“We both saw it. What effect did it have on us? For one thing, we’ll remember it. For all you know, you’ll tell it as a story to someone else, or thirty years from now you might pick up a wrench when you would otherwise have picked up a screwdriver because an irrelevant thought distracted you. You have no way of knowing that today. Surely you’ve had the experience of something standing out in your mind that someone said which they thought utterly insignificant. We have no way of knowing which among the actions we do are significant.
“And now project that out to all the people that you interact with, and all the people that they interact with, over the centuries and millennia that follow. Is there any doubt that your life would have been different if some roman soldier had spared one of your ancestors, or whoever it was who killed archduke Ferdinand had decided not to?”
“You can’t think about that sort of thing,” Katie said. “The influences and probabilities get too small.”
“Too small to think about, but they don’t go to zero. And you can’t make your own inability to properly think out a problem the basis of a theory. The universe isn’t here to be easily understood by you. Why was any particular thing allowed to happen? The answer has to take into account every last effect of that thing from the moments afterwards down through the years and all the way to the end of time. You can ask the question in a few words, but a real, full answer would take more words than have ever been spoken.”
Katie thought about this, trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Eventually she settled on, “So, basically, you can’t answer the question.”
“I can’t,” Fr. Xris said. “But equally important, even if I could, you couldn’t understand the answer.”
“Isn’t that the same thing as saying that there’s no answer?”
Fr. Xris gave her a puzzled look. In a great many arguments, he had never heard that one before.
“I think that would follow only if you assume that your intellect is perfect. I’m pretty sure that ‘I can’t understand the answer’ being equivalent to ‘there is no answer’ means that your intellect has to be infinite, and probably also infallible.”
“Anyway,” Katie said, “you do a lot of hand waving.”
Fr. Xris threw up his hands.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “there is a difference between hand waving and a question not being a legitimate question. But unfortunately the difference is: whether one is right. The difference between the truth and a lie is that the truth is true, and a lie isn’t. But both the truth and a lie are just assertions. If you don’t know the underlying truth, they look the same.
“I’ll readily admit that for as long as recorded history, and probably longer, charlatans have been waving away inconvenient questions. But that doesn’t mean that every inconvenient question is legitimate. Let me show you what I mean: if God doesn’t exist, then why can’t pigs talk?”
“Huh?” Katie asked.
“It’s a question. You can’t answer it. Does that prove that God exists?”
Katie didn’t answer, though the look she gave was exactly as dismissive as she meant it to be.
“Explain the Pythagorean theorem in five words or less, where the words are all about baking cakes.”
Katie gave him a WTF look.
“You can’t, so obviously you’re full of it, and I’m right.”
Katie varied the WTF look slightly, attempting to intensify it.
“Just because you ask a question doesn’t mean that you’ve asked a valid question. Just because somebody says that it’s not a valid question doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, or lying, either to you or themselves.
“You think that your grandparents were telling themselves pleasing lies and waved away all legitimate objections because they didn’t want to face the ugly truth. I presume that you think that’s what I’m doing now, perhaps more cleverly. But the truth is that it’s actually just an invalid question.”
“Why should I believe you?” Katie asked.
“That,” Fr. Xris said, “is a valid question.”
“The way to tell a valid question is that you can imagine what a valid answer to it looks like. ‘Why did you eat all of the chocolate?’ You can imagine the answer, ‘because I was starving and needed the calories to stay alive’ or ‘because I was really sad and would have killed myself except for the delicious flavor and theobromine’s anti-depressant qualities’ or ‘because it was so delicious, I lost control of myself’, though that last one should really be phrased, ‘it was so delicious I got distracted and forgot that there were other people around who had a better claim to the chocolate than I did’.
“In a particular case that may not be true. The real answer might be, ‘because I don’t care about you as much as I do my own pleasure’. You can imagine legitimate answers, even if they’re not the real answer.
“But think about something that you want to defend. Suppose that you want to defend the Californian revolution, throwing off the cruel oppression of the United States. Most people I’ve met think that it was justified. But what would you say to the daughter of someone killed in that war? You might try pointing to the happiness of modern Californians, or the stirring effect that the Declaration of Re-Independence has had, or maybe just introduce her to someone whose parents met because of the war and who wouldn’t exist otherwise. But you couldn’t put any of that into a one-sentence answer.
“If you really try to put yourself into the shoes of the daughter of a US soldier who was killed, then what could you say, even if you were right? By the way, that last one—introducing her to someone who wouldn’t have existed except for the war—points to the heart of what I was saying. If you introduced her to someone whose very existence depended on the actions in question, you would be appealing to all of the information which is contained in meeting someone—vastly more than you can sum up in a sentence or even an entire speech.
“The world is a complex place, and demanding an oversimplification doesn’t mean that there’s one that you’ll find acceptable. If there’s no possible answer, it’s not a legitimate question.”
“I’m not sold,” Katie said, “but I think I get what you mean.”
