What’s the Best Way to View Reality?

One’s perception of reality has an immense effect on one’s life. It is through this lens that one finds his or her identity, interacts with others, and, overall, comes into contact with the reality that one perceives. We could accurately diagnose many of the worlds problems today as stemming from incorrect notions or perceptions of reality that some persons or groups hold. These false testimonies are ideologies that, much like the Theological heresies, do much damage to the existence of mankind.

When a man with terrible near-sighted vision is without his glasses, his view of the world around him is a fuzzy colorful blur. It is difficult for him to differentiate between objects or persons around him and he might consider walking across a room without his corrective lenses an extreme sport. We see an example of this with Mr. Magoo, a cartoon from my childhood, who had awful vision, yet would still venture out and narrowly escape great dangers that would have been avoided if his sight was not impaired.

Is this the state of modern man? Is our  vision of reality so impaired that we are walking in and out of dangers, sometimes narrowly escaping and other times taking huge casualties? What lenses are we wearing that have caused our view of what is and how it is to be blurry and incoherent?

Reductionism

One lens that has impaired the vision of humanity is reductionism, which focuses too much on a certain part of something, forgetting the other parts that make up the whole of that thing, and sometimes says that the part is the whole of the thing. An analogy can be found with time, in that if we take all of time, from the beginning of everything to the end, and only focus on 1 hour, say 11am to 12 pm on October 2, 1874, we would miss out on a lot. We would ignore all of history and all that the future promised to only focus on one hour.

This happens often with the human person. Today, at a disturbing rate, there seems to  more and more of a focus merely on the human body and how much pleasure a person can produce for another and less recognition of the soul of the human person and the inherent dignity that it demands. This is easily recognizable concerning issues with human sexuality, such as pornography, of which John Paul II most wisely explains, “the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little”, but reductionism also impacts the human person in the area of consumerism and the mistreatment of people in order to save money or increase profit. This mistreatment can even turn deadly like it did with the 1,000 factory workers who died after their substandard building collapsed.

Furthermore, the notion that proclaims that the nature of a human person is determined merely by the feelings one has or even the sexual attraction he or she experiences and only that, is a cruel reduction that will cause more pain and confusion for those misled by it. Regardless of current feelings, this pain, confusion, and other detrimental consequences will manifest in a matter of time.

Finally, although I imagine we can go on and on, we see reductionism in the approach many have to the Faith of the Church. How many people boil down the Faith to a simple ideology within which we simply find a moral code or a place to feel good. While these are aspects of living a Faith filled life, they are not why Jesus left us the Church.

We are meant to come to know Jesus through our Faith, through our reading of the Bible, and through our prayer. These are not ends in themselves, but means to the goal of having a relationship with Him. In this way our Faith is not an ideology, the worship of ideas and mere aspects of the Faith itself, but is the worship of the One Who grants us this Faith and is the object of it.

Relativism

Another lens that is crippling the existence of humankind is the claim that all perceptions of reality are on equal ground and therefore should be equally affirmed as true. This is basically a universal proclamation that states there is no absolute truth that is binding on all persons of all times. Relativism is truly a contradiction in its own definition and finds its basis more on feelings than it does on logic.

The claim is that, because there are so many points of view put forward, it would be improbable that only one of them is correct. But isn’t that the case with everything else? In poker, the winner is the one with the best hand, regardless of the many other players with cards, and the only way to have more than one winner is for two hands to have the same value to cause a tie. In fact, leaving out the fact that there might be different ‘styles’ to play certain games dependent upon a certain culture, all games that are played, from sports to board games, have rules that bind on all people of all times.

For some reason, the Faith gets slouched into a realm of opinion, regardless of the trillions of miracles that have occurred since Christ walked the Earth and the reasonableness of the articles of the Faith, and people feel like they can dismiss because they see that someone else has made a claim in contradiction to it. Sometimes this is fueled by a misunderstanding of a certain doctrine or doctrines of the Faith, but this still does not validate any claim.

Moral Permissiveness

While this is really a big part of relativism, we can still separate it as many do who hold on to a certain idea of reality that they find to be absolute yet still maintain that others may do as they please. Moral Permissiveness, which is the allowance of all action either moral or immoral, allows for this and, maybe it is because one might not want to tell another they are wrong, it too causes the degradation of society. This is due to the fact that, when immoral acts are allowed, there is a restriction placed on those performing them. The restriction is not usually an external one, but an internal restriction that can make it harder for the one acting to say no to the act another time, lead him or her to an addiction to the act, or even limit the person from the peace and joy that comes from acting morally.

In this way, Moral Permissiveness is also a part of Reductionism as it reduces our freedom to merely the absence of external boundaries. St. John Paul II pointed us toward this truth on freedom at the 1980 World Peace Day when he taught:

“True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.”

He is reminding us that to claim that we can do whatever we want whenever we want is merely a false sense of Freedom. True Freedom comes from respecting the external boundaries that lead us to using our bodies and living our lives correctly so that we escape the heavy weight of sin and keep our minds and hearts open perceive and hold the beauty, truth, and goodness they were made for.

The Lens of Faith

When the world is viewed through the lens of Faith, the poor vision that man inherited through the Fall is corrected and we see reality as God intended us to. Jesus left the Church to continue the same work that He did for Bartimaeus, to help all those who live in the world to see rightly. This lens requires Faith, but God will help us to understand with our reason why this Faith is the right lens as we continue to look through it.

We get this lens from the Church in that through her teachings and Scripture we receive the whole gambit of history rightly, from its beginning to the present time. Furthermore, through these we receive an adequate portrayal of reality in terms of who we are as humans in our nature and what what we are called to do.  Also, with the Sacraments we are also given the strength to do what we are called.

In fact, I would say that in the Mass we are the most in touch with reality. In the Mass we have the highest point of human existence, where heaven and earth meet, so that God and man can join in communion surrounded by angels and saints outside of space and time like Moses on Mt. Sinai in the desert when he received the plans for the tabernacle or Jesus on tabor when He too had illuminated skin. When one rightly views the Mass in this way, they have the gift to see reality as it it truly is.

Thomas Clements

Thomas Clements

After earning a Masters in Theology from Franciscan University, Thomas Clements went on to teach several years of High School Theology, build and lead various retreats, form Catechists, give talks, and use his musical talents to lead others in singing praise to God. After many remarkable experiences of healing and grace over the years, he recently started Zenith Ministries to help Gen Z and Millennial Catholics experience the same healing and grace God has poured out upon him. You can discover more of what Zenith Ministries is and their mission at www.ZenithMinistries.com. Thomas currently lives in Atlanta, GA with his wife and four children.

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1 thought on “What’s the Best Way to View Reality?”

  1. ” if we take all of time, from the beginning of everything to the end, and only focus
    on 1 hour, say 11am to 12 pm on October 2, 1874, we would miss out on a lot. We would ignore all of history and all that the future promised to only focus on one hour.”

    In that one hour, everything that has ever happened to humanity or can happen
    to humanity is, has and will be done again and again. Fractals, that’s what you
    need to understand. That one hour is a microcosm of all history.

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