Savouring Grace

Earlier this week–actually day one of back-to-homeschool–I wrote in my prayer journal for the first time in a year and a half.  That’s about the average gap between entries.  I love to write but when it comes to talking with God, I rarely let it escape on to the page.  So it’s all the more remarkable that I recorded this particular prayer (of sorts) because it was actually answered, and in written form, that same night.  In a way, you could say that I wrote God a letter and He wrote me back.

In the interest of space and sparing you my partially PMS fueled “woe is me” ramblings to the Creator of the universe, I will only share the central part of my prayer.  My overall tone was discouraged and pleading (no big life crisis, just internal stuff).  Part of it was emotional and part intellectual, a sort of grasping for truth.  Here it is:

There are two worlds — one is real and one is an illusion.  Which is which?  Illusions have to be seen, therefore it makes more sense that the visible world is but a shadow of the reality that can only be experienced in spirit.  The physical world is all that can be proven by physical methods to physical beings, so are we more than our bodies?  We cannot separate from our bodies while in this life, but why have people had “spiritual” drives since the beginning of history?

I so wish I had time now to read apologetics and the arguments for and against evolution.  There’s a bitter irony in educating my children while feeling an academic disconnect.  My faith has always needed a sure footing, hence my thrill at discovering C.S. Lewis.  It’s getting wobbly now but I can’t fill up on heady stuff because there’s no room in my current life to chew on, let alone digest such lofty concepts.

And so, Lord, my only recourse, and undoubtedly the best one, is to come to you and pour out my jumbled thoughts and anxious feelings, believing you will strengthen my faith and revitalize my spirit…

Fast forward to sometime after 11pm (and I had been up until 2am the night before).  My eyes are heavy, but in a literary haze equivalent to a junk food binge, I cannot put down the latest copy of Real Simple Magazine.  The thick digest, stuffed with ads, must be triggering the nostalgic bliss of poring over the fall issue of Seventeen, one of the few pleasant memories of my adolescent years in the mid 80s.  And so, after sleepily skimming “how to look [my] best online,” I turn the page and suddenly I’m wide awake, staring at this famous phrase, shouted at in all caps:  I THINK, THEREFORE I AM.  What on earth is Descartes doing here?

When it comes to magazines (and them alone), I’m not a table of contents kind of girl.  I also can’t stand to see the preview of the movie/show I’m about to watch (when the new Battlestar Galactica was airing, I would always fast forward that part).  So while reading Real Simple, I had absolutely no clue that two-thirds of the way into it, I was going to be hit over the head (in a good way) with Philosophy 101:  A cheatsheet of the big ideas of history’s greatest thinkers.

The first synopsis was from the earliest philosopher, Plato, whom I only just superficially encountered this past year while teaching ancient history to my first grader (okay, I may have bumped into him in college and grad school, but we never made it past small talk, which in hindsight, was a travesty).  I was completely gripped by these opening sentences describing his Theory of Forms (the quote is exact):

Everything on earth, whether an object (such as a car) or an idea (such as justice), is actually an imperfect copy of an ideal and permanent “form” that exists somewhere, beyond our universe.  This is known as the Theory of Forms. The place where all these forms exist is guided by a heavenly force that Plato believed should influence our behavior. (This notion shaped Christianity).

Hello God.  You are real, you are near, and you have a sense of humor.  Real simple, indeed!  What’s that?  You have more to say?  On to the next philosopher (the one who woke me up on the previous page)…

Descartes believed that the mind and its thoughts were not part of the body, or even the physical world. (Although he did believe it communicated with the body through the brain.) This interaction between the mind, which is a nonphysical thing, and the body, which is a physical thing, is known as Cartesian dualism.

Proof of one’s existence is not to be found in the three-dimensional world (by tapping one’s forehead, for example) but in the very fact that one is pondering that existence:  You think, therefore you are.

Cartesian dualism is neatly explained by the film The Matrix…

What makes this even more amazing is that as I was writing my prayer, I actually thought about that movie as the analogy for what I was grappling with.   Needless to say, I was totally stunned and in a state of epiphany-induced euphoria, and were it not for only getting 4 hours sleep the previous night, I would have been bouncing off the walls (figuratively speaking).  Instead, I closed my eyes and thanked God for showing me how much he loves me by meeting me exactly where I am, both spiritually and literally…even if it’s between the covers of a woman’s magazine.