The “Real World?”
Entering “the real world” is a favorite theme of speakers at graduation ceremonies. They are usually referring to the “working” world of business and industry as opposed to the unpracticed world of high school and college.
But people searching for God must also ask ourselves, “Where, or what, is the real world?”
Faith, according to popular wisdom, is the inverse of the “real world.” Faith is the world of the spiritual, the idealistic, the theological. Serious people, it is said, don’t bother with that world, and many are cynical about it.
Indeed, according to popular culture, the “real world” is about people’s relationship to “real” things, like money, position, fame and power. One can’t let “unreal” things, like loyalty, friendship, family and love, interfere.
About Making Money
In this context, I can’t help but think of a U.S. presidential candidate – who is fond of calling people “losers.” His life has been about making money, and if the news reports about his past are true, often at others’ expense.
Back when he hosted the TV show The Apprentice his values were already on display. To me, he came off as a pompous executive telling someone with a smug grin, “You’re fired,” which is how contestants were eliminated from the competition that was part of the show.
I know, it was entertainment, but entertainment reflects and is a model for “the real world.” The message was, it’s OK to fire people and even enjoy the power and ignore the fact that a person’s livelihood and that of his or her family are involved and that losing a job causes grief that is second only to the death of a loved one. In this “real world,” there is no room for compassion and sensitivity.
For me, “real” employers are humane. They fire people only as a last resort and do so in the most sensitive way possible.
We Quickly Forget
But let’s face it, many of us who are searching for God prefer the “real world.” We have way too much interest in things and our relationship to them and too little in the possibilities offered by faith and spirituality. Questions about God, and his/her relationship to us may hold some interest, but we quickly forget about them in the face of the practical and concrete.
We have a hard time believing in the existence of anything we can’t see, feel, smell, hear or test. We struggle to include the spiritual in our “real” world. We know faith, hope and love are important, but the concrete and practical always seem to intervene.
One of my heroes of the 1960s was Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who recently died. I always think of him as the subject of a line in Paul Simon’s song, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” It goes, “When the radical priest came to get us released, we were all on the cover of Newsweek.”
Berrigan was certainly not part of the “real world.” He was a Vietnam-era anti-war protester and poet, somebody who wasn’t afraid of scorn in standing up for what he believed. “Know where you stand, and stand there,” he is reported to have said. He wasn’t on the cover of Newsweek but was on the cover of Time and spent time in jail for his protests. He was an idealist who placed values over things.
Do Hopeful Things
According to a lifelong friend, Berrigan was enamored of the idea of hope and told the friend, “If you want to be hopeful, you have to do hopeful things.”
If the term “real world” conjures up the presidential candidate, it also brings to mind Pope Francis as its antithesis. He’s an advocate for the spiritual but knows that means “building a more humane world.”
Instead of tirades on why we should be afraid – and build border walls, exclude people based on their religion or nationality and expand an already bloated military – one of the Pope’s dogged themes was recently expressed in this message to the first United Nations’ World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul.
“I offer a challenge to this summit: Let us hear the cry of the victims and those suffering. Let us allow them to teach us a lesson in humanity. Let us change our ways of life, politics, economic choices, behaviors and attitudes of cultural superiority. Learning from victims and those who suffer, we will be able to build a more humane world….”
