The other day on twitter, I saw the question posed: “What are your favourite drugs/escapes from reality?”
After going down that path in my 20s and finding no reprieve, I would say to my friend that asked the question: the goal is not to escape reality, but to align with it - to push toward reality with all your might.
Now, you might be saying “but Josh, the world is so bleak, there’s so much evil in it - I don’t want to live here, I want escape!”
Yes.
Hear me out: you feel this way because this world is NOT reality.
We live in the fallen shadow of reality.
Let me remind you: You are an infinite soul in a body that was meant to live forever - this is not home.
It’s why most of us look around on many days and think of the world around us as a strange place. There is certainly beauty and goodness to behold, but it’s a strange imperfect place.
Now, don’t start to think that the world is illusion (Gnosticism) - it is incomplete and imperfect because of us, because of our fallen nature, because sin. I had previously made the mistake in believing that this world is “not real” - not so. Matter is real, it “matters” (pun intended) - the reason so many people worship nature and the Creation itself rather than the Creator is that Creation really is Good.
The reason that Christ came as a man, as the Word incarnate, because matter is Real. God doesn’t despise matter - on the contrary He assumed it - forever uniting divinity and flesh.
God is reality itself.
Find God, and you find Truth, you find what actually is.
From there, all joy and peace is to be lived, for that is grasping Heaven.
Heaven is not “somewhere else” - it is not yet fully realized for us, but it is “already - not yet”.
So, your goal, the goal of everyone here and now is to cooperate with Christ in the redemption of Reality.
You are playing eternal games whether you know it or not. There is an eternal ascent toward Reality itself, the ultimate journey is at hand. Not an “abstract ascent” - but a very Real one in a life of Prayer, in the Sacraments which pierce the veil and break into the here and now.
Go all in on reality, these is no such thing as “escape”.
As always, God bless, and until next time.
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