In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it.
Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right.
Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch.
My car was parked near a bus stop outside St. Margaret's, a girls' secondary school. A row of girls was lined up, waiting for the bus, all standing next to my inexpressibly cool, John-Steed-like, Bentley facsimile. My hair was long and shiny. I was wearing all the up to the minute finery my new found wealth could provide: green paisley shirt, blue jumbo cord bell bottom pants, red white and blue basket ball boots, and a jaunty scarf of unremembered colour. Past the line of girls I swaggered and leapt artfully over the door. Unfortunately, the hem of my bell bottom trousers caught, mid flight, on the door handle and I crashed head first into the car with such force that I found my head lodged on the floor, between the brake and the clutch, and I couldn't extricate myself. Well, not for several full, slow, agonising minutes, anyway. By the time I managed to turn myself around, press the starter and motor loudly but slowly away, the girls had, mercifully, long since boarded their bus and departed.
This was, for many years, the single most embarrassing moment of my life, but now I can recognise it for what it was: a spiritual experience. It was a moment of grace. It was a Christ event.
The spiritual life is about movement towards truth, and on that day on Papanui Road, I was moved closer to the truth about myself and about the world. We are called to abandon the falsehoods we hold so dear in order to make our way towards that which, from the moment of our births, is calling us homeward. Some of our falsehoods are glaringly obvious: I am not John Steed (and neither is anybody else, actually, including the actor Patrick McNee who played him) and my car is not a Bentley. Some of them are more subtle: I won't find what I am looking for by trying to be cool. Some of them are pretty much unconscious: I don't need affirmation and admiration to be happy, not from a line of schoolgirls I have never met and am never likely to, and not, actually, from anybody.
We all have our own particular and unique suite of falsehoods. We acquire them from our biology, our families, our culture, our life experiences and our imaginations. We live inside our own little cloud of lies, not aware, for the most part, that they are not true, spending our lives in relentless pursuit of schemes to make ourselves happy, that cannot possibly work. We delude ourselves that our distorted perceptions of the world are true, and that following them will lead us to our heart's desire, and we do this because one of the greatest lies we tell ourselves is about the nature of reality itself.
Just think for a moment about how we commonly talk about reality: we speak of the cold, hard truth; a dose of reality; we tell people to get real or say 'you can't stand the truth'; we speak of things as a painful reality. Reality is, for most of us, most of the time, something to be feared, or to be anaesthetised against. Reality is, in our philosophically materialist culture at the very best indifferent and at the worst malignant. It's no wonder we cling so tightly to our illusions.
But in contrast, we Christians make a bizarre claim about reality. We say In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God... and the Logos dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. We speak of Jesus being God incarnate, but when we talk about the incarnation we're not talking about some demiurge - some superhuman or God like being - strolling around in disguise, like Clark Kent in search of a phonebooth. We are making a statement about this thing that everybody is so hell bent on avoiding: reality. While it is certainly true that the act of disillusionment, that is, losing our illusions, is often traumatic, this thing we are moving towards, when we escape from our little cloud of lies, is not indifferent and is certainly not malignant. Look at Jesus Christ. Not the Jesus who has been made over in the light of someone else's little suite of falsehoods, but the Jesus who sits enigmatically but clearly enough in the pages of the Gospel.
This is the best picture you're ever going to get of reality: intentional, merciful, grace-full, life giving. This reality is the great goal of all spiritual discipline. This is what draws us, sometimes painfully, but always kindly, to forsake our falsehoods. Or, at least, to consent to their removal.
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Jackie Donn