A Story Big Enough to Live In - Week Four

I remember as a child growing up I would look in the mirror and contemplate if I was really real. Everyone else I saw was real as far as I could tell, but I wasn't sure at times if I was. I remember thinking since I couldn't see myself that maybe I was not real. I used to stare in the mirror and try to make myself seem more real. There was also a time in my life where I walked through the motions of each day wondering if others were real or if by chance I was the only one real, did I somehow make them up? 

I  pondered these things and eventually I came to the conclusion, more of an acceptance, that I was as real as everyone else and that the people I met shared this reality with me. Some of you may have not had to spend so much effort contemplating this reality but it doesn't mean that you, at some level, did not wonder about it.

I believe that when Adam ate that apple that God opened our eyes to the experience of questioning of our reality for the first time. Before we had no other reason to doubt our place and purpose in the world. I have studied my neighbor's cows and I think how amazing it is that they don't sit around comtemplating their reality. They don't know that their destiny is to become steak and burgers. Maybe they have just accepted their plot. They do like to move to greener pastures but they aren't trying to break out of their pens and escape or seek freedom from containment. They just graze without contemplating their own survival.

God put something in our hearts greater than survival.  In chapter four of the Sacred Romance, John Eldredge introduces us to  "a Reality that corresponds to the deepest desires of our heart.'' Only we don't know exactly what it is we are searching for. "We were born into a movie that is already started and we are still trying to figure out the plot and make sense of the action (Eldredge)." Life was easy when we thought our parents had the answers and we thought we would eventually be in their shoes. Then we, some of us earlier than others, discovered our parents were as clueless as we were. Now we had lost our compass and were adrift on an open sea with no direction. No references. Our guides were just as blind as we are.

At first you think you lost something, I remember going back to my old neighborhood trying to find it. One year we even drove through an icestorm with a newborn baby just so I could go to a New Year's day gathering at a neighbor's house in the old neighborhood. We had gathered there every year I can remember growing up and having been away from home for four years, I had a desparate need to reconnect with it. What it was exactly I didn't know nor did I find it there.

Even the greatest and closest loves of our lives "could not be there with the strength, tenderness, and consistency that we long for." We live in a larger story than the one that we try to create for ourselves out of the peices that we hang together. According to Eldredge, "We are desparate to find something larger to give our lives transcendence. We get caught up in sports, politics, soap operas, rock bands," anything that will help tie one day, one season, one year with the next, in some sort of higher purpose. Here are some of the stories people choose to live in. These are listed in chapter 4 of the Sacred Romance:

1. I am the victim: Why does everything go wrong for me?
2. I am a survivor: I will hunker down and survive the cruel, cold world.
3. The romantic: Somewhere out there someone or something will sweep me off my feet and make my life complete.
4. The sportsmen: the pursuit of adventure through their own recreational activities or losing themselves in the accomplishments of their favorite players and teams.
5. The Religious one: making a contract with God to be excempt from the arrows by accomplishing good deeds.

We search desparately for a larger story to live in and find our role in. When we don't find it, we bury ourselves in a theme similiar to the ones listed above. Most of us would agree that our story is bigger than we can conceive and yet we try to put a book binding on it so that it will fit neatly into our daily reality. Having accepted the story is out there, having attempted to find our place in it and pull together the plot from the action and  scenes we can remember, we try to make sense of it. But are we living as Curtis and Eldredge mentioned, are we living out "Random Days of our lives" hidden by a cover-up story.

Or do you agree with Chesterton who said, "I always believed that the world contained magic, now I thought that perhaps it involves a magician. I always felt life was a story, now I know if there is a story there has to be a storyteller."