Wed, Jan 23
... The jigsaw puzzle
"One of the biggest facts you have to face, Vicky, is that if thereis
a God he's infinite, and we're finite, and therefore we can't ever understand him. The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware. People should never try to make God in man's image and that's what they're constantly doing... So in my heathen way, Vicky, when I wasn't much older than you, I decided that God, a kind and loving God, could never be proved. In fact there are, as you'veb een seeing lately, a lot of arguments against
him. But there isn't any point to life without him. Without him we're just a skin disease on the face of the earth, and I feel too strongly about the human spirit to be able to settle for that. So what I did for a long time was to live life as though
I believed in God. And eventually I found out that the as though
had turned into a reality. I think the thing that did it for me was a jigsaw puzzle.""A jigsaw puzzle?"
"A jigsaw puzzle. Hold still. Chin a little higher. You know those puzzles with hundreds of tiny pieces? You take one of those pieces all by itself and it doesn't make sense, does it? You look at one piece and it doesn't seem to be part of a picture. But you put all the pieces togeter and you see the meaning of it all. Well, what I, in my heathenish way, Vicky, feel about life, and unfairness, is taht we find it hard to realize that there is a completed puzzle. We jump to conclusions and decide that the one little piece we have in our hand is all there is and that it doesn't make sense. We find it almost impossible to think about infinity, much less comprehend it But life only makes sense if you see it in infinte terms. If the one piece of the puzzle that is this life were all, then everything would be horrible and unfair and I wouldn't want much to do with God, either. But there are all the other pieces, too, the pieces that make up the whole picture."
The Moon By Night, Madeleine L'Engle
How often do I need to be reminded of that? It's not just what I can see, it's not only what I can hold in my hand. There's so much more out there that I'm too small to see; that I'm too limited in my vision to understand.
infinite || abyss
posted at 11:15 p.m.
