Fantasy and Reality
Sixth Sunday of Easter Scripture Readings
Fantasy can be destructive to the point of becoming deadly. It seems harmless enough. From the Odyssey of Homer to Star Wars, humans have used fantasy to understand, to teach, and to entertain. But when fantasy is used to replace the real world, it can cripple, it can destroy, and it can kill. The scariest part of it all is that most times, the ones living in that fantasy aren’t even aware of it. They’re convinced that their imaginings are real—so real, in fact, that they’re willing to build their world on them and to pay any price to keep them.
It becomes truly frightening when we start to peel back the layers of fantasy in which people wrap themselves. They believe that wealth is real. They may not think that whoever dies with the most toys wins, but they see those people as successes and those others who lack them as failures. They believe the fantasy promise that if they have wealth, they won’t suffer. In the software industry, there’s a term for applications that are for sale but don’t yet exist: “vaporware”. Yet in the fantasy world around us, so much of what we see as valuable is just vaporware: wealth is vaporware, currency is vaporware, and even countries are vaporware. Cities and citizens are real; the rest is fantasy.
Wealth in itself is an evident fiction. It’s only useful to be exchanged for comfort, to ward off suffering, or to exercise control. Yet what could be more illusory and fantastical than control? Power promises invincibility, but consider the most powerful men and women in history. What was the fate of each of them? So many have just proved the maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even those whose legacies transformed the face of the earth could do nothing to prevent them from being destroyed, being eclipsed, or just fading away.
The third fantasy that makes up the unholy trinity is the silliest and most insubstantial of all, and that is prestige. Prestige is self-delusion on steroids. It pretends that with prestige, we’ll never be alone. It’s the illness of external validation. It’s relying on the flattery of others to demonstrate the reality of a non-existent superiority. What prestige really consists of is an insecure, isolated person surrounded by others willing to abase themselves to leech wealth or power from them. Prestige is just another currency, exchanging one empty promise for another.
Why am I talking about this fantasy world here and now, in the context of today’s scripture readings? It’s because we need to recognize the spiritual force driving this fantasy world. We call this force the Prosecuting Attorney, the Accuser. This is the voice—no, the conviction—that drives the fantasy world. It’s the belief that we’re not enough, we don’t have enough, we’re not strong enough, and so we always need more just to survive. It’s the belief that, all around us, people are better off than we. It’s the spirit of competition, of jealousy, of fear of losing out, or of being less than. It’s the accusation in the core of your being that you’re a worthless failure and alone, and it will never get any better unless we fight tooth and nail for it.
There’s a name for this prosecutor who drags us before the court of the world’s opinion and reads the charges against us in front of everybody. Now, it tells us, everyone will know we’re frauds and just how phony and worthless we really are. The Hebrews called this person the satan. We’ve anthropomorphized this accusing voice and called it Satan.
On the other hand, there is Jesus.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept,
because it neither sees nor knows him.
But you know him, because he remains with you,
and will be in you.”
There you have it: the promise of another Advocate—the paraclete, the defense attorney, the Spirit of truth. What does that mean? It means someone who’ll silence the accuser and who’ll dispel the cloud of fantasy we insist on immersing ourselves in. The Spirit of truth allows us to see the world within us and around us as it is rather than as we would like it to be. There’s no quid pro quo in the Spirit of Truth, no competition, no winners or losers. Our value is inviolable. Our dignity isn’t dependent on our background or our possessions or our accomplishments or on what anyone thinks of us. It’s not even dependent on our decisions or our actions or whether we’re “good” or “bad.” It depends solely on the love God has for us.
“And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father,
and I will love him and reveal myself to him.”
We have an advocate who pleads the cause of our value before the world. That advocate is and was Jesus. He lived and taught the sanctity of each person. At every step, he both showed and explained what love is—the polar opposite of the fantasy preached by the world of selfish self-interest and arrogant contempt for others. Jesus’s connection to the Father left him seeing himself as he was himself seen, and that was all that mattered. Though he was hated, he needed no rivals or enemies—no “them” to define his “us.” And his embrace of all the things we fear and fight most against revealed to us the way to true victory over fear and self-doubt. Jesus is our advocate. He has always been our advocate. Though we can no longer experience his physical presence, his advocacy has never ended. As he assured his disciples, he has not and will not leave us orphaned and alone to face the prosecutor. He has, rather, left us the Spirit of truth, the touchstone of all that’s real, to be our advocate. The conquering Spirit that was in Jesus is also now in us in and through his love.
And here is where today’s gospel lands. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of reality, is not temporary. He dwells in the Father’s dwelling places—your spirit and mine. We know him because he remains—he abides—in and with us. Jesus, who revealed the reality of who God is—unbounded love—and who we are—God’s beloved, has not abandoned us. He has revealed that God’s Spirit—the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of love—remains inviolable in us unceasingly pleading our cause of worthiness before the tribunal of our own consciences. The Spirit of Truth is in us, pleading our cause unceasingly. The accuser still speaks; we still hear him; we will hear him until the end of our days. But the verdict has already been rendered. The Father has spoken in our defense, and the defender remains with us. The choice we are invited into is not whether to win the case—the case is won—but whether, today, to allow ourselves to live in the fantasy world of fear, or to live as one beloved, gifted with the Spirit of reality, the Spirit of truth.
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