You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32)

Today's reflection is by Cameron Partridge, Episcopal Chaplain at Boston University

When I was growing up, I attended our local Episcopal church Sunday by Sunday.  Meanwhile, beginning in seventh grade, I attended an evangelical camp for one week each summer.  Where the parish formed me week in and week out in profound, understated ways, the camp exposed me to a dramatically affective, personal faith.  Where the former was the slow cooker, the latter was the broiler.  In complex and contradictory ways, both helped me navigate an early adolescent malaise.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32).

At twelve and thirteen, much of my life felt like it either failed to tell me the truth or bombarded me with incommensurable versions of it.  Some of it was corporeal, some familial, some socio-cultural.  There’s nothing like being a trans or gender nonconforming teen to make you aware early on that what people declare or narrate as “the truth” – or my least favorite phrase on the planet, “the real world” – can be as prescriptive as it is descriptive.  Too often, when people declare “this is how the world is,” they are trying to ensure that it will stay that way, and to enlist you in the project of making that so. 

Which is why the line from John’s gospel rang out so clearly to me.  You shall know the truth—whatever anyone else says the truth is, whatever anyone else tells you about how the world works and what your place within it is, the unfathomably complex truth as God proclaims it is opened to you. And as you begin to learn and step into that truth, it will not imprison you, it will not cordon you off from yourself.  It will transform you.  It will make you free.

The Gospel of John is keen on the mystery of truth, of what we can know, when we can know it, and how it will change us. “What is truth?” asks a uniquely Johannine Pontius Pilate (18:38).   “‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” Jesus declares (16:12).  This truth that makes us free is only bearable when we are ready.  And lest we think we never will be, the Spirit comes and catches us up and opens our hearts wider than we could ever imagine.

So as we walk into these first few days of Lent, 2014, this is my prayer: that the Spirit might prepare us to bear, and bear out, that divine truth that heralds our liberation.