(The Nationalist, 27 October 2000)
‘Why doesn’t religion come down from the clouds and get into the real world?’ Have you ever heard that said, or thought it, or had it floating around at the back of your mind?
What is the real world? Is advertising the real world? Just think for a moment of a cigarette advertisement. Have you ever seen one with smoke coming from the cigarette? Advertising creates artificial wants, which it calls needs, and then offers a product, at a price, to meet that want. Is that touching people at the point of reality?
What about Hollywood? Is it the real world or a world of make-believe? Need one ask? Is anything more artificial, glitzy and self-indulgent than the annual Academy award ceremony, with those toothpaste smiles vainly seeking to conceal raging jealousies?
What about the consumer society with its message that if you have more you will be more? Is that message true or false? Is it not true that a little satisfies need, while nothing satisfies greed?
How much of politics is real and how much of it is smoke and mirrors, a matter of playing games with words and ideas so as to create an image, one which may not have much to do with reality?
How real is the freedom of the media? They may be free from government censorship but are they free from the pressure from marketing and advertising? Does the saying ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’ not apply?
How about international politics? The UN Security Council is the principal international body with responsibility for promoting world peace. Yet its five permanent members are the world’s five largest arms producers. Is that really working for peace?
So what is the real world? Is it not essentially about relationships, about how we connect with God, others, self and nature? Isn’t it about our priorities, attitudes and assumptions, even our reflexes? Isn’t it about our anger, our hurts, hopes, fears, grievances, disappointments, un-forgiveness and so on? Isn’t it about what motivates us, about basic questions such as ‘Why should there be anything rather than nothing?’ ‘Why should I care about anyone other than myself?’ ‘What’s life about?’ ‘Why are we humans beings here?’ ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What is the ultimate purpose of life?’ And that is what religion is about.
Do you know yourself? Or do you spend most of your life running away from yourself, afraid to meet yourself, and bartering the truth for trifles? That’s a real challenge. The real world is more the world within us than the one outside us. And the task of religion is to bring us to face ourselves in truth, without masks, to call facts by name and accept them as they are. That means calling a spade a spade. And it means calling sin by the name of sin and my responsibility mine.
‘Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’
(T. S. Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock, I)