In most of my circles, we assume that reality is something solid.  We can get our arms around it and sink our teeth into it—you pick the metaphor.  We believe there are hard realities that we must accept and there are bits of reality that we can change with enough effort, but at bottom it is accessible.  There’s something to be said about this—reality doesn’t seem to respond well to our whims.  When we approach reality, we approach something we can reach, touch, and hold.

I don’t think any of you will be surprised to know that I’ve also wrestled with the idea reality is not nearly as accessible as most of my communities assume.  Some point to the ways that our talk about reality affects one another and conclude that our descriptions of reality are more about manipulating others (or ourselves) than about any actually real.  A few would go so far as to suggest that there isn’t anything “real” out there, but I suspect they’ve gotten a little to wrapped up in their own thinking and simply lost touch with anything outside themselves.  That said, there’s definitely something to be said for the idea that our descriptions of reality are more about the speaker than the thing we talk about—more about power and projection than the reality that cares not for what we think or believe.  (Yes, it seems to me that this is true even within scientific circles…)  Here, when we approach “reality” we are really grappling with our own filters. 

Lately, I’ve found myself relating to the idea of reality differently.  At bottom, I do not believe that capital “R” Reality lies within my reach.  It lays beyond my limited ability to grasp and my pre-conscious filters veil it from my perception.  That said, I want reality.  I desire it with an instinctual thirst I struggle to express.  I don’t desire to grasp, manipulate, or know it—I desire to take my place within it.  Somehow, at 36, I don’t sense that I’ve emerged into Reality.  I may have taken a breath of its air from time to time, but always I’ve retreated back into safe stories about what is real or only half unconscious self-deceptions.  I’ve accepted something less than what is real not because of cowardice or fear, because somehow I was not yet formed enough to emerge from the narratives and beliefs I had been given without simply substituting some other formative narrative or belief structure that would equally keep me from what Really Is. 

I suspect to a great many of you, this makes very little sense.  I am trying to speak of something that I don’t really know and that overfills the expressive capacity of the language and stories I use to communicate.  I’m trying to communicate about something that cannot be shrunk down to fit into the limitations of human speech—something that I cannot hope to grasp or understand.  And yet it calls me and I have no wish to deny it although I sense it contains horrors beyond my imagination and will shatter many of the little cherished thoughts and beliefs that I consider beautiful today.  Let them all be dashed to pieces and thrown to the chaos waters if only I may find myself standing in the midst of what Is.  Let even my inner self be broken open if only I might breathe air untinged by self-deception and the power mongering of little would-be beneficent tyrants (very few people think they want power for its own sake) and fools masquerading as learned demagogues (the sagacious know that wisdom does not play well to a crowd). 

I cannot help but wonder if what I’m experiencing has something to do with what Jesus called being “born again.”  It seems to me that we have domesticated this image in a way that does violence to its violence.  Birth is not a gentle process.  It is as full of tearing and terror as it is of beauty and hope.  Do we really believe that being born of the One Who says “I AM” is accomplished with a couple magic words and produces the fruit of cozy, fleeting feelings of belovedness or an emptiness the we must push down with a commitment called “faith?”

I want to self-consciously take my place in Reality in a way that I haven’t to this point in my life.  From where I stand today, I recognize that I can’t even say exactly what that would look like and yet the hunger remains.  I want to breath air untainted by deceptions, whether they be the lies of power crazed politicians, the paternalistic tales of the well-meaning, or the self-deceptions of a still only partially formed man.  There is no worldview—no ideology, no teaching, no religion, no theory—untouched by these deceptions.   My soul has been formed into patterns shaped by those deceptions and, lately, those patterns chafe.  So, I choose to embrace ignorance.  I choose to embrace the risk of confronting the unknown.  I choose to embrace the trust that somewhere beyond the protective veil I call “understanding” there waits something worthy of that trust. 

But, even if I’m wrong, I want to breathe the free, unfiltered air.  It calls me.