Your people shape your reality. Who you spend time with and what you do together is a huge part of how we see life. Our worlds, our realities, are made up in part by those we spend our time with; those with whom we build and share experiences. This may seem like a no-duh realization, but let it sink in.
David Abram’s book “Spell of the Sensuous” is a book I’ve known for a while that I need to spend time with. It looks at our (humans’) place in the world as part of a wider community, people, animals, mountains, rivers–things that for most of history have been viewed as part of one big, living system, but which we are coming, at great costs to ourselves, to see as inanimate. It’s a slow read for me, but there are “a-ha” moments on just about every page. The following thread comes from Abram’s book.
Abrams goes back to Edmund Husserl, who is a guy at one point I was planning to spend a good part of graduate school for philosophy getting to know. Husserl grabbed the word “phenomenon” way before L.L. Cool J got a hold of it. Edmund said the goal of phenomenology is to “describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience.” And that without doing this first, all the fields of “objective” sciences had no context.
Another guy with a daunting name who peeled back the curtain of phenomenology is a guy named Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“We must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world, of which science is a second-order expression… To return to things themselves is to return to the world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks…”
MM-P said you can only have a field like geography, “in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”
Give me one more heady stretch here. When Husserl looked at the world he experienced, he had to account for the fact that there were other sensing beings with whom we interact with, and something like looking at a tree and clouds overheard, whatever the reality of it is, it’s “intersubjective,” experienced by multiple people. Hang on to your intersubjective hats:
“the very world our sciences strive to fathom… is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or ‘reality.'”
Abram is skimming the surface of Husserl’s Emerald City:
“The encounter with other perceivers continually assures me that there is more to any thing, or to the world, than I myself can perceive at any moment… It is this informing of my perceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of the world.”
Okay, now breathe. Grab a cup of coffee, put on some cartoons, or Shark Week. My apologies, no one likes to dig into the fabric of experienced reality without warning.
That’s an almost academic way to say, who we spend our time with becomes a part of our reality. We probably know that on some level, but when you dig into it, it carries even more weight.
I know my experience of the world, of life, is one of many, and I can’t get it all–there is way too much to take in. If I am honest and humble enough to admit that, I need other people to help me experience more, to understand more.
Like a lot of people, I drifted away from church somewhere through my 20s and 30s and early 40s, not seeing a relevance, not feeling connected to what I thought it meant to be a part of, or go to church. Over the course of the last few years, what I understand church to be, what that reality is for me, has been shaped, co-created in so many ways by the people at Christ Church Easton, particularly the Saturday “Alive at 5” service. Because that was where I saw, witnessed, experienced first-hand, people’s lives being transformed, by the honesty, love, and acceptance of the other people there; by the laughter, the tears, the joy, and the hope we found; by the Holy Spirit; by God’s love poured into people who shared it with each other, then went out, told others, and helped build a church family. I still like the word tribe.
When you have people who are willing to put themselves out there; people are searching for more out of life; people who are willing to step beyond the mistakes, missteps, and pain of their past in hope of being a part of something new, bigger than themselves, but of which they are a key, unique piece of the whole–the tribe you become a part of, build, invite others to, shapes your reality.
Let’s consider this post a preamble, an introduction. And let’s see what we can build from here.
