“Break on through, to the other Side…”

To live fully as a human being necessitates transcending biology. One must “break on through the to other side,” (The Doors) as the old song goes . For as human beings we have a deep longing for eternal realities, for things that are timeless and unchanging. This is evidenced in any number of ways, such as our ability to think outside the confines of the so-called “time-space continuum”, in our dreams (sleeping), but most especially in our capacity to love in a manner that refuses to limit itself to present earthly realities. Despite death, which is the cessation of all temporal experiences, we go on loving those whom God has given to us, whom we continue to esteem and cherish in our lives—family, friends, etc. “Love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8). This is truly profound.

Some, quite sadly, chalk this all up as religious wish-thinking. Modern atheists, who in today’s western world have wrestled  themselves into a place of a new cutlural ascendancy, dismiss this longing for the eternal as a feature of humanity’s primitive past. Ancient hominoids invented the gods out of ignorance, fear, and insecurity, or so they say. All the forces we now call “nature” (sun, moon, stars, sky, earth, air, ocean, rivers, wind, storms, lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.,) were “divinized” and given human features (e.g., the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus).

Even the appearance in history of belief in a single god, monotheism, is no different than the polytheism, in that it is a sum total of our human hopes and dreams projected outward from ourselves and upwards into the skies. Freud’s main point in his book The Future of an Illusion is that “god” is an invention of human beings, the grandest “illusion” of them all, created by primitive man’s need to help deal with the harsh realities of life. Though written in 1927, this book has become canonical in today’s academic circles, i.e., it is taken as a literal truth.

Despite the prevalence of this new atheism and the materialism that follows it, people today yet show themselves to be starving for something more than the temporal. They experience the “glass ceiling” of strict materialism (“only matter exists”) as a truly dehumanizing force. Thus, even in this post-modern world, many still strive to break out beyond our biological limitations so that our hearts can be reborn and fully live. Maybe this is why our young people today, though wholly irreligious, remain fascinated by the dark “spiritualism” of the many expressions of negative science fiction, not to mention the occult, witchcraft, etc.

So, once again, to affirm that human beings are innately spiritual is to say that we are continually seeking to transcend the limitations of our physiological realities. Sadly, the world views that disallow eternal realities (faith and spirituality) create pathological conditions in human life that are caused by nothing else but the absence of these timeless values. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who was a student of Sigmund Freud, repudiated Freud’s atheism by saying that as human beings we have a deep, innate hunger for eternity, and that the root cause of alcoholism and addiction is the denial of the transcendent in the human experience.

But what exactly do we mean when we speak of the eternal? Is it possible that we are talking about something that is so ethereal, so airy and fuzzy, that it is impossible to move beyond the categories of speculation? For unbelievers, actually, this is their point: that religious doctrines cannot be accepted by any “reasonable and sane” person because they cannot be grounded in empirical facts (like science, math, history, etc.)  This is a very old question that goes back millenia. Even so, from the beginning we human beings have had a definite sense of the eternal as belonging to a realm that lies beyond time, where all is perfectly and completely beautiful, where the shifting sands of injustice, evil, and suffering are no longer found.

Ultimately, Orthodox Christianity flips the whole problem upside down by declaring that it is not so much that we humans need to break through from the material to the eternal, but that the eternal has broken through into the material world in which we live.

And all of this happens, once and for all, when Jesus Christ, the Son of God made flesh, is resurrected from the dead.

Fr. Paul Jannakos