How does it taste? I didn’t like the taste it left in my mouth. I’d also been exposed to some folks in my life who did, in fact, seem drawn to unreality, seemed to relish it. I didn’t like what I saw and I reacted against it.  

Just this morning I was reading in Luke 12:2 where Jesus, commenting on the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, says that, “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, and nothing hidden that will not be made known.” Those are scary words, no matter how much I’d like to think of myself as a truthful person. But what struck me today as I read it was that I felt something less like a threat in those words and more like a good, plain promise. What do I mean? Well, if the Pharisees are hypocrites, it means who they actually are and who they appear to be are two different things. What you see is not what you get. They’re living, walking, talking unrealities.

What Jesus is pointing out is that this sort of thing can’t survive when Ultimate Reality arrives. In the Kingdom, deception will not be possible; every veil will be rent in two, every lie dispelled, every heart will live in loving transparency and trust with every other heart. 

Everyone will be true, through and through. When I was a kid experimenting with lying, the terrible ache I felt and hated was deeper than shame or the fear of being caught. It was almost the fear of not being caught! Because if my lie wasn’t exposed, I really would be caught—trapped in an unreality and doomed to be cut off from love. Whatever part of me that couldn’t tell the truth would remain outside the circle of fellowship, which in the end will be the only place where the life and love we most desire will be going on. Liars may be the loneliest people. Even great sinners can access deep and tender fellowship, once they can admit the truth. There’s great comfort in that, especially since the truth is we’re all great sinners, so there’s all kinds of fellowship to be had!

But I’d like to add to all of this another way of looking at it. With this, I’m pulling heavily from one of my favorite little books, The Art of Living by Dietrich von Hildebrand and its chapter on Faithfulness.  

When I lied about my brother’s drawing in elementary school, I had a certain powerful experience. I’ve been describing how it made an impression on me that formed my feeling toward truth-telling, and eventually against hypocrisy. That impression was one among many in a sequence of encounters that left an impression, a sort of shaping handprint, pressed in, that made me want to be a true person. 

Von Hildebrand makes the point that this “impression sequence” is how faithfulness takes shape in a person—in fact, it’s how personality accumulates and becomes a solid reality. It’s how people go on to become either solid presences or unreliable phantom presences. It’s the accumulation of good, true, and beautiful impressions upon our souls, upon our hearts that, when deliberately retained and cultivated, becomes the makeup of our personalities. Maybe we have an experience, like I did, of the repulsiveness of lying, and it leaves a mark. From there on out, either the mark continues to affect the way we feel (our affections are formed) about life or it wears off and is forgotten. The old feeling of wanting to tell the truth feels like just that: old. Now there’s a more novel situation tugging at us, and we drop the old conviction either for the moment or forever. That flimsiness of character is a lack of personality. Another word for it is inconstancy or infidelity. 

Am I constant? Am I the same “yesterday, today, and tomorrow”? That’s not a static thing; persons are dynamic, living realities, of course, with God being the most dynamic and the most stable. No, am I always becoming more and more true, more consistent, more stable and reliable? More alive and present. Am I always moving toward the transparent life of Heaven, where no little shadowed corner is held back from the living light of Reality?  

I pray for that. I pray, “Oh God, make me true!” 

Am I blown about by every wind of doctrine, entertainment, novelty? By every momentary impression that darts in front of me? Or do the best things take deep and lasting root in my heart, until a sturdiness of presence, a definite shape of self, a face—once blurry—comes into particular, dependable focus, able to participate deeply in the life made available by the beauty of God’s creation, the faces around me, and finally God’s own face in Christ? Do I even have a personality, a face, yet? 

I’m sure it’s true that it is always taking shape, always coming into focus. But, at least, I pray to be engaged in that process, rather than turning to the right or the left to escape it. “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful,” says Hebrews 10:23. That’s what Hildebrand is talking about: God is constant, real, and stable as a personality, and so we have something in which to root ourselves, a promise that can accumulate until it can constitute our own personalities. The work of holding “unswervingly” means to fight in the depths of our hearts and bodies and minds to retain the goodness we’ve known even as a parade of distractions invites us, at every moment, to slip off to our shadowed corners of escape into unreality. The only end to that pursuit is the loss of personality, and the trap of loneliness—perhaps, if allowed to go on long enough, ultimate loneliness for eternity. 

But God, who does not change like shifting shadows, and in whom there is no darkness at all, always and ever continues to make reality available to us. His is a solid personality of real presence, stable and endlessly beautiful. At every point, we are invited to draw near to Him, and to feel the touch that makes us substantial. To look into those bright eyes that light the lamp of our eyes and thus our whole darkened, deceived bodies with light, allowing our shadowed corners to be bathed in gladness. It is, after all, only in His light that we can see light at all. Only in His presence that we can be truly present. Only in God’s tender hands that the clay can ever hope to take definite, recognizable, lasting shape, becoming a true and beautiful reality. 

Once upon a time, as a little life was seeking a shape to settle into, a young boy tasted the void of untruthfulness, and recoiled from its bitter claim upon him. Now he remembers. What has grown up in that space is a place—a place of presence, touch, and a language of love in the particular, love in the fellowship of the real. That is a place to live from. It is a heart, I pray, not shifty and shapeless, but one becoming more and more true, fitted for truth, constantly being made into the definite image of Him through whom all things were made, Jesus—who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is the very root and soil of all that is or longs to be truly real.

The featured image, “Wood Pile Ready for Winter,” is courtesy of Sam Keyes and is used with his kind permission for Cultivating.

Matthew Clark

Matthew Clark is a singer/songwriter and storyteller from Mississippi. He has recorded several full length albums, including Matthew’s latest project, “The Well Trilogy,” 3 full-length album/book combos released over three years. Each installment—Only the Lover Sings, A Tale of Two Trees, and Where the River Goes—is made up of 11 songs and a companion book of 13 essays written by a variety of contributors exploring themes around encountering Jesus, faith-keeping, and the return of Christ. You can find the books on Amazon and the albums on Spotify and Apple Music.

A founding member of The Maker’s Project and a columnist for Cultivating, Matthew’s essays reflect on faith-keeping and pilgrimage. Matthew travels as a touring musician and speaker sharing songs and stories in a van called Vandalf.

www.matthewclark.net/