In her book “Guidelines for Mystical Prayer,” Ruth Burrows describes what it means to die a “happy death.” To die in a good way, she states, is not a question of whether death catches us in a morally good moment or a morally bad one (e.g., dying drunk in a bar as opposed to dying in a church). Rather, to die a happy death is to die in honesty, without pretense, and without the need to lie about our lives. Only a saint, she says, can afford a saint’s death. The task for the rest of us is to die in honesty as sinners, asking God to forgive us for a life of weakness. We read in scripture how Jesus picked up parables and stories that were current in his culture and tailored them to further his own religious and moral teachings. Moreover, he taught, and with precious little equivocation, that we are to honor truth wherever we see it, irrespective of who’s carrying it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that true faith is humble enough to accept truth wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big minds and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be. God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceiving and receiving goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.