“Reality” and the Real

There are a lot of illu­sions in what is con­sid­ered real­ity. Social myths, polit­i­cal fads, pop lifestyle lies, and the ever-present spin-masters try­ing to make a buck. Words are cheap. “Real­ity” has gone soft. The major­ity of peo­ple in our econ­omy make a liv­ing by jug­gling words and sym­bols. We stare at com­puter screens and move lit­tle sym­bols around. It is real work in an unreal world. Most of it is very nec­es­sary. Keep­ing a cor­re­spon­dence between what is hap­pen­ing to its pre­cise doc­u­men­ta­tion is con­sid­ered a high art in a liti­gious world.

For all of the com­forts of a highly tech­no­logic age, I often yearn for eras past, in which peo­ple lived and died with­out the ocean of “nec­es­sary” paper­work that ver­i­fies every minute for insur­ance or gov­ern­men­tal rea­sons. Mod­ern med­i­cine has had its suc­cesses, but its coat­tails are long with paper push­ers. Stay­ing legal has become a sort of life and death expe­ri­ence. The files fill up and you won­der if you are actu­ally doing any­thing that makes a dif­fer­ence. When you die, your boxes of files are tossed. Your “life’s work” is in a landfill.

For all of the the­o­ries of what it is to be real and fully human, it comes down to the life of one per­son: Jesus of Nazareth. In and out­side of the Chris­t­ian faith, there is a con­sen­sus that he had a han­dle on what it was and is to be truly real. He lived before the com­puter age, the auto­mo­bile, the chan­nel­ing of elec­tric­ity, and the “dis­cov­ery” of Amer­ica. He was ter­ri­bly real out­side of what we gen­er­ally con­sider reality.

I have main­tained for years that there is only one his­tor­i­cal event worth actu­ally wit­ness­ing: the res­ur­rec­tion. The Inva­sion of Nor­mandy has been replayed over and over by Hol­ly­wood. Why are we so obsessed with death in the light of the poten­tial for eter­nal life? Talk about dis­tracted and dis­torted spin! Our cul­ture obsesses on crimes and dis­misses the “stair­way to heaven” afforded by focus­ing on the most mys­te­ri­ous event in all of humanity.

You can have all of the pop real­ity you want. Per­son­ally, I am less and less impressed by it. Give me some­one that can open the grave. The rest is just a footnote.