Vanishing Point

There's a great phrase in the bible that's translated in the King James as "from everlasting to everlasting."  The concept is as if you're standing in the middle of the desert, squinting off to the horizon trying to see where the line is between reality and mirage.  The best you can make of reality while squinting into the shimmering heat is the "from" part of the phrase.  The "to" part is turning around one hundred and eighty degrees and doing the same thing in the opposite direction. 

Much of our life's energy is spent searching out some point on the horizon, just past the distance at which things can be easily seen.  The range of possibilities associated with our relentless squinting and straining is infinite.  We might be trying to anticipate something fun (e.g. "What am I going to get for Christmas?") or trying to adapt to a changing challenge, a threat or even a potentially horrible circumstance.  All these exercises depend on our imagination for their existence.

The distant dancing shadows can be our biggest invitation to worry.  It's an invitation we usually grab with both hands and hang on to like grim death.  When someone is kind enough to point out that we're wrestling with shadows, we usually respond with a self justification that sounds like, "But they're my shadows."  Somehow we imagine that because they're ours they're more real or at least more legitimate than everyone else's.

Of course, we give birth these shadows.  We give them life, dress them up and sometimes even build our entire lives around them. Even though we work hard at ignoring, despising or at least managing them. we return to them every chance we get.

Shadow's lack normal perspective.  As they grow closer due to the passing of time or our gravitating toward them, they grow in size out of proportion to everything else.  They get big fast and as shadows do, they darken everything they touch.

Oddly though, once we pass them they shrink quickly or even vanish completely.  In the end, the only purpose they've served is to distort the view that extends between everlasting and everlasting. 

All shadows are cast by something; they never have a life of their own.  In keeping with the theme of broken perspective, it is the universal characteristic of our invented shadows that they cast darkness out of all reasonable proportion to the object that creates them.  Even when the originating object is what we might all agree to as being serious, our creation of the corresponding shadow creeps over everything, obscuring the original subject so much that it can barely be seen at all.  This makes it all the harder to engage the issue itself as we're off flailing in the darkness, wrestling with nothing. 

To oversimplify some, here's a simple layout of the course all lives follow:  Birth, living, death, the thing that's next.  Over arching the "birth, living, death" phases is the idea that the world is not perfect.  In turn, we're asked during the "living" phase to respond to the present reality of  imperfection with our power of choice.  We can choose to rail against it, ignore it (still a choice), run away from it or accept it.  While all these choices exist within the realm of the possible, accepting reality is the only option that makes sense.  In the end, our choices are a necessary causal component of "the thing that's next."  This is an area where it's important to be within the generous boundaries of right.

That brings the next question, what is reality?  The clearest place to find the answer to this isn't in propositional logic.  That's because human logic exists only in the narrative context of human life and society.  It's shaded by everyone's respective shadows.  My vote for a solid take on reality is the narrative found in the bible.  I've written before about the book of Job.  The book of Job is the best condensed expression of human state and of  man's relationship to God I know of.  Here's the short version of what God says there:  "To understand reality, you must accept that I am who I say I am.  You must accept that you are who I spoke you to be.  Physical reality is the product of my creation and your broken choices." 

That perspective is the yardstick by which all shadows should be measured.  And in fact, shadows of proper proportion may be ignored completely because all we ever cared about was the object anyway.

I'll end this with a writer's confession.  I find myself wanting to say more here, to address again the reflexive, "But you don't understand how tragic and scary my situation is."  Any such reflex on my part is bound to fail.  We must each find our own perspective and with God's help, force our shadows to submit.  As we move between our vanishing points, we need, deeply need, to accept who and what God is, who we are and where we live.  Everything else is distortion, darkness and shadow.