The real world

We contemplate for a time the meaning of Good Friday, and then return to what is called the real world of work and shopping and commuter trains and homes.  As we come out of a movie theater and shake our heads to clear our minds of another world where we lived for a time in suspended disbelief, as we reorient ourselves to reality, so we leave our contemplation - we leave the church building, we close the book - where for a time another reality seemed possible, believable, even real. But, we tell ourselves, the real world is elsewhere.  It is the world of deadlines to be met, of appointments to be kept, of takes to be paid, of children to be educated.  From here, from this moment at the cross, it is a distant country.  - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


There are lots of aspects of our spirituality in which we can encounter the same tendency.  The physical world scoffs at our spirituality not only because it isn't the real world, but because it has little to do with the real world.  The physical world insists that it alone is the real world.  And at least part of our mind agrees with the physical world.