A Meditation on Reality
One year ago, I began volunteering with an organization in Durham, North Carolina that has captured my heart. I cannot stop thinking about and praying for my friends, my family, at Reality Ministries. Throughout the course of my year with Reality, I paused several times to reflect on what I witnessed. I am convinced that something unbelievable is happening in Durham, North Carolina on the corner of Gregson St. and Lamond. And I have made it my mission to continue to be as much of a part of Reality as I can from a distance.
The following is a meditation on the concept of reality with special concern for my friends in Durham.
Meditations on Reality
German theologian Helmut Thielicke began his book The Evangelical Faith with the suggestion that there are two basic views of theology in the modern world: Cartesian and non-Cartesian. When we turn our focus to the nature of reality, we find it much the same. Today, there are both Cartesian and non-Cartesian views of reality. I would like to suggest to you that one of these ways of looking at reality is significantly more preferable for Christians.
We may best summarize the difference between the two views by drawing on two quotations. The first is from Descartes himself: “I think, therefore I am.” In this now-famous quote, Descartes suggests that all knowledge – including knowledge about reality – begins with the thinking self, the subject. In contrast, 20th century theologian Karl Barth radically altered this truth claim to read as follows: “I am thought of, therefore I am.” The difference, while only a slight grammatical alteration, is nothing short of revolutionary. Knowledge, for the Christian, does not begin with the thinking self. Rather, it begins with the revelation that God knows his creation. I am known – God knows ME!
A Cartesian view of reality is best described as egocentric. We begin with ourselves. Human knowledge of nearly everything derives from self-knowledge. Who God is; what a human being is; these things are determined with reference to the thinking self, the subject. The perceived good in this way of going about things is that it is self-fulfilling. But with self- fulfillment comes its negation: self-denial. For every instance in which the self comes to view reality with a sense of understanding or achievement – every time that I come to sense that I have a place in this world – there creeps into the mind that notion of doubt. Do I really belong here? Is this real? Or even worse, there is someone or something out there that seeks to deny my existence.
The thinking self, the subject, relies upon encounters with others in order to validate the self. I experience something to be true, but until I encounter someone or something that confirms my self- knowledge, there is always a doubt – a fear of misperceiving reality. The process by which the self is validated is also the process by which the self is negated.
A humorous example: In the movie The Jerk, Steve Martin’s character Navin Johnson, is an existential mess. He is racially and socially confused, without the slightest idea of who he is. In an act of self- validation, he scours through the new phone book until he finally sees his name in printed letters. In this moment of existential triumph, he shouts, “I’m somebody now.” If you’ve seen the movie, you know the rest of the story. There is a psychotic serial killer who randomly picks victims out of the phone book. He chooses Navin’s name from all of the thousands of others and tries to kill him. So, in this very small act by which Navin becomes somebody, he is once again threatened with the possibility of non-being.
But we are not talking about phone books, we are talking about schools and churches, governments and societies. For those of us who seek encounters with others that validate our existence, there will always be some who experience rejection. There will always be those on the margins who are ignored or separated or even worse, flat out lied to. They will be treated as subhuman and eventually they may truly come to believe that they are subhuman. They will be deceived into believing that which is unreal because their chief point of reference is themselves and their encounters with the world, with us.
This is the significant problem with a Cartesian view of reality. My own ability to think is the means by which my own existence is affirmed. Every instance when another challenges or disregards my existence in turn leads to a new doubt about the nature of reality as the I experiences it. I use Barth as an example of a non-Cartesian view of reality. Barth shifts the nature of what is real from the subjective to the objective. I do not exist because I am able to think about my existence. I existed even before my ability to ponder my own existence. Or even better, I exist even if I never gain the rational ability to make such a proclamation to the world.
Reality is not merely that which I experience. Instead, reality exists before I experience it, sometimes in contrast to some forms of “un-reality” that I experience. Existence is beyond the self – which means that it is beyond self-determination, self-limitation and self- doubt. Reality is no longer that which is posited within the realm of what I can experience. Reality now stands out from all of the deceptive unrealities that come from self-denial. Reality is this: God created us and we exist because God upholds his creation as good. We are adopted children of God, reconciled to the Father through the person and work of Jesus Christ, his Son. Reality is the Gospel. While the powers and principalities of this world may tell me that I do not matter, that I do not mean anything; while people and institutions may fail to acknowledge my humanity, the gospel proclaims that I am significant, that I exist.
We as evangelicals have done a tremendous job of vocally confronting powers and principalities who seek to negate the selfhood of those on the margins – especially the margins of the womb and end-of-life care. The problem is that the evangelical community has significantly failed to speak for those whose whole lives are marginalized; namely, the disabled. After the womb and before the tomb, we are silent. We shout to powers and principalities about those whose lives are in jeopardy, but for those who live their entire lives in existential jeopardy, we have not even the slightest whisper.
I suspect this is largely because we are trapped in a Cartesian view of reality. We create disability. If someone does not appear to be a rational and thinking self in the same way that we are, we are suspect of their ability to hear and receive the gospel, to participate in the community and body of Christ. Both subtly and intentionally we say and do things to suggest that some people belong on the margins until they can prove that they are significant.
Churches must begin to speak more boldly about reality in a non-Cartesian manner. Reality is not a subjective truth that depends upon the individual’s human response; reality is that before we as humans even had the capacity to make a response, God proclaimed our existence to be good and he assumed our marginalized human flesh in order to redeem it, giving it the utmost significance by bringing it to the right hand of God the Father almighty.
This is what I love about Reality Ministries, a fledgling ministry in Durham, North Carolina. Every Tuesday night at Reality Ministries, a space is carved out where scores of people – both disabled and able-bodied – come together and share table fellowship and community with each other. People find that they really do exist; that if even for just one night a week, someone else knows them by name and encounters them as significant. More importantly, the objective reality of the Gospel message – that God created us and sustains us and has redeemed us, and that we matter long before we ever have the ability to question our own significance – is both whispered and shouted. Those who live on the margins are told that they are important; those who think they are important are reminded that they are called to live their lives among the marginalized. Those who doubt their own reality experience a reality that obliterates all of the lies and deceptions and doubts that the powers and principalities of this world thrust upon us. It is a beautiful thing.
The challenge for the Evangelical community in the 21st century is this: We must speak the gospel truth to both the world and to the church. We must carve out spaces within our communities, our congregations, for speaking to and living with disabled people before we can try to speak about them or for them. This begins with the simple acknowledgement that our views of reality must change. We must quit rehearsing the Cartesian mantra, “I think, therefore I am,” and begin to remind each other, “I am thought of, therefore I am.”
I hope that others will come to experience Reality Ministries the way I have. I hope churches in Durham and throughout the world will be challenged to re-conceive their view of reality as such and will find new and exciting ways to live into the ultimate reality of the Gospel message: that even before we became aware of ourselves as thinking selves, God was and is and will always be FOR us.
