Rethinking our perception of reality

Let us take a minute to talk about onions.

This is what Robert Farrar Capon does in his book "The Supper of the Lamb: A culinary reflection," spending 12 pages cutting open an onion to find his assumptions about what an onion is -- odorous, spherical, dry -- are false, based on assumptions. In fact, he writes, an onion has an "utter wetness," is made up of pieces that look like vectors and hardly smells at all when it is whole.

"Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for that they are," he writes. "That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing."

Then, he provides the best definition of idolatry I have read yet.

"Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods -- to make them too important, and therefore, to make them unimportant altogether," he writes. "Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things."

An idol, Farrar Capon suggests, is something someone regards not for what it is, but for what it can be made to mean to them, rendering the object/person/circumstance a means to an end rather than an end in itself. To put it simply, idolatry is making things, circumstances or people into something or someone they are not. It is using, it is a lack of respect for an object's solitude and autonomy, a lack of respect for what or who it is in its being, irrespective of ourself. God is not an idol because God is the One worthy of our praise, worship, devotion, all of ourselves. That is God's being, and therefore, it is not false.

Often, I think, reality gets a bad reputation as something dull and dreary and undesirable. I think, however, that is because what we think is reality is actually unreality, an assumption about the way something "should be" that keeps us from opening ourselves to the gift of what is. We have forgotten the frivolous abundance of our God and the way God lavishes it upon us; we have forgotten to look. The real world offers us an abundance of wonder, an emporium of concepts, intricacies and sights to marvel at -- we need only turn to nature for proof of this. In our lives, too, perhaps we turn away from the difficult situations because they are so real and contain so much of the presence of God and God's offer of grace that we balk at receiving it. This is not how we expected reality to look. God came as a baby, and we wanted a majestic ruler rolling through in splendor and designer shades. Instead, God's crying and burping and making poop we have to clean up again. This is not how we imagined it.

But isn't that the point? Our imaginings are not reality; this, here, is. "I AM," people told each other God said, and I'm going to believe them. Because look around and inside you and over there at the person sitting by the window and that guy over there by the door, and isn't it all too marvelous not to? A God who exists amidst it all, in us all, with us all, through us all. If it seems too good to be true, could it possibly be because we are operating out of a faulty definition of reality? And if it is not too good to be true, maybe we could reevaluate our meaning of truth.

God is real, and so reality speaks of God; let us, then, turn to face it. Let us, with God, look the real circumstances of our lives in the face, we don't have to be afraid. In this childlike gazing, there is a marvelous freedom, a courage, a wonder, we might bring to the situations of our lives when we look openly rather than shutting our eyes. It is true; even onions cause us to cry. But if we surrender ourselves to the inevitability of the tears and peel back the skin to pay attention to the onion, we come away with a richer knowledge of what it actually looks like inside. And the tears subside.