Dear Biddy,

Is the space between a truth and a lie shrinking? I am wondering if you had an antidote for that in your herb garden?

The place denial plays in helping the lie become a truth maybe revealed in the words of David Whyte:

Denial is a beautiful transitional state every human being inhabits before they are emancipated into the next larger context and orphaned, often against their will, from an old and very familiar home.

©2014 David Whyte
from ‘DENIAL’ From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

This week I am praying some of lies I’ve heard might get infected with denial so to fully enable the path of truth to find a way home.

There is the lie that Australians don’t care about refugees – yet most of my friends seem to – all the while the majority of members in our Parliament voted to remove my country from the Convention we helped author a few generations ago. Surely we are better than this?

There are the lies in communities and families like the one a violent man pickled by alcohol was a happy person spreading conviviality through his larrikin ways to all he met. Surely the scars, the bruises (faded and still raw), the debts, the children and the parent’s heartaches have their own truth?

Fear of change masquerading as bravado and stubbornness is another kind of lie. This kind of lie is where fear builds up and brings a paralysis to truth – so only the lie moves around slipping and sliding unable to wrestled to the ground.

Finding out the truth is hard and not where we want to be, making a labyrinth of lies will lead us back to our centre, and in that space, denial might come to lead us out into truth.

If denial creeps in, truth maybe able to find a way out of the crucible holding the lie. What is that crucible made of? Fear? Pain? Anxiety? Empathy is the elixir to find our way from lies to truth and an empathic ear to denial might just release the pressure point of the fear or pain or anxiety.

My country, Biddy, and me too, need a dose of empathy to get us through the lies, to open the potential for denial and then midwife us into truth.