Letter #273: Home Again, Home Again

The Journey through Experience to Innocence

Mine son.

It takes a genius to rediscover the God of fools. It takes the deepest science to unearth the truth of Genesis. Like everything in life, it all comes down to T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

People forget that this achingly beautiful portion of Four Quartets goes on: “Through the unknown, remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning…” where we find, “the children in the apple tree.”

In other words, the genius’s philosophical journey back to simple wisdom and the scientist’s rediscovery of biblical truth — these are just signs and echoes of mankind’s journey from the Eden of innocence to the Eden of experience. Unless we become like little children, we shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

But of course, just because the journey is circular, that doesn’t make it useless. I have met many an unlettered homemaker who knew more about human nature than any brain surgeon. But if I need brain surgery, a homemaker is not the person I’m going to call. As I said in my last letter, we have simultaneously become masters of the material world and spiritually insane, a society of autists who can calculate the square root of bazillion but can’t find the human soul with both hands and a flashlight.

Is this tension between flesh and spirit inevitable or just a phase in the journey from Eden to Eden?

The other day I was wasting way too many of the final minutes of my life reading some nonsense on the internet. It included a sentence that went something like this: “If you hug a person for 30 seconds, it causes a release of oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, that will make you feel happy.” I thought: Interesting theory. Let’s test it. I’ll go up to some purple-haired, nose-ringed feminist wearing a ‘Down with the Patriarchy’ t-shirt, and hug her for 30 seconds. Let’s see if she becomes happy or kills me.

Which is to say: If the sentence had read, “Hugging people you love makes you happy,” it would have been true instead of, you know, idiotic. Translating the spiritual into the language of the material renders it not smart but absurd.

But does this mean too much knowledge makes us stupid? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s the misuse of knowledge, and the addictive romance of material success. Technology and science create the illusion of overall progress. If prayer has no obvious impact on health outcomes while medication does, why not just take the medicine and forget the prayer?

For me, the answer is obvious: Joy. Joy — not happiness but gusto in both happiness and sorrow — is the life of life and the purpose of creation. The product of spiritual realism, it is the only signpost on the way back home.

Love, Dad