A Home in the World

One of the most pernicious ideas that infiltrates Christian doctrine is the orientation to a life to come. Hebrews 13:14 tells the devote to focus on what is beyond life now, "For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come." 2 Corinthians 4:18 communicates that what is more important to focus on is something that is insubstantial and beyond this reality, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."

Philippians 3:20, 1 Peter 2:1, and 2 Corinthians 5:1 admonish the same type of orientation up and beyond the experience of life now. It is one thing to daydream about far off lands, it’s another to direct your life in line with a doctrinal mirage. Nietschze spoke of people with this orientation away from life as the "Backworldsmen" (Hinterweltler). The state of focusing one’s attention on a conceptual reality because of the unwillingness to bare the truth of life as all there is. While I think this attempt to dignify our current life’s suffering is understandable, it also has a very dark side. 

If I accept that there is a world to come that is completely devoid of any pain and, in every moment, iridescent with the brightest joy capable of being experienced, this keeps me in a perpetual state of craving. Think for instance, of the most exciting trip you had planned, perhaps a trip to Hawaii or Europe with your friends. Didn’t you, in the days leading up to the trip, have a hard time focusing on what you were doing? The eagerness and imagination of what it would be like to be relaxing on the patio at 730am with a cup of coffee overlooking the ocean and feeling the cool breeze. Fantasies like these inevitably pull one away from the moment you are in, even if it is an enjoyable experience. That is a state of preoccupation that, while positive, erodes the quality of attention to the life that is happening right before you. Now imagine that, not just a few weeks or months, but your whole life was lived in anticipation for the most enduring and blessed series of experiences you could imagine, how much more would that pull you away from life now. That is the state of being for believers who are believing scripture right. It is a prescription for detachment from our natural world. In fact, evangelicism tells us directly that we are to be "In the world, but not of the world (taken from the book of John).” Our bodies, our relationships, our possessions, our experience of nature, is all to be let go of. Not in the sense of non-clinging, but in the sense of rejection. This is not our home, but a foreign land that one is not to get comfortable with. This puts a real limit on the degree to which we can feel at home in our bodies. At home in the world to which we belong. It alienates us from existence. No longer am I looking at the multi-dimensional landscape before me as another form of natural embodiment to which I am a part, but I see it as a product of a divine intelligence from which my soul lives separately and will in due time depart. This sets up a pervasive dualism, a split between soul and experience, that for most believers is a lens they look through but few examine. When I come back to my senses, I come back home to the world of being, prior to concepts, ideas, and fantasies. A world of profound direct experience. A world existing here and now.