A Crack in Everything
Human beings are natural system-makers. From the moment our brains are developed enough to do so, we try to organize the flood of data pouring into them. This is natural and essential for our survival in a world that doesn’t make survival easy. And we don’t stop there, with systems of thought that help us live and prosper physically; we want the whole thing to make sense—where it came from, how it works, what it’s for, where we fit in, what’s right, what’s wrong. We even have scientists and philosophers and theologians who make such efforts their main line of work.
There’s a natural tendency to expect these systems to contain everything: to account for all physical phenomena, to answer all spiritual questions, to remove all the uncertainty from moral decisions. But that’s expecting too much. I don’t believe any system constructed by the human mind and comprehensible by it can resolve all our questions. Inevitably it ends up constricting us rather than freeing us as we try to force reality into the neat boxes it provides.
Happily, life has a way of breaking into our systems, either shattering them completely or humbling them, putting them back into their proper role as useful tools, as servants and not masters. Leonard Cohen has a nice line in his song “Anthem:”
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
A crack is usually a form of damage, the result of stress or impact. The cracking of a closed system may occur only as the result of some sort of violence or trauma, painful but necessary if the light is to enter. Much of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction describes the infliction of such damage upon someone’s neat but false system.
I’ve been thinking about this in reference to the discussion about Ayn Rand and objectivism that’s been taking place here in response to my last two posts about them. Even aside from what I regard as its fundamental errors such as materialism, objectivism strikes me as an example of a system that tries to encompass too much. Its proponents find it liberating, but everything I’ve read connected with it, including Atlas Shrugged, makes it sound suffocating to me.
Christians are as liable as anyone else to over-systematize in this way. The grand systematizer of Christianity is St. Thomas Aquinas (Protestants might say John Calvin). One sometimes sees in over-zealous Thomists a tendency to make the theological system greater than the faith itself, to treat it as a machine for generating precise and detailed answers to any possible question. Misused in this way, it can actually serve to keep God at a distance.
If Thomas himself had any tendency to put too much trust in his own theological reasoning, he was placed out of danger by that famous vision he had toward the end of his life which left him able to say only that it made all he had written seem but straw. And it seems providential that the story became known, and a permanent reminder to all who would come to revere his work that its whole purpose is to point beyond itself.
But although Christians may over-systematize (clumsy term) in this way, the condition can’t persist indefinitely because its central element is also the crack, the huge and gaping crack, that lets in the light: Jesus Christ himself. You could say the crack is the system: not an idea, but the incomprehensible man who is also God; not an abstract statement answering a question you may not have asked, but a person who hears your question, reads your heart like an open book, and gives you the response that you—you specifically—need to hear in order to find your salvation. I say “response” and not “answer” deliberately; it may not be an answer at all, in the sense that it resolves your question. Quite likely you will not like it, or even understand it, but it will be something that will lead you toward becoming the person who does understand it.
I thought of that at Mass tonight, when the Gospel reading was the incident where the Canaanite woman asks for Jesus’s aid on behalf of her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28). His response is outrageous: he compares her to a dog with no right to the food meant for the children of the family, the children of Israel. What a thing to say! Wouldn’t most people have cursed him in response, or at least stormed off in fury, telling everyone they met that this purported holy man was a jerk? But the woman doesn’t do that; goaded in this way, she drives unhesitatingly straight on to the truth he wants her to see, and presumably wants the others present to see. “…yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” He hasn’t simply given her what she wanted, but changed her, made her soul deeper and richer.
And where we want to see a neat resolution of the most difficult problem of all, the problem of evil and suffering, there is no direct response at all: only the man himself hanging on the cross, and the desolate words “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” And then the Resurrection, and the invitation: take up your cross and follow me.
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Someone who calls herself only Anna C has put together a very nice sequence of photos as a video for “Anthem”:
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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