When we first see Neo in The Matrix, he is ducking in and out of an existence defined by cubicles and cubicle-thinking. Before we start seeing life in terms of the Kingdom of God, we too live in a shadowy Matrix-like reality that we mistake for the Kingdom.

When Jesus spoke of his favorite subject, the Kingdom of God, he was speaking of spiritual reality. He was trying to pry open his listeners' minds and spirits to the possibility that spiritual reality is more real than physical reality.

The trouble is, because we constantly interact with the physical world around us, breathing air, eating food, touching objects, we become like addicts, trapped in that world, unable to see outside it. We can't think, read, sermonize or study our way to reality. It won't help us perceive what is going on in the spirit realm.

To wake up to spiritual reality, it is our spirits within us that must apprehend it. Our spirits must experience it. Our rational minds might discount the experience as flaky because it exists outside physical reality. But our rational mind is an addict and a tyrant, demanding "facts" and pooh-poohing anything that doesn't enter our experience through the door of our senses.

The arts and literature understand this waking process very well. Whether, it's Neo in the Matrix, Lucy in Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, or Frodo going to Mordor, the passage from a humdrum reality to a deeper world where something inside that has been asleep is awakened is an archetypical experience.

The secular religion that enables our inner addict denies the possibility of spiritual reality, but having once experienced it, our spirits can begin the process of detox.