Awake

Truth is still one big "pillar of cloud"

I learned something interesting this morning. Truth and justice are cloudier issues than I thought. I guess I should have known. God did reveal himself as a "pillar of cloud" to the Isrealites on their journey through the desert, after all.

In a culture of the sovereignty of individual opinions, an increasingly free, open, and universal press (thanks to the web), and the persistance of nation-states, nationalism, and good old fashioned state-sponsored obfuscation of the truth, I find the line between truth and deception, hero or villain, right or wrong, to be increasingly difficult to draw.

With the very real possibility for all the facts to be gathered, all the truth revealed, I see an attitude of complacency to gather these facts, to reveal the truth, prevailing. This complacency only contributes to the surreptitious behavior of those who would "policy-make" their way out of testimony to the truth.

So even though we live in a world with incredible access to information, we have yet to see a world able to discern the credibility of this information.

Am I any better? I'm myself only a small voice that is maybe a just a little more than half-heartedly seeking to reveal the truth.

But I will say this: onward the explorers, the seekers, the ones who would embark on a journey to find the truth, to see it revealed before their eyes, to know, to believe and to gain something that they did not know they were looking for: a love that cannot be described in words, though it seems right to describe it as the deepest, widest, most amazing love they have ever experienced.

Today's journey takes us to the crazy mixed-up state of Israel. Both a favorite and a despised topic to "discuss" for a wide variety of people, today's story is one of a tiny bit of historical perspective coupled with the latest reports of an event that happened just the other day: the strictly conditioned release of Mordechai Vanunu from an 18-year prison sentence for his 1986 revelation of Israel's "not-so-ambiguous-after-all" capacity for developing WMD's via the Dimona nuclear power plant in the Negev desert.

Here's the oh-so-tiny bit of historical perspective: Past references to Vanunu in Sojourners Magazine:

• Commentary: Beyond Clan Politics: A consistent stand against persecution (January/February 1998)
• Between the Lines: Inspectors Turned Away Again (January/February 1999)

And...some selected recent coverage on Vanunu's release from the BBC (UK):

• Vanunu: Israel's nuclear telltale (Tuesday, April 20, 2004)
• 'Proud Vanunu vows to fight on (Wednesday, April 21, 2004)
• Vanunu: Hero or villain? (Friday, April 23, 2004)

Thanks to Shawn for the BBC article on Vanunu that sent me on today's journey.

Happy exploring.