Have you ever heard the phrase “get real”? Most often it is a phrase of disbelief, somewhat akin to “tell the truth”. We often realize that what we are hearing just doesn’t sound with what we think reality actually is. And, quite often we believe that reality is the same as truth.
In a famous quote from the Harry Potter movies, Harry askes an ethereal Dumbledore, “is all this real or is it just in my head?” The immediate answer is “of course it is in your head, does that make it any less real?” And in that short exchange is a wealth of wisdom. Consider the impact perspective has on reality. We cannot escape the perspective of our own lives and beliefs on what we expect to be real or what we believe is real.
Across so very many years, I have been asked more often than I care to remember if what I believe is real. It used to be a bit of annoyance to try to answer this question about the God I believe in being real or not. I have learned to answer those questions with a resounding, it is what I believe. For me it is real. Now, that answer serves me well, perhaps you too, but there is a fundamental danger in this perspective.
The danger is that people believe that their own reality (their perspective of it) is the only one. It is just not true, reality is ever unfolding and always in process. Just as the universe is ever-expanding, so too is reality. If the Jesus/God you believe in today is exactly the same as the One you believed in yesterday, you have missed the point. Yes, God is the same now and forever, as scripture says, but we are not the same forever. When we become static and stop growing, we are no longer people of faith.
Instead, when we become static, set in our ways, faith is no longer necessary because we “know” what we believe. If you are the same today as you were ten years ago, heck ten days ago, I would suggest that you are not really living. It is scary to deal with the unknown, the “gray areas” that are all around us. I sometimes wish it was just one way or another, but life is not just one way.
Faith means to celebrate what we do not know, that is its very definition, of things “hoped for” and “unseen”. I do not trust people who have all of the answers. Life without mystery is a stale reality. It is why I choose mysticism, it is why the name of this blog is the messy mystic. My prayer for you is that you are ever-growing and ever-changing and open to all of the mystery we call life.