Sometimes it is more comfortable to avoid the truth – to fail to speak up when it is in our selfish interests to keep quiet.  It is all too easy to go further than keeping quiet when we should speak out – to lie, to embroider the truth – to tell, what we like to think of, as ‘Little White Lies’.

ALL:   Help us to show a real commitment to speaking the truth, particularly when it doesn’t seem to be to our advantage to do so.

When we speak our truth, help us to do it with humility and to listen to the truths of others, so that together we might seek the truth, rather them just your truth or my truth.

ALL:   Help us to be continually open to new ideas and new insights, including from those we most profoundly disagree with: they may have much to teach us.

So much of the modern economy is based on persuading us to want things we don’t need, so that we will buy things we can’t afford. The pursuit of truth has no time for such manipulation, or for the deceit practised by the wealthy and powerful to justify their own positions.  As someone said ‘history is always written by the victors’.  The pursuit of truth means looking at life from the position of the vanquished, the victim, the poor and powerless: Something Gandhi understood well.

ALL:   Help us to live our lives in the pursuit of the truth.

ALL:   As we live our daily lives

Help us to speak the truth

Help us to hear the truth

Help us to live the truth