The Truth About Lies — The 9th Commandment

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“Do you think this outfit makes me look fat?” This is the timeless question to which husbands and boyfriends, if they know what’s good for them, are supposed to answer “no, of course not!” regardless of what they actually think. It’s the classic lie that we tend to think of as not only excusable, but virtuous. In fact, some say it would be wrong not to lie in this situation. We live in a culture in which lying is accepted and forgiven and even at times encouraged.

Our politicians lie to us and we have come to accept it as par for the course. Think of President Clinton’s infamous, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” This lie got him into trouble temporarily, but then you see bumper stickers that say, “When Clinton lied, no one died.” This forgives Clinton’s lie by contrasting it to the lies of the Bush administration – the lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that led us into war. The philosophical underpinning of this bumper sticker is that a lie is not a moral wrong in an absolute sense but only insofar as it hurts people. But then, even Bush’s lies that had such dire consequences seem to have been quickly forgotten. The American people re-elected him, after all. These days telling the truth can get you into a lot more trouble than lying. Just ask Edward Snowden.

There seems to be a general cultural consensus that lying itself is not evil and truth-telling itself is not good. It’s situational. It depends. Even the Biblical commandment to not bear false witness against one’s neighbor doesn’t outlaw lying generally but specifically when lying incriminates an innocent person. Most of the major medieval Jewish commentators don’t even comment on this commandment because its meaning is thought to be narrow and obvious. It’s about preserving a court system that’s reliable and just. One commentator, Ibn Ezra, notes that the verb can be read as causative – “to cause to testify falsely” – so it’s prohibiting hiring a false witness as well as doing it yourself. But they don’t extrapolate to lying in general.

The fact that it specifies, “against your neighbor” makes it narrower still. The commandment to not kill simply says, “Don’t kill.” It doesn’t say, “Don’t kill your neighbor.” The commandment to not steal simply says, “Don’t steal.” It doesn’t say, “Don’t steal from your neighbor.” These are absolute wrongs, regardless of whether the victim is your neighbor or not. But the ninth commandment says, “Do not bear false witness against your neighbor,” which suggests that this is specifically about relationships within a community. The message seems to be that lying is not an absolute wrong like killing and stealing, but it is wrong within a community because of the damage it does to relationships. Honesty is part of the glue that holds the fabric of a community together.

• When this congregation wrote our Right Relations Covenant, we clearly thought so too. It says, “Speak the truth as you experience it with kindness, care, and respect.” You can find the Right Relations Covenant on our website or down at the welcome table during Coffee Hour today. This is a challenging idea because of course when we lie, it’s most often to preserve relationships with others! It’s to make things nice. We figure that sometimes it’s far more destructive to a relationship to tell the truth.

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• Take that proverbial case of the wife asking her husband if she looks fat in this dress (and I’m intentionally using the familiar gender stereotypes here even though this scene could play out with any combination of genders). A woman asks her husband, “Do you think I look fat in this dress?” and let’s say the truth is that he thinks she does. There are two possibilities for why she’s asking: either A– it’s an honest question, she honestly wants to know his opinion because she wants help deciding whether to wear the dress or not; or B– the question is code for a different question like, do you love me? Or are you attracted to me? 

   

  If it’s option A, she truly wants his opinion, then surely he owes it to her to give it to her. She’s explicitly asked for help in making a decision, she values his input, and if he cares about her, he shouldn’t mislead her.

   

  If it’s option B, and what she’s really asking is do you love me or are you attracted to me, the issue is more complicated. Because in fact she is being dishonest with her question. She is not asking what she wants to know. So what to do? He could play along with the game. She’s asking do I look fat when she means do you love me and he could answer no you don’t look fat meaning yes I love you. So he’d be answering in code the question that was asked in code. 

   

  But what a mess! And what a sad state of affairs if we can’t ask what we really mean to ask and say what we really mean to say. I think a much healthier and bolder approach would be for the husband to say, “Yes, that dress is not flattering on you and I love you very much.”

   

  Let’s look at one more scenario. If, sticking with option B, she’s speaking in code and wants to know if her husband loves her, and in fact he doesn’t, then it’s even more essential that he say so. That would be the hardest truth to speak and to hear, but the most important. She would, above all, have a right to know that truth. We have a right to know the truth, even if we don’t always want to hear it. There is no worse kind of lie than a lie that deprives someone of information that they need in order to be able to make good decisions in their lives.

