From Your Minister
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My physicist father drove me crazy. I would ask him what rainbows were made of, and by the time he had pontificated for 15 or 20 minutes I would be desperately bored, sorry I asked, squirming to get away. The rainbow itself would be long gone.
Later, I drove him crazy, too. Year after year, I would gift him with books like The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and other popular books that turned physics into something of a … well, a religion. He would thank me politely. After he died, I brought all those never-opened books back to my house.
My father studied physics, it became apparent, because it solved problems and he liked that. Physics was orderly. Uninterested in scientific theories that bordered on the mystical, he was broken-hearted that none of his four kids opted to study math or science. Once, I told him with excitement, I was actually interested in a math theory class. This was because a student had told me that in their math class they could start from the ground up, doing equations that were true, true, true, and then, building on these truths, reach a point out over the horizon somewhere that was FALSE! That, I told my father, was a truly compelling reason to study math! He studied my face as if to see if I was joking and then said with more sadness than scorn, “That’s the dumbest reason to study math I ever heard of.”
It wasn’t only my father who responded to me this way. For my college thesis, I proposed to study Platonic dialogues. My particular interest was the times when Socrates pointed to a myth as an important source of learning, rather than hammering away with question after question, because the myth was the closest thing to truth that could be uttered. My philosophy professor looked at me with about the same face my father had and then said simply, “It does not mean that.”
So I did what everyone who was met with such facial expressions did in those days: I studied English Literature. Even that, though, I found a rather sad pursuit. Rather than look at how the whole piece of artistry was consistently greater than the sum of its parts, rather than pause to look in awe at the sheer beauty of a poem or novel, we picked them apart. Pick, pick, pick, into such tiny particles that soon we didn’t know what the whole thing even looked like. The only classes I really loved were Allegory, where the words on the page pointed to something bigger behind the story, and Romantic Poetry, where the weather could represent how someone felt and it was OK. Classes that let the mystery be.
Where do students get to meditate on the mystery of life? Where are the schools for mystics? I am not at all sorry that prayer was taken out of public school, but I do think there’s something good about pausing for a moment of gratitude for all that is life. I don’t think “Intelligent Design” is real science, but I do share the impulse to marvel at the symmetry, at the eloquence, at the precision of nature which points to something beyond the broken-down particles.
What I longed for was a world that offered both—that lifted up the beauty of the whole, pointed to the edges of what we could know, and still devoted itself to moving as far down the road of knowledge as the students could go.
I like to think. I like to analyze what people are doing, and why, and how cultures are shaped, and how power is built and used, how patterns emerge. I like to learn how to use social media, how things work, and what bird species look and sound like. I like to be challenged intellectually and to think hard. I like to read books and interesting magazines and consider something I never thought about before. None of that learning diminishes mystery for me. In fact, the more I learn, the more I see that I don’t know. The more mystery emerges as a constant. The topics that I know the most about are the ones in which I am also the most aware of what I don’t know.
Socrates was declared the wisest man in Athens by the Delphic Oracle, because he knew that he knew nothing. My philosophy professor would say that Plato didn’t mean that. I’d say he did. I’d say that my philosophy professor missed a great deal of what was interesting, and beautiful, and true, by closing his mind to the mystery.
As for me, I’m honestly not that interested in those cosmic physics books either. I’m going to trust that my ever-increasing acceptance of the mystery means I’m heading in the right direction, that I’m getting wiser. I don’t need to research mystery—it finds me. I can go about my business, trying to get along in the world, and I’ll never be without it.
A colleague told me that his three-year-old son loves to quote Scooby Doo: Looks like we have another mystery on our hands!!! This kid says it when things are broken and there is no mystery at all about who broke them. He says it when he really doesn’t know something. I think this three-year-old has the right idea: Looks like we have another mystery on our hands!!!
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