Fr. Xris chuckled.
“I’m not selling anything,” he said. “I’m giving it away. The difference is that you already have it, whether you choose to accept it as true or reject it as false. There’s no sale to be made. There’s no exchange. I’ve given the truth away, which, aside from enjoying it myself, is all the good I can get out of having it.”
There was no good response to this possible, since it was essentially a mere assertion that he was right and she was wrong, so Fr. Xris concluded the conversation so as to spare Katie from making a defensive response. He rose and said, “I would be happy to talk with you further at your convenience, but I need to go say morning prayers, and your eggs are getting cold.”
“Actually,” Katie said, “the plates have inductively charged capacitors which power heating elements in the ceramic that keep the food at whatever temperature the chef programmed. But I don’t want to keep you from your duties. I have some reports to go make once I finish my breakfast, anyway.”
* * *
Fr. Xris did indeed go to his room to say the liturgy of the hours, though technically it was Terce and not morning prayer, but the slight imprecision was just because he didn’t think Katie was likely to care about or benefit from the details of his daily routine.
He was in the middle of one of the psalms when there was a knock on his door. Fr. Xris smiled. Even on a cargo ship with only ten other people, there’s no predictability to your day.
“Come in,” he said.
“Good morning, Father,” Shaka said as he opened the door.
“Good morning, Shaka.”
Shaka walked in. Unfortunately there was only one chair, which Fr. Xris was already sitting in, so Shaka stood. He got right to the point.
“What mass schedule do you intend to say, Father?�
��
“I generally say daily mass around the middle of the day, often at 11:30 so it’s right before lunch” Fr. Xris replied. “If you’d like to come to daily mass, let me know when before noon would be good for you and I can probably vary my schedule to accommodate you. Public mass is always preferable to private mass. As for Sunday mass, some reasonable time in the morning is usually best, such as ten O’Clock.”
“Both work for me, Father,” Shaka said. He smiled. “I don’t have a schedule on this ship, but I thank you for the consideration.”
He bowed and left the room.
* * *
Fr. Xris completed the office and turned to some of the reading he had been hoping to get done on the trip. Parish life did not afford him much time for reading, and St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei—On the City of God— was not easy to read with constant interruptions. Fr. Xris had read it once before, but many years ago, and this time he was reading it in the original Latin.
An hour or so later, there was another knock on Fr. Xris’s door. This time it was Hannah.
“Good morning, Father,” she said. “Do you mind if I come in?”
“Please do,” Fr. Xris said. “Unfortunately, though, these rooms are only equipped with one chair. Would you like to use it?”
He rose as he made the offer, so that it might seem like a real offer.
Hannah closed the door behind her and waved her hand declining the offer.
“I’m happy to sit on the floor,” she said as she sat, “or I suppose I should say the wall. I’ll be happy when up is up, not... left.”
“It is a bit weird,” Fr. Xris said.
Hannah bit her lip for a moment. “I once heard a song with the refrain, ‘everything you know is wrong: up is down, right is left, and short is long.’ It’s not quite the same here. Up is right, right is down, and short is still short. But still, it kind of feels like that, doesn’t it?”
Fr. Xris laughed.
“I’ve never heard the song,” he said, “but I am familiar with the sentiment. And you’re right it is kind of funny that we’re almost in a place where up is down. But then, it’s sometimes good to stand on your head.”
“Why?”
“It can help one to look at things as they really are. I’m told that artists—painters—will sometimes practice by copying upside-down pictures. By turning it so you don’t recognize what you’re drawing, you pay more attention to the lines, and actually draw what you see, rather than what you think you see.”
“Sounds a bit deep for me,” Hannah said, “And you can’t really do that with sculpture.”
“I suppose not,” he said. “For painters, it’s entirely practical. And for the rest of us, at least it can teach us not to take ourselves so seriously, if nothing else.”
“You mean seeing everything in a new light?”
“I was thinking more of the fact that there’s no dignified way to look at the world upside down. If you’re athletic, you could do a handstand, which isn’t very graceful; for most people the only way to do it is to bend over and put your head between your legs.”
“No,” Hannah said, “that wouldn’t be dignified at all.”
“Not in the least,” Fr. Xris said. “Which is why it can be so healthy. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with dignity, mind you. It’s just that dignity can become a little cramped.”
“A lot of things can become a little cramped,” Hannah said.
“True, that.”
“Did you ever find yourself wondering what you were doing?” Hannah asked. “I mean, why you were doing the things that you were doing? What big picture were they a part of?”
“Occasionally,” Fr. Xris said. “The world is too complex for us to understand, but I don’t think that anyone can help occasionally wondering what the big picture is.”
“There’s no way to know, is there?”
“It depends on how big you’re talking,” Fr. Xris said. “We can’t understand the big picture where you can still see the details of our lives as tiny little dots, but if you keep zooming out, we can understand that picture.”
“That’s counter-intuitive.”
“Most true things in life are.”
“Really?”
