Letter #179: My Question is This

What We Lost When We Lost Our Faith

Sprung.

Outside my kitchen window, there’s an inlet of a river. At the edge of the inlet, there’s a log. Now and then, throughout the warmer months, turtles and ducks perch on the log to bask in the sun. What is odd — well, I find it odd — is that the turtles rarely bask with the ducks and the ducks rarely bask with the turtles. Either one group or the other takes the whole log or one takes one side and the other takes the other side so that the log is half ducks and half turtles.

I often watch these arrangements and wonder: What’s this like for them? Do ducks enjoy the company of other ducks? Do they merely tolerate the turtles or do they feel some sense of companionship with them? And how is it they so rarely mingle? Is that by willed design or is it just some wordless instinct of which they themselves are unaware?

When we first discussed starting this Substack, we said we wanted to include our audience in the sorts of conversations that we’ve had through the years while hiking and sitting together. But there are moments we have not recaptured.

Once, I remember — we were hiking in Griffith Park, I think — I wondered aloud what space is. What’s it made of? If we were outside a spacecraft, floating in the vacuum, what would be between us? What would constitute my “here” and your “there?” You made a game attempt to come up with an answer. But no one knows the answer. “Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions,” says Wikipedia. “Disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.”

Thanks a lot, Wikipedia.

On another hike — in Runyon Canyon this time — I saw a sparrow on a telephone wire. He seemed to be gazing into the distance, and I asked you, “Do you think he experiences the beauty of the view?” Your response was, “Why would you even be thinking about that?”

But I do think about it. The older I grow, the closer to death I come, the more the world seems to me to be shot through with mystery. Not just unanswered questions that science might one day explain, but “a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things,” as my pal Billy Wordsworth used to say.

In your final letter last week, you said, “the fact of existence, rather than nothingness, is itself astonishing.” It is. But to experience that astonishment, to wallow in its mystery, is no easy task. It’s the work of a lifetime rather.

It’s exactly this vision that I think we lost when we allowed science to elevate reason above faith. Faith and its gift of holistic perception. Its offer to help us greet the miracle with the image of God within.

Love, Dad