At Times; Disillusioned at Seventy

In the early 1900's, John Boynton Priestley wrote an essay entitled: "The Disillusioned."  It took me back a bit when I read: "We are perpetually disillusioned.  The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a Touch."

I realized that long before I became disappointed in my first iPhone, cell phone, mobile phone, pager, fax machine, manual typewriter, teenage hair cut, pin ball machines, "red rover- red rover," kick the can, or cap gun existed; long before the Millennial Generation was disillusioned with Generation Y and Generation Y disillusioned with Generation X or Generation X with the Baby Boomers before them, and the Baby Boomers with the Great Generation before them, disillusionment reigned.  Priestley, a social commentator, who wrote this comment was writing about his own disillusioned culture.  His words came more than a decade after a group of literary notables identified themselves as the "Lost Generation."  So named because of their own general feeling of disillusionment. I suppose I am trying to make the  case that disillusionment has been epidemic for a very long time and not just with me.

As a person among others, who tell, hear and share stories, the possibility of taking in a story that is bigger than reality is quite likely.  As a side, this is what advertisers make their living off of, I believe.  Subsequently, disillusionment is a quality that follows every one.  Yet despite its common occurrence, it has been my experience that disillusionment, for the most part, has been a crushing blow, with the collateral damage of shattered expectations quite painful.  I think that it's probably with good reason that I journal it in terms of the discomfort and disruption that it fosters; for I often frame the crushing of certain hope and images in terms of loss and difficulty.  I discover that most of disillusionment does not speak of my losses lightly, no more than a victim of burglary moves quickly past the feeling of loss and violation.

And yet, as I have given it thought and practically speaking, disillusionment is the loss of illusion.  When I think of it in terms of theft, it is the equivalent of having my high cholesterol or a perpetually bad habit stolen.  Disillusionment, while painful, is evidence which shows the myths that enchant me need not blind me forever.  A sign that what is falsely believed can be shattered by what is genuine.  In such terms, such disillusion is far less an unwanted intrusion than it is severe mercy.

I think the crucifixion of the Son of God is something like this.  The death of God?  There are no categories with which to understand it.  For those who first held hope in the person of Jesus, it was the same.  The death of the one thought to be the Messiah?  It was an event that leveled them with disillusionment.  New Testament scholar N.T. Wright describes the force of this dissonance in his book, Jesus and the Victory of God: "There were, to be sure, ways of coping with the death of a teacher, or even a leader.  The picture of Socrates was available, in the wider world, as a model of unjust death nobly borne.  The category of 'martyr' was available, within Judaism, for someone who stood up to pagans... The category of failed but still revered Messiah, however, did not exist.  A Messiah who died at the hands of the pagans, instead of winning [God's] battle against them was a deceiver."

From reading the Gospel accounts, it is not hard for me to believe that for those who loved Jesus most, it took time to see that it was not hope but their hopeful illusions that died with him on the cross.  Everything they thought God was, every hope for a messiah wielding power and control, every image of God winning the battle, everything they thought they knew about religion, painfully, but mercifully died on a shameful, Roman cross.  Making it applicable to Bill Prather, I too, bury my illusions with the body of God, without illusions I confess, it has never been a simple journey.  I have found the powerful words of poet W.H. Auden to help describe what is often the case in my personal world filled with illusion: 

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

If I will allow it, this death can be far more than loss.  While advertisers count on our moving from one dead illusion to the next, the death of Christ tells a different kind of story, a demythologizing story, which cuts through the storied layers of illusion I continually create about myself, the world, and others.  Within such a story, disillusionment is the precursor to nothing short of resurrection.  And faith is the audacity to confront my illusions with a cross.  I found in The Clampit Lectures, these words of author Parker Palmer.  "Faith is the courage to face into our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned about them, the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them.  Faith..is a disillusioned view of reality...that lets the beauty behind the illusions shine through."

Heavenly Father God, I come this day to bury my illusions with your Body.  I confess mourning my losses and lamenting over the graves of dead dreams and expectations, hopes and visions.  I confess standing in painful, fearful disillusionment.  On the other hand, I am eternally thankful that I stand aware that I have the capacity to be equally startled by what emerges from the tomb.  Amen