“Yes. That’s why we’re so used to everything feeling wrong: it is wrong.”
“I thought that you were supposed to tell people that everything was OK. That’s what I heard that priests did.”
“Who on earth told you that?”
“I don’t remember. You’re really the first Christian I’ve actually known.”
“Well, wherever you heard it, it’s wrong. Our job is almost the opposite of that.”
“Telling people that everything is wrong?”
“Not everything, but much of it,” Fr. Xris said. “One of a priest’s jobs is to comfort people. Now, which is more comforting when things suck: being told that things are as good as they can be, or being told that things are as bad as they can be?”
Hannah thought about it.
“Neither sounds very good.”
“Clearly. How good could anything sound when things suck? But picking from the possible choices, it’s much more comforting to be told that things are awful. For one thing, it means that they can get better. For another, it’s true, so it means that no one is trying to blow sunshine up your butt. Feeling like you’re being lied to doesn’t comfort anyone. Actually, being lied to is worse than being told nothing. People only lie to you that everything is OK when they think you can’t handle how bad it really is.”
Hannah nodded. It wasn’t appealing, but it did make sense.
“But how can you be happy if things suck?”
“By finding your happiness somewhere other than in the world. Even when things are going well, the world is not enough.”
“What else is there?”
Fr. Xris smiled. “God,” he said.
Hannah looked thoughtful.
Fr. Xris remained silent. He had learned when to let people lead conversations.
“What can God give you that the world can’t?”
“Himself,” Fr. Xris said. “The key to making any sense of that is that God is not just one being among many. The Christian God is not just bigger or stronger or better than the pagan gods. The pagan gods are, in the end, just like us. Maybe they’re bigger, stronger, and don’t die—at least not on our timescale (I have no idea what’s supposed to happen to them when the heat death of the universe sets in)—but that’s it. They didn’t make themselves any more than we did. They don’t explain themselves any more than we do. They are, in themselves, just as pointless as we are. They need constant entertainment to keep themselves from asking, ‘what’s the meaning of life’, just like us. The Christian God is completely different.”
Hannah looked intently at Fr. Xris, which he took to be a request to continue.
“The easiest way to explain it is St. Thomas’s third proof for the existence of God: we all have an origin. You’re here because of your parents, who are here because of their parents, and so on, all the way back to the big bang. Everything moved is moved by another; everything is caused by something other than itself. But there has to be something behind it all, or it would be an infinite chain hanging from nothing. That can’t be. If nothing started it, it wouldn’t be started. So the chain of causation is attached to something; there is something which caused everything else but which was not itself caused. That’s God.
“He’s the uncaused cause. The unmoved mover. He’s the one thing which necessarily is. We all might not have been; God is the one thing which can’t not be. He’s not bigger than us, he’s utterly and completely different from us. He’s more different from us than we are from rocks. The difference between God and us is incomprehensibly bigger than the difference between us and a quasar. God is pure being. He’s Being itself. He needs nothing. That’s the whole key to our relationship with him, by the way. He needs nothing, we need everything, and he wants to give it to
us if only we’ll let him.”
Hannah put her arms around her knees and rested her head on them.
After a minute or two, she lifted her head and said, noncommittally, “it sounds good.”
Fr. Xris waited. He had not been a priest long when he realized that patience was the most practical of the virtues.
“I need to think this over,” she said, eventually.
“By all means,” Fr. Xris said. “I’m not asking you to do anything; this isn’t a sales pitch. But if you find any more questions, I’ll be happy to share what I know.”
She stood up.
“Thank you, Father.”
She waved goodbye, and left the room.
Fr. Xris thought back over the conversation for a few minutes, then went back to his reading. St. Augustine was making fun of the huge number of Gods which the Romans had, wondering how with the dozen or so deities accompanying a newly married couple to their bed they would ever manage to overcome the embarrassment at their large audience and consummate their marriage. He had laughed at it when he read it in English, and now he discovered that it’s true that everything sounds better in Latin.
Speaking of which, the original of the phrase The World is not Enough is Orbis Non Sufficit. That one was about a draw. The English sounded quite good. It was the motto of Sir Thomas Bond, nearly a thousand years ago, but immortalized by his fictional namesake James Bond. They’ve been making those movies for nearly 500 years now. Sir Thomas was a recusant catholic, during the time in England when it was illegal to be catholic, and his motto was quite appropriate. An ironic version of the words on the stone under which Alexander the Great was buried, “A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.”
No one knew who wrote that. There’s something funny about how the great general who conquered the world came to rest beneath the mocking words of someone the world had never heard of. Supposedly Alexander had asked to be buried with his open hand showing out of the casket as a warning to others that you can’t take it with you. After death, the wishes of even the most powerful men are at the mercy of others.
Fr. Xris’s train of thought was interrupted by his stomach, which was reminding him that he owed it lunch. Having no immediate demands on his time, he accepted his body’s suggestion and went to the cafeteria.
A Stitch In Space Page 6