Under every apparently chaotic event, there is an underlying unseen order. There’s something drawing everything to action. There is a reason for everything happening so strangely accurately. Somehow those synapses in your brain connect with each other in the firing process every single time, and if at some point they don’t–well, that’s because you just locked eyes with someone you wish you didn’t still love. (Or there’s a possibility that you might be dead.) There is something telling tigers to squeeze their eyelid muscles together when the sun is too bright. The ancient people of the medieval world would say that these things happen because all things wish to please God. The planets move in circles, because that’s the closest shape to perfection. Plants grow upwards because they wish to be closer to the Lord. To us, all of these things are as real as real can be. But are they really?
Is this world truly real? I’ve had spells where I’ve doubted my own existence since I was seven years old, and every time it happens I’m reeled back from the brink of insanity only by the reminder of the tiniest imperfections of the world. God throws me–cold, emotionless and doubting–to the edge, but then he hauls me back, crying and broken, by the hem of my shirt. All of life so far has served to break me down from the dead computer I was born as, into a mushy pulp of a emotional girl––and it’s been an improvement. No, I cannot explain the world. No, I cannot tell you exactly who or how God is. No, I cannot tell you the ulterior motives of every person I know. But this uncertainty is life for a human, and with every brutal reminder of how mortal and unreal we are, we are pushed closer to eventual reality. With every lost love and broken friendship, the better we will become at keeping and building. All of life for a Christian can be summed up in the comforting theological term of “sanctification.” All of life for a pagan can be summed up in the fiery term, “damnation.”
I want to explore our current reality, so bear with me, and we’ll take a little detour away from apparent truth and wind our way down to true truth. What is this life that we experience? Have you ever really sat down and thought about how you think? How does that even work? There’s something that we call a brain, squashed inside a bony sphere, covered in a gelatinous goo that softly surrounds and massages the vitals within it. This brain is made up of little squishy channels of matter that spark out electrical synapses that somehow tell your arteries to expand and contract themselves, and somehow tell you to feel offended by the pretentious stare of that certain person, and somehow these synoptical synapses can flash images of your past across your eyes, your eyes that don’t really truly see anything. Have you ever closed your eyes and tried to see nothing? It’s not possible. Even in the darkest darkness, pulsating chromatic aberrations fluctuate across my visionless vision. Everything I do––even if I try to do nothing––creates a physical or mental result, whether I like it or not. I think, and then my fingers move to press the keys of my keyboard, and the things I think go on a journey from my electrical brain to my fleshy hands to my electrical screen that was thought up and created by another electrical human, who is just as alive as I am. And there are billions of these blooded beings in this world that runs on electricity and dirt.
So the questions arise; it seems that this life is real, so why does everyone question it at some point in their life? What is holding us back from fully committing to living as if everything is real? Everyone has doubted reality at some point. Maybe it was as small as a flicker in the back of your mind, or maybe it was a full-on existential crisis––but it cannot be denied that life has felt at least a little bit fraudulent to everyone at some instant. C.S. Lewis and St. Augustine have an answer for us. We doubt the realness of reality, because our reality is not truly real. We are searching desperately for the life that we lost so long ago. Lewis has a view of reality that sees our present reality as not real at all, and Augustine believes almost the same thing. He sees the reality that we experience as a twisted shadow of what life would have been like without the fall. God inhabits the true reality, as much as He could be said to inhabit anything––because where he lives is beyond living. We can’t understand the concept of truest reality, because we can only understand that which has been given to us to understand.
Continued in (2)
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