The Hard-to-Swallow Bits (Midweek)

 

 

The Hard-to-Swallow Bits

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 1, 2019

Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist of the mid-20^th century, focused most of his work on how complex adult thinking and reasoning grows from the simpler more naïve thought processes of children. One of the progressions in reasoning he noted early on involved children having problems estimating and comparing volumes of which glass held more water. Children younger than six or so had problems estimating basic spatial relationships: when they saw a normal tumbler filled with water emptied in its entirety into a tall skinny Champagne flute, they usually would say that a tall skinny glass held more than the tumbler, though no additional water was added, because, as they all eagerly pointed out, “the water is higher, and that means more.” He discovered that it was pointless for adults to explain the logic correcting the children’s error (“It’s the same water with nothing added or taken away, so it must be the same amount, regardless of the shape of the glass.”) The kids could not see the point until their reasoning and cognitive skills had developed to a more advanced stage, and they had discovered intuitively the principle of the conservation of volume by playing with water and glasses on their own. 

We all are hostages to our own limits in perception and reasoning. We all have blind spots, to which, by definition, we are blind. As Donald Rumsfeld put it, “there are things we know, things we don’t know and know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know.” Further experience and growth might mean that light is shed on such blind spots, or maybe not. 

Imagine a world existing in only two dimensions: length and width. Beings living in such a world could see things only through these two dimensions. A sphere crossing such a world would be seen by its flat-land inhabitants as first a point, then a circle that gradually grows and then shrinks until it is a point again and then disappears. A cube crossing the plane of the flat-land would appear as a square only and then disappear. No amount of reasoning or mathematical modeling would change the flatlanders’ inability to perceive volume and depth. 

Most religious traditions have always asserted that our world is like that: we see only limited aspects of the truth, and are unable to escape our own perceptual limitations. The spirituality of contemplation and the discipline of careful reasoning and scholarship seek to break through the blind spots. And in this, one of the most important solvents of our limitations are the things that seem totally unpredicted and unreasonable in our lives, the things that our normal perceptions and reasoning cannot account for. 

For Christians, the story of the resurrection of Jesus is a central narrative that serves as a solvent of seeing the world through the eyes of the senses only. The story should bother us: it is unprecedented and not-to-be repeated. It goes against everything we think we know about the world. Even this story’s details evolved and grew in the telling, and this makes many of us doubt how helpful the story can be in breaking down our misperceptions of life and death. 

It is the hard bits, those most difficult to swallow, that hold the greatest power in breaking down our limited view. But for that to happen, we need to patiently grow and develop new doors of perception, and spend time “playing with the water glasses.” This in practical terms means hearing the stories again and again, living out their truth in the small ways we are capable of. This is what Church is all about. 

Grace and peace. 

      Fr. Tony +