your 2007 Easter meditation

Some people believe that everything ultimately makes sense. Perhaps things don't make sense from our point of view, but they do make sense from someone else's perspective-- God's, perhaps.

But what if things ultimately don't make sense?

I can think of two very different schools of thought that embrace this view. The first, and most well-known, is without a doubt the deliberate absurdism of post-World War II French existentialism. Born out of the blood and rubble of a war that spanned years and continents, this school of thought basically said we need to stop looking to God for solutions, because the universe, unlike what religion teaches us, is inherently absurd. The only sense to be found is what we make on our own, wresting meaning from the nonsense around us.

The second school of thought is best represented by Catholic thinker Raimondo Panikkar, an advocate of religious pluralism who resists the temptation to form philosophical or theological models to explain how some or all religious traditions fit together within a greater paradigm. For Panikkar, there is no ultimate fitting-together: the universe is marked by an inherent incommensurability.

Think about it this way. People who believe that It All Somehow Makes Sense are partial to this analogy: the universe is like a large, rectangular sheet of window glass that's been smashed on the floor. We, as beings with a limited perspective, pick up the pieces as best we can and successfully fit some of them together, all in the faith that, ultimately, the window itself can be pieced back together-- if not by us, then by Someone.

But Panikkar would say that it's more like this: imagine two such windows have been shattered in separate rooms. Half of the glass from one window is scooped up and combined with half of the glass from the other window; those pieces are strewn across the floor of a third room, and now here we are, trying to put those pieces together into one whole window. The project is doomed to fail.

What do you think? Does the world ultimately make sense, or doesn't it? Can we ever arrive at a Grand Unified Theory? A Theory of Everything? Can we attain GUT or TOE?

What I find interesting is that Panikkar is a Catholic priest. You'd think that he would side with those who believe that, ultimately, things do make sense, even if that sense is visible only to God. But this is not Panikkar's stance. No: for him, the universe's parts do not fit neatly together; there is harmony, to be sure, but there is also a certain jagged, mismatched quality to reality.

Perhaps we can, with caution, replace "jaggedness" (my label, not Panikkar's) with the more elegant term "mystery." Most people seem to think mystery is a one-sided phenomenon. After all, to God, who sees The Other Side as well as our side, what is mysterious? The traditional answer is Nothing! But Panikkar is suggesting something different, I think: that mystery is not merely a function of our limited human perspective, but something woven into the fabric of the cosmos, into the fabric of the Absolute itself.

Which leaves us with two choices: mystery is one-sided, or mystery "goes all the way down." So perhaps this essay has led us to an even stranger question: what is mystery?

And there I leave you on this Easter Sunday: to ponder the mystery of mystery, and the abyssal, infinite regression to which that turn of phrase alludes: the mystery of the mystery of mystery, and so on. A good existentialist would dare you stare into the abyss.

Come to the edge.


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