The Real World

Perhaps distracted by the non-story of the boy supposedly floating over Denver in a homemade helium balloon, I find myself thinking about the real world. For the past three years, I have been traveling around the country for glimpses of American religious life. I went to California to watch veteran teacher Char Kamper teach about marriage to public high school students. In San Antonio, I visited Christian Zionist John Hagee's church; in Seattle I spent time with a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew who call themselves the Three Amigos. 

Last spring, I found myself in the courtyard of a house in Nashville, TN where women who are recovering from drug addiction and prostitution live. In the bright sunshine, I talked with a woman named Caroline. Caroline's story is a brutal one: rape, abuse, violence, homelessness and misery. She told me of running away from home at 14 and being sold into prostitution by someone who "befriended" her on the street. She talked of taking her youngest child to crack houses with her and leaving him in the care of strangers while going to get high. 

But as we sat together under a flowering cherry tree, she told me something perhaps more shocking than her story of terror and sadness. She said, "When I was on the street, I didn't know anything about the real world." I had trouble making sense of what she was saying. When I was in college, we called anything outside the college walls "the real world." I would certainly have said that Caroline's world of horror was more "real" than my sheltered and protected one. I would've said that I was terribly naive while she was street smart and savvy. She understood how the world worked while I lived in a place of make believe.

On the contrary. I learned that she was as naive as I was. In her addiction, she knew nothing of what people were like. She was afraid to move out of her very narrow familiar suffering. We were both ignorant of the "real world." The real world, it turns out, was the one we were creating together as we spent the afternoon listening to each other's stories. The real world is a place of both risk and connection.