What is Real Life?
And How Do We Live in It?
I.
The leaves are turning. We don’t live where the colors overwhelm, but there’s enough to spark a surge of awe. On days like this, under a cloudless sky, and autumnal foliage incandescent from the early afternoon long light, that I feel the tension of realities. What is real life? What does it mean to live?
Does this sound melodramatic? Perhaps. But consider.
I exist in space and time: a finite person tethered to three dimensions, relentlessly propelled forward away from yesterday, toward today. As a rock, or a tree, this would be the end of the story. Existence.
But as a person, I experience this dimensional reality; this temporal propulsion. I am aware of my existence.
This awareness extends beyond my immediate sensory experience of those dimensions. It extends into relationship through language, which enables me to relate to and share experiences with other persons. It is extended into possible reality via the imagination, and rationality. And it extends into transcendent existence through a deep and abiding spiritual awareness.
II.
We do not often think of ourselves like this. Standing, as we do, at this cosmic nexus of individual, transcendence, sociability, finitude-under-infinitude. The sense of smallness troubles us. We know, deep inside, that we are small, and that the universe is big.
Big, and—relative to our ability to control—chaotic. It is probably not accidental that so many of the creation myths tell how the gods vanquished chaos to bring order. There is imprinted within our very creatureliness the knowledge that order and structure is contingent upon God’s power (Genesis 1:1ff), and that it may be undone should he allow it (Genesis 6:17ff).
Standing at this cosmic nexus, we are confronted with the fact that we are contingent beings. Conditional creatures. We exist only because and through the benevolent power of the God who is love, and who has life in himself.
Received as it is intended, this knowledge becomes our joy, our splendor. Existence is the overflow of God’s own nature; his goodness and love given form. But there is something in the human heart that resents this arrangement. For if we are truly contingent creatures, then we are existentially vulnerable. We do not, and can not exercise free control over the reality we inhabit.
III.
Frightened, we seek dominion over limited spheres. We reduce the cosmic nexus to compartmentalizable ideas and bounded spaces which may be sequestered and managed. We demythologize the world, redrawing the maps to reinforce our continental boundaries of “real life,” hastily scrawling “here be dragons” across the remaining realms.
The real world is thus shrunk down to a world that we can touch, see, taste, hear. To a world consisting of measurable goals and quantifiable successes. Real life is what we can drive to, pay for with a credit card, put on a shelf, listen to with friends, sleep on, fashion with our hands.
Except that human beings are intractably drawn toward the transcendent. Our limited spheres of directly experienced life are never sufficient. They bring a fresh strain, an exhaustion, even terror. And so we are always seeking to escape; we are always looking for meaning beyond this burdensome world we so desperately want to manage.
This is why we are irresistibly, it seems, drawn to story—seeking escape from the “real life” we created through minimization and reduction. Often, we seek this escape through television, literature, and film. Or by pursuing the intrigue of other lives, experienced through proxy on social media.
IV.
And so on days like this, when the rays of our home star penetrate the red and yellows fluttering from their stems, ending their lives in a blaze of glory, and the sky practically hums with azure brilliance, it is unsurprising that we feel pulled outward, to something thick and real, something more.
And the question swells in my soul once more: what does it mean to really live?
I suspect it means to live open to the tension. To live at the crossroads we so often try to avoid. Where insignificant finitude meets the infinite glory of God’s attention and affection for us? Where our inability to control the inevitable chaos meets the enormity of divine promises to sustain us through the chaos? Where discomfiture with the unknown collides with the Word.
What does it mean to really live? I think it means we choose to live here.
I love this.