Meaning beyond mystery

The “Three Kings,” or more properly the “wise men,” had a problem. Their study of the stars had told them that a great king had been born in Judea, and they had set out on a long and dangerous journey, following his star, to find him and do him honor. Strangely, neither King Herod nor the experts in the Jewish Scriptures knew anything of such a birth. And strangest of all, the star led them not to a royal palace but to a simple peasant house among other peasant houses.

Surely they must have asked themselves whether their journey was all a mistake, whether they should return home and forget the whole thing. Yet the Gospel tells us very simply: “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary and they bowed down and worshiped him.”

The science of their day had brought them to the door of the house. But there science ended and it required a leap of faith for them to dismount from their camels, stoop perhaps to enter the house, and to fall on their knees before a peasant child being tended by a simple peasant woman and her husband.

That leap of faith, though they were surely not fully aware of it at the time, took them into a whole new world of meaning—meaning centered on that baby and yet extending out to the very limits of time and space. For as John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

The “Word” or “Logos” in the original Greek of John’s Gospel was the creative wisdom, principle of intelligibility that gives order and meaning to all creation and to our lives. By faith the wise men found it in that baby. They are venerated as the first Gentiles (non-Jews) to receive that gift of faith, the first of billions of Christians down through the centuries to whose lives the birth of that baby has brought meaning and direction.

Whatever may be the historical basis for the story of the wise men, I see it as bearing a lesson for us in the far more sophisticated scientific age of today.

Science has progressed incredibly beyond the astrology of the wise men in penetrating the secrets of our world. The theory of evolution, the discoveries of biologists and astronomers and nuclear physicists have revealed a world of mind-boggling complexity and dimensions in time and space, a world of forces so delicately fine-tuned that any one of dozens of conceivable variations would make life as we know it impossible in our universe. Scientists who have probed deeply into these mysteries are gripped, I am told, by a sense of awe akin to religious wonder.

To explain the tremendous improbability of this fine-tuning without a Grand Designer, some cosmologists invoke the Many World theory in which our “universe” is only one among many “universes,” one in which conditions happen to be right. But even this approach leads to a blank wall, to a mystery, when we face the question of meaning: Why is it that something exists rather than nothing? Are the values which we cherish—the dignity of the human person, human rights—real? Are they anything more than the chance products of evolution? Is there a real difference between an Adolf Hitler and a Mother Teresa? In a line attributed to Albert Einstein, “Does the universe care?”

Perhaps four days in the Heart Center recently have made me more sensitive to such existential questions. In any case, I find it much easier to accept the meaning of life and death portrayed in the story of the life, the teachings and miracles, the death and Resurrection of the child whom the wise men found, than to try to make sense of a life and a world which are ultimately meaningless.

And I am not alone in this. Recently, a friend who had done relief work in Iligan after the “Sendong” disaster recounted one incident to me, with a catch in her voice. A soft-spoken man in a relief center was very solicitous to her and her husband, insisting that they share the little food he had. Only gradually did it come out that he, a security guard, had been away from his home, on duty, when the fury of the floodwaters struck. He communicated by cell phone with his wife and two children as they went to the second floor of their house, and then to the roof; then there was silence as the house was washed away. Days later he found the body of his wife, hardly recognizable; the bodies of his children had not been found.

The bottom had dropped out of this man’s life; seemingly he had nothing more to live for. Yet he remained calm and at peace, considerate of others, as he reflected on the story of Job in the Old Testament, on the assurance that there really is meaning behind the mystery of suffering and death.

I know not what a non-believer would say to a man in his situation, but for myself I thank God for the gift of faith.

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Comments welcome at jcarroll@aeneo.edu