Mirages

We’ve all seen it in movies or TV shows: The hero of the story walking through an endless Saharan desert, dying of thirst, while his mind starts creating illusions of the things he needs or desires most. It is at least how I learned what a mirage was, when I was just a tot.

Mirages don’t only exist in the extreme heat of blisteringly hot landscapes. We wander a different kind of water-less existence – the personal pains we do not wish to face that lurk beneath our consciousness. For many that pain is the status of singleness, that bites the back of the mind while conscious thoughts and actions dominate our attention.  For others this may be self-loathing, as guilt simmers in their gut from a past mistake. Throughout, we feel the dull pang of inner thirst, and when we are without conscious thoughts or actions to distract ourselves, we enter similar delusions as the traveler in the desert – an oasis in the parched land of our pain – a fantasy of that which we think will vindicate us from our plight.

The pain of the moment is circumvented, as we relocate our consciousness from that which is killing us inside, to a dream of what would fix it. Sometimes that looks like imaginary conflicts with people that hurt us, or inner depiction of how we would be admired if we succeeded in some way. There are limitless versions of such pain aversion.   

For those of us who are believers, our conscience may pry and ask “shouldn’t I be looking at Jesus in this moment? Don’t I realize I am thinking in circles?” and when we wrestle with ourselves over such a thing, we find ourselves hopelessly drawn back into the warm embrace of the fantasy. In so doing, we remove ourselves not only from the agony we are subconsciously experiencing, but also from the current moment that Christ should exist with us.

It’s hard to find Him in the fantasy. I’d dare say that it is nearly impossible. Instead it seems like Jesus and the pain are located in the exact same space: in the present embodied now one is avoiding. Maybe a reality that is difficult to face is this: that the two are a package deal. Jesus wants to exist within the pain one is avoiding – or maybe this, that confronting the pain and identifying the fantasy as vain escapism, is the first step to realizing what Jesus wishes to address in us.

By confronting the hells of this world, Jesus didn’t aimlessly wander in fantasies and “could-be’s” or “should-be’s”. He shouldered his agony in His desert wanderings (Matt 4:1-11), and agonized on nails and wooden beams three and a half years later. He faced ultimate pain, and by doing so, superseded it.

Maybe we fortify ourselves in our desert wanderings, as combined influences of the pain of our path and the presence of Jesus changes us in to something greater than we were before.

If you find yourself in a broken record of fantasies and thoughts you cannot escape, drop a line at the bottom of the homepage.

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