Scrooge McDad,
As you are well aware, no matter what is happening at any point in spacetime, there is a perfect quote to describe it somewhere in the 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol. And luckily, since you and I watch it with the family each year, we know every line by heart.
Last week we got to talking about everything we wish we could know, but can’t. That desperate longing we have to pierce the many-layered veil of the spirit: The veil that separates our human experience of things from things as they are. The veil that shrouds from our view the inner chambers of even our dearest friends’ hearts, and ours from theirs. And most tenderly painful of all, the veil that hides the face of God from the sight of all flesh. So naturally, I thought of a line from A Christmas Carol.
It's at the end, when Scrooge has woken up from his dream of the three Christmas spirits who taught him to repent of his greed. But was it a dream? Or was it real? Is there a difference? It has cracked his pinched heart so entirely open that it might as well have really happened. And that’s all he can say with certainty: his heart was dead, and now it lives. Beyond that, he can only sing with giddy incomprehension: “I don’t know anything. I never did know anything. But now I know that I don’t know! All on a Christmas morning...”
It is one of the most fleet-footed Socratic profundities in all of literature. And in light of our conversation it has me thinking about all the things that the Bible says we definitively don’t know: when the world will end (Matthew 24:36). Where God’s spirit will go next (John 3:8). Who’s going to heaven (Matthew 13:24-30). Even the people who do get to heaven will be surprised to learn why (Matthew 25:37-8). Basically on all the questions we’d most like to have definitively answered, we’re told: you don’t know.
When confronted with a transformative era like ours, there’s this frantic impulse to develop a theory of the case: five rules for telling good brain chips from bad! One test to determine if a new machine is from God or Satan! But maybe that kind of knowledge—that grasping kind of information-system knowledge—just isn’t the kind we should expect to find.
Because there’s another kind of knowledge, a kind it seems we can have: “I know my sheep, and my sheep know me.” (John 10:14-6). “Now I know in part,” but one day “I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Maybe knowledge of the heart—personal knowledge, the kind of knowledge we have of each other, and of a God who comes to us with a human face—is the kind that can teach us right from wrong in our strange new world.
Just a thought,
Spencer
Ignorance is bliss. God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, perhaps because in their ignorance there was bliss. Maybe even now, He is telling us the same: be careful what you wish for. If you find the answers you seek, you may not be better for them. This may be because all things can be used for good or evil, a mixed blessing, as it were. Nuclear power, for example, is a blessing; nuclear warheads are a curse.
I know nothing—St. Thomas Aquinas had that same epiphany, near the end of his life. In his case, however, it did not bring him any joy, at least none that we know. He stopped writing his “Summa Theologica,” and never another word on his faith. He died the next year.
St. Thomas was so stunned by the realization that the mystery of God is beyond human comprehension, that he said to his protege, “Reginald, I can write no more. All that I have hitherto written seems to me nothing but straw.”
To each of us, that realization can strike us differently. To Scrooge, it was a joy, a release, or an opening (of his heart), but for St. Thomas, a Doctor of the Church, it may have felt as if his life’s work was all for nothing, that his life was wasted. As for me, if such an epiphany should ever strike me, I pray God it’s the former.
Maybe “not knowing” is a lesson in acceptance.