Pondering the imponderable, as if a fish could explain the meaning of water – we all tend to assume our many layers of presupposed perception of reality is somehow a sufficient explanation of reality. Which is not to suggest that the nature of reality is inscrutable but rather that it requires a more humble expectation of how what is real might be revealed. Everything that occurs has a cause-and-effect catalyst underpinning each event – making it a matter of discernment when trying to identify possible causes . . . by placing it in context.
For instance, if a four-year-old boy tells us he’s wrestling an alligator, we likely smile at his imaginative sense of play. But if an eighty-year-old man tells us he’s wrestling an alligator, we rightly become concerned that he might be suffering from dementia. In this way, the unreality of the alligator scenario, when placed in context reveals a clearer understanding of what is actually occurring. But this is a simple example of how context can give us clues – but sometimes the clues are far more complex in the way they are embedded in the context . . . because, like icebergs – we all have far more beneath the surface than can be seen.
Consider the psychological dysfunction of codependency — when a child of a drug addict or alcoholic parent is raised in the alternate reality created when shame, anger, and hurt invariably shapes that child’s default perception of reality. Then extrapolate that out over every relationship that child will ever have as a grownup – what framing of reality do you imagine gets promulgated from such a person? Now consider how we are all broken in similar ways, each of us shaped by our own stories, interacting with the brokenness of others – is it any wonder we might be tempted to imagine a reality that better affirms the life we’d rather live?
Then there is the modern notion that our consciousness is nothing more than brain chemistry reacting to electric current – an idea meant to underscore that a materialist universe is the sum total of reality. But ironically, this idea ends up creating the opposite psychological effect – where people begin to imagine themselves as disembodied beings who can be equally at home in a virtualized environment as being in their bodies. And this is how we become the avatars our devices have begun to portray us as – in a reality, we can simply put on and take off like a set of clothes. Until more and more we become hollowed out by the vanity of our own self-declarations . . . pretending that our actual bodies can be redefined as being whatever we say they are.
This is how a culture ends up ontologically adrift, with everyone speaking their own truth, living in their own reality . . . expecting the rest of us to conform to that reality. How does such an ethos not create social dissonance? Which is why we need to reclaim reality from this deconstructed milieu and we need to celebrate the immutable transcendence of our Christian faith in ways that becomes an invitation to return to the sacredness of their own existence as being made in God’s image. For this is the deepest truth of our existence, that allows us to accept each other as both broken and valuable beyond all measure . . . a perception of reality that invariably fosters forgiveness and redemption.
Remember – “love is what designed you for something more”
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