Reality Has Never Betrayed Me

Sorry for the posting hiatus.  School started and life got crazy.  But here we are.  Back at it. So we’ll just dive right into the heavy stuff…

A few weekends ago, I went to the New York Encounter, the annual conference for a movement called Communion & Liberation (started by the Italian Luigi Giussani back in the 60’s).  The entire conference was absolutely memorizing to me, truly unlike any other conference I have ever been to.  The theme of the conference was “Reality Has Never Betrayed Me,” certainly not your typical catchy acronym theme that you might usually encounter.  When I first heard the theme I decided instantly that I absolutely must attend this conference because this concept of reality not betraying us just grabbed me by the throat instantly and I wanted to dive headfirst into this theme.  Is it true that reality never betrays us?  Sometimes it sure seems like it does.  I was intrigued if the conference would really dare to ask the question honestly, to take it to the edge of the cliff.  Is it really true that reality never betrays me?

The opening session on Friday night was a discussion between the moderator and Richard Cabral, this man who grew up in a gang on the streets of L.A. and turned his life around after spending some time in jail and is now a successful actor.  I walked in a bit late to the session and as I walked in these were the first words I heard out of the moderators mouth that he posed to the actor: “Reality has never betrayed me.  Can we really say that?  If we are honest about it reality is going to kill you.  And it’s going to kill everyone you love.  How then can we say that it doesn’t betray?”

Holy hot cakes batman.  So it’s going to be that kind of conference.  I mumbled a few expletives of excitement and awe under my breath to my friend and sat down and buckled up for what was a wild weekend.  The actor’s response to the question was fascinating and I will just give you one line here: “Only if we surrender and let love take us to death will death take us to love.”

Yep.

But back to this question- can we really say reality does not betray us?  It seems that it betrays us all the time.  Friends betray.  Family members drop dead from sickness without warning.  Dreams are left unmet or annihilated and thrown back in your face.

Lucky for me, there was a talk (which was actually more of a discussion, between John Waters and Michael Waldstein) the next day titled “Reality Does Not Betray. Really?”  This talk blew open my tiny little world.  There is so much I could highlight from it, but for your sake and mine, I will pick out a few of the most profound insights and highlight them here, and I highly highly recommend you take the time to watch the talk yourself (I will include it in the bottom of this post).

The first question that naturally arose was that of the nature of reality.  What exactly is it?  Because we have to know what it is in order to know if it betrays us.  This proved to be a foundational insight, because they spoke of the false realities that we create for ourselves, that we prefer to live in.  False reality by its very nature is a betrayal.  And when we think that reality betrays us, perhaps it’s only because we have set up for ourselves a false reality and the sting of that betrayal feels oh so real in the moment.  Yet we must be able to take a step back and question the reality which we have built for ourselves and see if it stands up against reality as it is.  And what exactly is reality?  It is that which is given, that which I experience, the concrete path of my current situation.  John Waters said something like this:

Reality is the path that I meet as I’m on it.  It is what is given to me, circumstances, gifts, signs, which are the ques and the clues which take me along the path that is my destiny.

He went on to speak of why we experience the temptation to create a false reality for ourselves… (I’m paraphrasing here)

For us today, life is  always elsewhere.  Wherever we are, it is not quite the place that we want it to be, that it ought to be… This is a culturally orchestrated condition.  Nothing is concrete.

Ratzinger speaks of the bunker that man has built for himself to live in.  The bunker has closed out the mystery, it has created a space where man is master because he knows everything and is all powerful within that space… because he thinks there is no mystery to challenge him, to discomfort him…. forgetting that the mystery is not just out there, but it’s in here (inside of man).

Life is always elsewhere.  My ideal life is always somewhere out there in space.  That one stung.  I think this problem is especially true for me as a product of my generation.  When life is elsewhere, it makes things easy.  I don’t have to deal with the problems of life being here, of all the things going wrong, of my own selfishness, of the imperfection of the present moment.  So, we want to create this idealized version of life somewhere else, off in the distance.  I’m not having enough fun right now with the people around me so I dream about being elsewhere with other people, and then when I get there that’s not enough either, so I dream again, and so on and so forth (the effects of social media on this condition are obvious and crippling, but I’ve already discussed that in previous posts…).  One day in the distant future (that is not real, by the way) life will be perfect.  One day, I’ll have it all figured out.  This saves me from my responsibility to the now, from my duty of the present moment, to the concrete people and circumstances of my life here and now, as imperfect as they may be, that beckon me to be present to them.  And there are few things we want to avoid in our culture more than responsibility.  So, the idealized life of elsewhere is a nice mask to pretend like we are taking some responsibility, but in the end it’s not real, and it betrays us and those around us.  And then we get frustrated and all angsty about how life isn’t all its cracked up to be.  Well, when you aren’t living in real life, of course it can’t be all it’s cracked up to be, it loses its ability to be anything at all.  We build our own bunkers, our own little worlds, because this is held up as the ultimate freedom of man- autonomy, to create his own reality.  Yet in effect it does the exact opposite of what we want it to, it cuts us off from any contact with real reality at all.  Being closed up in a bunker doesn’t leave you very “free” or liberated. No wonder we are so lonely, if we all create our own bunkers of reality, we cannot dialogue with each other, connect with each other, because we are all on our own planets and rendered incapable of any type of connection or communication with the other.  This is what a bunker does- encloses the self, incapable of contact with the outside world.  In those few moments where I’m brave enough to take reality on headfirst, I find it to be wildly satisfying and fulfilling, even if it’s not what I expected it to be or wanted it to be.  There is a certain peace that comes with just accepting the “givenness” of reality, of life, of it all.  I am where I am here and now.  It’s given to me, to us.  And it is indeed good that we are here.

Thus, I would propose, reality has not betrayed us.  It awaits us.  We have betrayed ourselves.

Here is the talk in its entirety.  I cannot recommend it highly enough. Maybe find some time this weekend to sit down and watch it. Maybe with a friend. Or some popcorn. Or both.  Probably not both actually. Just pick one.  But truly, do yourself and the world around you a favor and watch it.  If the full hour is intimidating, that’s fine too- just watch these two little segments from John Waters: from 2:45-8:00 and then again from 10:30-18:45.  This is where he makes the comments that I spoke of above, and he says them much better than me.

And finally, the ultimate cure for all in any state of existential reality-betraying crisis, Miss Constance:

God I love New Orleans.