Dis-illusion

“The refusal to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering in human life.”

The tyranny of illusion. Is any of us truly free from it? Intelligent minds shun the notion — or at least they say they do. But the truth lies at the base of the meteoric rise of entertainment and gaming industries — not to mention the burgeoning demand for surgical procedures that beautify, lift, alter, tuck, augment, take out and put back together again. The truth is that we humans totter like blind men along a very fine between truth and illusion, calling out as we do:

“No nearer, lest reality
Should disenthrall thy soul.” (1)

‎‎”Disillusionment means that there are no more false judgments in life. To be undeceived by disillusionment may leave us cynical and unkindly severe in our judgment of others, but the disillusionment which comes from God brings us to the place where we see men and women as they really are, and yet there is no cynicism, we have no stinging, bitter things to say. Many of the cruel things in life spring from the fact that we suffer from illusions. We are not true to one another as facts; we are true only to our ideas of one another. Everything is either delightful and fine, or mean and dastardly, according to our idea.” (2)

Is illusion a house of cards? Maybe. But who knows? A little paint, a little landscape, and we might just make it look real.

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(1) Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/113/.

(2) Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest : Selections for the Year, NIV edition. (Westwood, NJ: Barbour and Co., 1993).