How do you know what’s real?

There is the ideal, the dream, the vision and the hope; even things like worry and fear and dread that all live in the realm beyond this one, not here yet, or maybe never, but possibly could one day, if, maybe, perhaps…

And then there is here and now, you and me, your body and your life, the nuts and bolts of it, the reality of it, of what is, of all that there is.

The Mothers and Fathers and Others of the Christian tradition have said that faith is the evidence of things hoped for, not seen, not yet, not now, not here; that we must hold on to the promise of what is to come; that we should walk by faith, not by sight, which might as well be the same as saying we should walk by what we hope will be, not by the evidence of what is…

There is what we want, and then there is what we have. There is what we dream and know could be, and then there are the situations and circumstances that we are in. There is faith for what we believe could be true for us, what we believe is true for us despite the evidence, and then there's the evidence, the doubts, the whispers, the data that attests to the here and now reality of our lives.

There is a gap between the ideal and the real, and in many faith communities and traditions, the actual faith part of it has become about bridging that gap, but not in a way that pulls it all together… for too long, and far too often, faith is used as a means of escaping reality, taking us further away from the realness of our lives, the reality of our situations, the blood and brick and bones of life happening all around the world in all the horrific and beautiful days in which it does.

How do you know what's real?

How do you merge the ideal and the real together? How do you make sense of it and peace with it? How do you make what you want, what you dream, and all the possibilities that take flight in your imagination, real? On the flipside, how do we know what fears, worries and concerns, warnings, pain, and trauma are real, too?

Perhaps you've witnessed people's experiences being minimised and judged as not real, not enough, not true… Maybe that's happened to you? Maybe you've stayed awake in bed at night filled with fear about what could be, worried about what may or may not happen, thinking about all the ways things could go wrong…

Jeff Warren said:

"The reality of where you are is always more important than the ideal of where you imagine you should be."

Because here's the thing, someone wrote a memoir, and we've called it the book of James, and in it, the author said:

"Faith without works is dead…" *

And that concept works if faith is not a word describing a certain set of beliefs and dogmas outlining what you need to do to be holy, but is instead the meeting place of the possible and the actual.

Possibility is a beautiful thing, but if we do not follow possibility through to embodiment and practice, it remains simply that: an idea, something that hasn't happened yet, something that lives in a realm beyond here, in a realm we can become enslaved to.

And faith lives here, with you, in you… the infinite taking on form through your finite blood and breathe and skin and bone life.

Faith, in this sense, is the substance of reality; it's what we make it with; it's how we face it, move through it, and create it—moment by moment, day by day.

Mindful Prompt: Rather than thinking of faith as an abstract concept that takes you away from here, from you, from life as it is, rediscover it to be what brings you to now - the meeting place of all the possibilities and the things that actually become possible and real.

See you in the App, xo

Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco 

From this week’s series titled "Re-Framing Automatic Narratives", with a subscription, in the App. Hope to see you there.