At Least Two Worlds

Exploring where we want to live

At Least Two Worlds

What if I told you that the experience of life that you and I are having could be different. I suspect for some of us (myself included), our responses would range from, “show me” to “I believe,” with a healthy helping of, “I agree but don’t know how to get there,” mixed in. I’ve found the idea of a world to be helpful in navigating this.

In tap dance land a very small adjustment to a step can create a wildly different outcome. The experience of the dancer and the audience can change with the addition or elimination of even a single movement or sound. Add a sound and one experience is unveiled. Take a sound away and a completely different experience is unveiled.

In other areas of life things are quite similar. Make a small change in a seemingly meaningless choice and the following of experience of life can be drastically different than what we may have regularly expected. We seem, after all, to have a way of cultivating regularity. Irregularity demands quick learning, high attentiveness, and can be stress inducing. Regularity, by contrast, allows us to leverage knowledge, pay attention to important things (rather than everything), and minimize stress. However, our cultivation of regularity lessens the opportunity for change or growth. In order to grow then, a few things need to be in place. A desire for things to be different, honesty of where we are starting from, a willingness to start small and stay in the process for the long hall, and a vision of the where the long hall is supposed to land us.

This Vision is Key.

As many of you may know, I’ve been a professing follower of Jesus for many years. That aspect of my life has, as best as I thought I could in any given moment, permeated the rest of my life. My pursuit of the life Jesus embodied, as testified to in the Bible, has been a primary pursuit for me. I have, however, also been formed by a complex combination of my own list of desires, personality, social relationships, a multitude of cultural norms, and the specific pursuit and training around my artistic work. Add to all this the experience of growing up in multiple communities (my family, neighborhood, different schools, and the tap dance community) each of which seemed to have different underlying values. In this context, with these formative forces often pulling in different directions, the following of Jesus becomes a little more challenging.

If we’ve ever tried to do something we thought was good, but that was different than what we normally would do, or would be expected to do, we’ve experienced a similar dissonance.

The vision that Jesus proposes of the Kingdom of Heaven, brings together two ideas that I find extremely compelling. First, it sets up the opportunity to begin to envision what a world in which what God wants to have happen actually happens even looks like. Second, it sets up the opportunity to compare and contrast the vision of that world (the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven) to our experience of the world around us.

At different times in my life, I recognized that the world I was experiencing was not the one I hoped to be in. I had had enough experiences of love, generosity, gentleness, kindness, and joy, to know that there was another way of life. One that wasn’t ruled by competitiveness, contempt, anger, and the use of people for any particular end. Ironically, I felt alone in this. Without some kind of kindred spirit with whom to navigate this journey, I felt unsure. Was what I was thinking just a dream? Or was it the reality of the situation? Could there be an entirely different world? One in which goodness born of love was the governing principle. Where a sense of achievement or accomplishment wasn’t something to be chased in and of itself, but that hitting the mark was the natural outcome of doing good. Where doing good was the natural outcome of the character of the people who were in this world.

Competing Visions

There are at least two worlds that each of us encounter.

First, is the world that we observe. This one is filled with all kinds of people, places, things, experiences, and ideas. As we live in this world we begin to learn (at least intuitively) how we think this world works. After all, we hope to survive, if not thrive in this world, and what we observe seems to be the way things are. We need to discern how things work in order to make good choices about how to survive or thrive. We begin to naturally model ourselves after those we see who have the kind of life we desire, those we trust, or those whose choices resonate with something in us as good or right. This experience has a feedback loop. We are formed into particular kinds of people as we navigate this world.

There is another world. This second world is the world that want to be in. It is often described as the way we wish the world we observed actually was. We might say, “I wish people were more kind,” for instance. That really means, “I wish I lived in a world in which the people were more kind especially in contrast to my current world.” We experience comparison of worlds when we visit other families, towns, or countries. We compare these new experiences with our observations of our own world, and with the vision of the world we want to live in. We become aware of different ways of life – some of which we may like and try to adopt, and others we may reject.

As we navigate these two worlds, we begin to respond to the challenges of living in each. We make choices around who we are to become in light of these challenges. These two visions are often in competition, too. One may find themselves encountering a proposition like, “You can’t be honest and be in business,” for example. In the observed world there may be plenty of examples to support such an idea. However, this idea is in direct opposition to the vision of a world in which people are trustworthy. A world in which I would much rather live. There are many such propositions that exist, and therefore many point of contention between the two worlds. In my life, the simple act of existing has sometimes felt unattainable. Replaced by the battle between attempting to live in one world over the experience of the other. That is, living in the world that I would want to be in, while continually being drawn into the propositions of the world I am observing.

A Third World

In the midst of this human drama enters Jesus, with a proposition. He says, to paraphrase, that there exists a world that is different than the world that we are currently experiencing. That life in this world is governed by different values, relationships, and ideas than those that we may be most familiar with. That those values, relationships, and ideas, are closer to (although maybe categorically different than) those of the world that we would rather be in, than they are to the those of the world we are currently in. That this third world is one that we can experience right now. Importantly, Jesus’s proposition is that this other world is real. It is not a figment of one’s imagination, or something we could create for our own psychological comfort. It is much more than something we could ever conceive of with our limited facilities, and yet it is made accessible to us.

Jesus’s proposition does not deny any of the challenges of the observed world. The very real challenges of violence and poverty and distrust and animosity and manipulation are all real. Even the unfulfilling nature of aspects of the observed world –money and fame, for example – are also addressed. What is explicit in Jesus’s proposition is that the reality of such things does not equal the permanence of an experience of life that is fraught, and without the possibility of change.

Entering Into the Third World

The obvious questions that come up when speaking about such things are pervasive. They include things like, “Who is running this proposed world?” and “How might we enter into this world?” or “Who else is allowed into this world?”

These are all important questions that will get their due attention in future notes. In the meantime, I wonder what observing the world around us, paying attention to our own desires for the world we would want to live in, and taking Jesus’s proposition of the Kingdom of Heaven at face value could lead to.