   

  Of course real relationships are rarely so simple as to be binaries of loving or not loving, thinking someone looks good or bad. It’s not so clear. It’s usually shades of grey and the truth is blurry and the small lies that we tell just get rolled into the general fuzzy ambivalence of daily life. And so it’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re not really lying, we’re being kind; we’re picking one truth to share of many possible truths. And anyway, we’re postmodern people and these stark notions of truth and falsehood are so passé!

   

  But here, as Barbara warned us in her homily, we run the risk of lying to ourselves. Because telling the truth as best as we can discern it, is really, really hard. You don’t get to wallow in pleasant fantasies about who you are. You have to own up to your failings and shortcomings first to yourself and then to others. You don’t get to manage your image. You don’t have recourse to the little fibs that protect you from responsibility or from judgment. You also don’t get to indulge in social niceties but you have to instead get real with the people in your life. You have to endure the consequences of people having information before you’re ready for them to have it. This can be awkward. It can be painful. It can cause conflict. It can set you apart from others in society. It’s a way of refusing to play the games and speak in the codes in which everyone else speaks.

   

  And so what if we did this? If the language of the 9^th Commandment suggests that telling lies tears the fabric of relationship and community, would truth-telling then keep that fabric intact? Clearly not. At least not in the short term. If we all started telling the truth as we saw it about ourselves and others, a lot of things would come unraveled. But maybe they would be the things that should come unraveled. And the things that survived it would be the things that should survive. It would be a spiritually daring way of approaching life. It would require the courage to let go of everything that wasn’t grounded in reality and the faith to trust that it was going to turn out okay. I’m reminded of the aphorism, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it was never meant to be.”

   

  The spiritual intensity of truth-telling has not been lost on religions over the ages. In many religious traditions, truth-telling is a central spiritual practice. Telling the truth, even when it’s an inconvenient truth or a painful truth, seems to be an essential part of being in sync with the universe. Satya, truthfulness, is one of the eight pillars of Hindu practice. In one of the Upanishads, the sacred texts, it is written, “No virtue is greater than truthfulness, no sin greater than promoting untruth.” It suggests that all other spiritual practices are useless unless you are also practicing truthfulness. It categorizes the practice of truthfulness as a kind of asceticism. 

   

  In the Christian tradition, the monk St. Augustine also taught absolute honesty and he developed a whole taxonomy of kinds of lies, organized from bad to worst. The worst kind of lie was spreading a false religious teaching. The least bad kind of lie was lying to save someone’s life, but in his view even this kind of lie was still a sin. There are prohibitions against lying in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. In the Book of John, Jesus describes lying as the Devil’s “native tongue.” In the Book of Numbers, Balaam speaks as an oracle and says, “God is not a human being that he should lie…” God is envisioned as a being who does not lie. Truthfulness is considered an ascetic spiritual practice in these traditions and lying a sinful indulgence.

   

  To me, this is a fascinating concept that truth-telling is an ascetic practice. Asceticism, meaning a kind of extreme austerity — forgoing of comforts; stripping down to the bare essentials of life for the purpose of spiritual growth. And truth-telling is like this: in place of the comforts of our social games and codes, by refusing to lie you are constantly reminding yourself and others that life is serious and life is short and we don’t have time to be saying things that are not what we mean. By refusing to lie, you state that we have a sacred connection to one another. Lying does soul damage to the liar, the lie-ee and the relationship between them. By refusing to lie, you refuse to participate in that kind of soul damage.

   

  It’s hard enough to say what you mean when you mean to say what you mean. It’s hard enough to really know somebody and to be really known when you are being truthful. It’s hard enough to not feel alone in this world when you try to be open with the people in your life. Much less when you’re spinning lies.

   

  So I challenge all of us to give it a try. Try it just for a week. Absolute truthfulness. No lies, no misrepresentations. If you decide to conduct this experiment, I’d love to hear any stories you have of how it went. It doesn’t mean that you have to say everything that crosses your mind – we should heed the old warning, “Always tell the truth but don’t always be telling it.” In other words, don’t go out of your way to say hurtful things. But, if you want to do this experiment, you can’t mislead people either by silence or words or actions. If all these great spiritual teachers are right, it will truly be a spiritual practice. And I bet it will teach us a lot about ourselves. I guarantee it will be hard to do, even for a week. Because, as Gloria Steinem put it so beautifully, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”