Do you remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz, when they pulled back the curtain and discovered that the Great Oz was just a normal man? Dorothy’s search for what was real – her home, because she did not feel she belonged in the land of Oz – led her to seek someone who had power to release her from the fantastical and unreal land of Oz back to reality and home.
If Dorothy was like us, she would have never left Oz to find what was real. She would have assumed that because the Great Oz was a fake, so was everything else – that the only reality was what she could see and hear, if she clung to the concept of reality at all. She never would have reached within herself and said “there’s no place like home,” because wouldn’t that be naive?
Humans have an innate desire for the “real” (by that I mean perfect or original); we crave a reality so perfect that it is unattainable in real life. Think of a perfect Christmas. Find a picture in your mind of that of it that would fit on a postcard. Isn’t it beautiful? Yet that idealized image does not exist; it is merely a combination of all the things you most love about that holiday – the ultimate archetype of Christmas. Why would humans have a desire for perfection that no one has experienced before? It is not like the instinct to eat or have sex. Those things fall within the realm of experience and possibility. What reason is there for the craving for realness and perfection, other than that there is a reality more ultimate than flesh and blood, dirt and skies? Moreover, what evolutionary instinct would motivate us to sacrifice ourselves for other people, whose genomes ours are theoretically competing with? All of these are ideals that mankind could not have learned from instinct and experience but exist because of mankind’s yearning for the real.
Yet we debunk and “see through” the traditional morals our grandparents lived by; we disqualify any figure in history who could serve as a guide based on moral standards that we’ve already condemned as arbitrary and unkind. We have deceived ourselves into believing that our desires and our conceptions of the good are informed by instinct or cold rationality, which cannot be true.
We live in a nightmare of our own creation, one of those nightmares where you fall off something and seemingly fall into blackness forever and ever, because we are too educated and sophisticated to believe that there could be a solid foundation of bedrock at the bottom or a Someone to catch us. We cannot get our bearings as a culture because we have foolishly rejected absolute moral values and the idea of a Creator who gives purpose and life.
The mistake comes when we believe that there’s nothing real left to seek. Because we have all discovered our share of fake wizards, we pride ourselves in “seeing through” or debunking anything that presents itself as “real.” We wander around Oz, confident that what we see is all there could be, yet yearning for something more.
We can disagree about what exactly the “real” looks like – what values define it. I’m not denying that. But those arguments must come from within the system of values itself, editing or deleting a lower value in favor of a higher guiding value. The only way to make progress is to acknowledge the idea truth and ultimate reality actually exists.
But how does all this start? How does one even begin to approach the idea of absolute moral values or ultimate reality? I would suggest that the human imagination was made for just that task. Become like a child. Turn off your cynical rationality for just a moment. Then read a fairytale or a legend, one where good triumphs over evil and where the prince rescues the girl. Imagine a world where trees were more than just a lucky combination of fibers and cells and where little girls’ fantasies of fairies living in the forest are not ridiculed or merely tolerated but encouraged. Go to church with the mindset that the person talking, no matter how simple or backwards they may seem, might know something you don’t. Maybe the truth is backwards or upside down from what you have always assumed. Stop looking for functionality and search for beauty – the kind of beauty that would motivate you to sell all you have just to possess it. Then keep going, and don’t stop until you’ve found what’s real.
(If you are interested, here is some recommended reading: The Abolition of Man & The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis; 12 Rules for Life by Jordon Peterson.)
grace upon grace 