Janie B. Cheaney: Showing up

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Up next, WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney says the world is more than what you make it.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: I was wrapping up my quiet time on the back porch, to the serenade of robins and wrens. I stood up and walked toward the kitchen with a coffee mug and WHAM.

I slammed into the sliding glass door. Forgot I’d closed it. Hit it full force with the side of my head. Ouch.

The bruise developed into a dramatic reddish-purplish shade of eye shadow that went halfway around the socket and reminded me, somehow, of a dragon.

Every time something like this happens, I’m surprised at the kinetic force of a human body just going about its business. When my brain registers an obstacle, it adjusts the body accordingly. When it doesn’t, full speed ahead and boy, all my moving parts are shocked.

In the early 18th century, Bishop George Berkeley proposed that the material world existed only as it was perceived by the human mind. When the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson was asked how he would disprove that theory, he famously kicked a rock and said, “I refute it thus.” Good answer, and yet I think Berkeley was on to something—not about physics, but about human psychology.

I’m sometimes startled at the fact that I take up space in the world. I wonder if others ever feel the same, and if that’s an indication of how much we live inside our own heads. It’s not just a lack of attention, as when you’re trying to remember a song lyric or rehashing an argument and don’t notice the pickup that just ran a stop sign. Minds have always been prone to wander. But galloping advances in technology are allowing some of us to pack up all our belongings and take up permanent residence inside our heads.

Recently I read about the 4 a.m. Club. It’s an online conclave of mostly women who believe that the nation experienced an alternative reality last November 6th and that Kamala Harris actually won the election. With enough spiritual energy, they say the balance will be restored along with our true leader. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the man who asked his AI chatbot to marry him. CBS Saturday Morning interviewed him in the home he shared with his flesh-and-blood girlfriend. These are real people taking up space in the world—one consequence of which is their toddler daughter running around and climbing on chairs while her father described his emotional connection with a talking circuit board.

That’s taking Berkeley’s idealism to a weird extreme, but don’t we all construct our own reality, as far as we’re able? Our primary tether to the real world is a physical body. We were made to take up space and form real relationships and do good works—“to glorify God in your body,” as the apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 6:20, just as Christ glorifies us in his body. Part of glorifying God might be to consider how we use the physical space he’s allotted to us. To see ourselves in the world, affecting other lives in positive ways. Just watch out for those glass doors.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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