Letter #167: Square Peg, Round Hole

The Spirit in Time

Splash.

We are coming through an era of absurd intellectual corruption — coming to the end of it, I dare to hope. And since the fantastical notions of our thinking classes all depend on the premise that there is no God, the fantasists have made strenuous efforts to suppress Christianity where they could not erase it altogether. Prayers have been banned in schools, the name of God removed from public declarations, belief and believers excised from both fictions and histories… Even the phrase Merry Christmas has sometimes fallen into manufactured disrepute. During our Thanksgiving conversations, I was shocked but not surprised to learn that the popular video game The Legend of Zelda was packed with Christian iconography when it was created in Japan, but stripped of it when it was brought to the U.S. Many such cases, as you young folks like to say.

Because of this — and because I do believe the clerisy’s Reign of Error is coming to an end — I feel the need to continually confirm the orthodoxies even as we explore the originality of each soul’s journey to God. If I believe in letting go of judgment and in allowing the individual to flourish as he finds his unique way to salvation, it is not in spite of the Gospels and the Creed and the traditional rituals. It is because of them. We must know the truth before it can set us free.

There’s a wonderful scene in the movie Apollo 13. Our brave astronauts are trapped in space with the air in their craft running out. To keep them alive, engineers on Earth have to find a way for the astronauts to put square cartridges in round air filters using only the scraps that are available onboard the stranded ship. They literally must put “a square peg in a round hole.” The scene in which these flabby, balding, bespectacled science nerds heroically set to work is a moving tribute to human ingenuity. The entertaining novel The Martian — in which a stranded astronaut must survive on the red planet using only the materials at hand — is essentially this same scene repeated over and over. It works every time.

The thing is this. You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole just because you think it ought to go there, or because the world would be a better place if it would, or because it’s not fair that it won’t. But as the NASA engineers in the movie demonstrate, miracles can be done by those who know the rules of reality and can employ them with both rigor and originality.

To live in Christ is just such a miracle. In order to live spiritually in a material world, to let go of judgment in a world of sin, to prioritize sacrificial love in a society that worships power and pleasure — in order to fit the square peg of eternity into the round hole of time — you have to first learn the Way.

Love, Dad