Living in Reality

You might be a pure materialist. But if you believe we were created in any way in the image of God, then we cannot be fully living in reality unless we are in relationship with Him. As mentioned in an earlier post, “Our brain is a transducer”—we are body and soul. Yet we often let the body and its impulses drag us along, to the detriment of the very thing that makes us in the image of God: our soul.

I’ve been reading a short but dense book on just this topic, The Deification as the Purpose of Man’s Life, by Archimandrite George. It’s as serious and weighty as its title suggests, and you could easily spend hours dissecting the wording and meaning of every page.

Here are a couple of quotes from the first few pages:

“From as early as the first chapter of the Holy Bible, our life’s purpose is revealed, when the holy writer says that God created man, ‘according to his image and likeness.’”

“‘According to his image’ refers to the gifts God gave man alone, unlike all other creatures, so that he is in God’s image. These gifts are: a rational mind, a conscience, free will, creativity, eros, and a yearning for the absolute and for God, a personal self-awareness, and everything which makes man stand above the rest of the creation of living creatures and makes him a person and a personality.”

To put it another way, we were created to live with purpose, and ultimately, we must ask that this purpose be directed by our Creator.

As the great Viktor Frankl once said, “Faith is trust in ultimate meaning.”

We were created to matter. We were created to worship, to help others, to fully realize ourselves in this truth.

One beauty of this is that, regardless of our circumstances, we always have the opportunity to turn to God and, in doing so, to our ultimate truth. In fact, in times of suffering, this can even be easier than when we’re caught up in the rat race of life.

When we seek satisfaction by filling the holes of our desire with temporal things, it only leaves us hungrier, constantly craving more. We begin to focus inward, on our ego, trying to soothe its pain with whatever is quick and close at hand.

But our attention should be elsewhere. It should be toward God, toward the reality of our soul, a soul created in His image. Why pray? This is the primary reason. Prayer is how we filter out the noise of the world and sharpen our perception of the signal coming from God through our soul.

Archimandrite Sophrony, in his book On Prayer, might have said it best:

“Prayer is infinite creation… Through prayer we enter into communion with Him who was before all worlds. Or, to put it another way, the life of the Self-existing God flows into us through the channel of prayer.”

Begin the journey, my friends. Get down on your knees, lead with tears, and let God flow through the channel of prayer.