Is it just me, or are lots of us more like Hobbits than is good for us? Valuing comfort, home, and a quiet life, living in our cozy hobbit-holes, eschewing adventure and exploration…nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Even if we don’t live like Hobbits (though that would probably be my dream), we might act like Hobbits in certain corners of our minds and hearts. And yet, our heart needs more; we are invited out of our comfort zone to more reality, more life, more connection, more freedom…more adventure. Does that sound appealing? Adventures are exciting, but they also include confusion, danger, wrestling with big questions, and when we return - if we return - we are not the same. Last week we faced our illusions which can get in the way of living fully and truly connecting with ourselves, others, and with God. By definition, all illusions pull us out of reality into an echo chamber of the stories we tell ourselves. The illusion of control, for instance, can cause us to cling to our comfortable and safe routines where we feel better able to control the outcome. As we wrap up our journey through Henri Nouwen’s book Reaching Out, we’ll now explore prayer as the opposite pole to illusion. Nouwen claims that as we move toward prayer, we will move away from illusion. This may feel backward at best or simply confusing, as our experiences in life in general and with prayer in particular may have us feeling ambivalent towards prayer. When life is chaotic and God feels far or nonexistent, prayer can seem pointless and empty, maybe even deeply disappointing. I wonder if seeing prayer as an adventure can invite us to explore prayer with fresh eyes, finding more than we thought was there at first. We may find more reality and more life. We may find something new to go on as we explore some themes around prayer such as experiencing God’s absence, paradox and confusing messages around prayer, and we’ll get a little practical with a way of praying that’s both simple and profound as we listen for our Prayer of the Heart.

Remember that scene from the Matrix where Cypher enjoys a steak? He betrays his comrades and condemns humanity in order to be reinserted into the Matrix, to return to a false reality where he can live a life of luxury and to be "someone important, like an actor." In the scene, he delights in eating a perfectly cooked steak and wine, a stark contrast to the bland, unappetizing "goop" the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar eats in the real world. Cypher acknowledges that the steak isn't real, but he savors the sensation, stating, "I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss." This line encapsulates his weariness with the harsh reality of the human resistance and his desire to return to the comfortable illusion of the Matrix, even though he knows it’s not reality. Cypher represents our very human temptation to choose comfort and illusion over harsh truth and freedom, even at the cost of betrayal. We can be more like him than we’d like to admit, tending to resist reality a lot of the time. We have whole collections of strategies against the real. We actually can be quite masterful at protecting our hearts and minds against harsh truths. We can live asleep, doom scrolling while avoiding our life, particularly if it’s uncomfortable or painful. In some ways, why wouldn’t we? We all do this, even when it doesn’t make sense. And we may be so good at it, we may not even realize we’re doing it. Nevertheless we’re invited to face the Real, and to turn to God as Ultimate Reality. As we wrap up this mini-series walking through Henri Nouwen’s book Reaching Out, we’re exploring the movement from illusion to prayer. So this week we’ll face our illusions, see how we’re pretty fond of them, and consider what we might do instead of remaining in their grip.

For this week, I want to piggyback off last Sunday and the work we did around mapping our loneliness. As we move into the terrain of our loneliness, I want to explore whether the reason we struggle with loneliness might be because of the quiet barriers we’ve built between ourselves and true intimacy? All of us carry a deep longing to be fully seen and still fully loved—a longing that goes all the way back to Eden. To navigate towards that, I want to draw from Jesus’ words in John 15 and invite us to reimagine intimacy not as a fleeting feeling or dramatic act of love, but as a lifelong pattern of laying ourselves down for one another in the ordinary, sometimes painfully boring, rhythms of real life. To that end, I want to walk us through three subtle, but powerful barriers that often keep us from closeness with others: the illusion that life should always be interesting, the weight of unspoken and unrealistic expectations, and the everyday irritations of difference. If you've ever felt like your relationships — romantic, platonic, or communal — fall short of what you hoped for, I hope this message can offer us a grace-filled path forward: not to escape or idealize, but to stay, die to ego, and find new life on the other side of disappointment.