I love his vision of the world, summed up in the sidebar quote by Borges:
"Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny."
There is a sense of mystery and awe at the scope of possibility -- an admission that the world is beyond us, that God is beyond us -- and a recognition of the beauty that comes with that reality. There is a seeking for truth and meaning, a desire to burst forth from boxes and categories that have contained us. There is an openness to discover whatever the world may hold...
The librarian in Borges' story laments the loss of so many precious books - books each full of their own unique stories, even if those stories be gibberish. For the librarian, each book has its own inherent value, rooted in its uniqueness. Every book is special...
There is a moment in Pixar's The Incredibles where the villain reveals his master plan to sell his inventions... Then, "everyone can be super! And when everyone's super, no one will be." As Dash put it earlier - saying that everyone's special, is just another way of saying that no one is...
The pendulum swings ever back and forth... Back and forth between identity and inclusivity. The church, like all movements, is caught in the balance.
Move too far toward identity and you find yourself trapped in exclusivity - setting litmus tests and forcing out those who don't measure up. These are the 'totalities' of Emmanuel Levinas. These are the narrow definitions of truth, the definitions of what it means to be human that leave out too much. No system can hope to be both consistent and complete (thank you Kurt Gödel), and so in our efforts toward consistent definition, we lose truths, unable to see past the blinders of our narrow definitions.
And so we are wise to heed the librarian's warning. We are wise not to destroy so quickly those books which we do not immediately understand. God is beyond us. To claim that we have a complete understanding of the mind and workings of the Almighty is arrogant and dangerous.
But there is danger too in the other direction. When we become so open, so focused on inclusivity that all is truth, then we lose any sense of identity. We cease to have meaning. It is the reverse of the pendulum, Gödel's 'Catch-22'. If we strive for completeness, the inclusion of all truths, then we cannot be consistent. We will invariably include some falsehoods.
I admire the agnostic - the one sane enough to admit that he or she does not know everything, that he or she cannot hope to fully understand the universe. The agnostic is always open, always seeking truth. That's different than the universalist, different perhaps than even our friend librarian. The universalist claims that all things are truth, all paths are wisdom, all books are equally special... which is really just another way of saying that none of them are.
We live in the tension - ever seeking balance between the swings of the pendulum. We cannot hope to have a complete understanding of the Almighty Living God. If such were possible, then God would not be God. But neither do we pretend to understand nothing. I believe that God has revealed God's self to us - not God's whole self, but pieces of the reality of who God is. I find that revelation in the world around me and in the words and ideas of others throughout the centuries. As a Christian I find that revelation most poignant in the testimony of Scripture and the person of Jesus.
We do not know what the world holds. We cannot grasp or contain God. So speaks the Lord to Moses out of the depths of the burning bush, "I will be who I will be." And so we need the librarian's openness. But we also value the truth revealed to us it is a gift. We do not shun the truth by declaring all things true.
Well said.
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