Is This the “Real World”?

“Get to a safe place.” That’s what my guardian angel said. Now, I know better than to argue with my guardian angel. Even so, I was a bit confused. I thought I had already relocated to a safe place, an opportunity afforded to me by Divine Providence through the intercession of St. Romuald. Granted, it wasn’t the “Fortress of Solitude” I had read about as a boy (and envied) in Superman comics, but the location afforded near solitude, mostly quiet, and the freedom to pray, read, and write. I can go for weeks without reaching for my car keys. On a typical day, I don’t need to speak more than a few sentences to another human being. It’s an introvert’s dream come true!

After decades of living as if I were an extrovert (in the classroom, in the pulpit, at the podium, serving in the missions), I am finally living as the introvert God made me to be. I am not living in a cloister or in full seclusion as a hermit — I am a Jesuit, after all — yet I am happily living more ad intra than ad extra. I am trying to live (de facto if not de jure) a “vocation of withdrawal,” a formulation borrowed from Ann K. Warren, author of Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (1985).

The academic in me wants to interject some ad hoc terminology to help these ruminations along. The first is the distinction between IN-HERE and OUT-THERE, the weightiness of which I began to appreciate thanks to Carmelite nuns, who are the most “sequestered” of all female monastics in Catholicism. Years ago, I was visiting such a nun. Between us stood a medieval-style prison grill and a black curtain. She spoke of the fact that I was living OUT-THERE. No ink on paper could communicate the intensity of the mixture of horror, revulsion, and pity Sister had infused into the term. In her world, which is to say the cloistered monastery, she was blessed to be IN-HERE and was very glad not to have to live OUT-THERE. From my point of view, however, she was living IN-THERE, and I was living OUT-HERE — and she was better off. By far.

Another relevant distinction is between “the Real World” and “the Realm of Common Experience.” Whenever I taught an introductory course in philosophy, some freshman would invariably interrupt my lecture to share what he was sure was a sagacious observation. Drawing upon all the erudition and life experience his 18 years could afford him, he’d jerk a thumb to the classroom window and say, “Well, you know, Father, OUT-THERE, in the Real World….” That’s where I’d interrupt him. “No! The term ‘the Real World’ is an honorific. We reserve it for what we do in this classroom, where we treat of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. What you’re pointing to — that’s the Realm of Common Experience. That’s the theater of illusion, seduction, and addiction. Enter the Real World, IN-HERE, so that you can dispel the unreality of the Realm of Common Experience, OUT-THERE.”