Under the Fir Tree

There’s a mercy in discovering some battles can be escaped. Close the door. Put down the phone. Stop answering texts. Let the voices go on without you for a while . . . The world, surprisingly, survives. Abba Antony knew what solitude does. It takes weapons out of other people’s hands. No accusation reaches you unless memory carries it in. No praise can intoxicate you unless you pour it yourself. There’s no face across the table to irritate you, no careless sentence to correct, no beautiful thing to possess with your eyes. Hearing grows quiet. Speaking stops. Seeing has less to feed upon. Three wars end. And then the fourth begins. This is the unpleasant gift of silence: eventually there’s no one left to blame for the noise. We imagine solitude will give us peace because we imagine other people are the principal authors of our unrest. If the office were quieter. If the children needed less. If the news weren’t so maddening. If that person would stop saying that thing. If someone final...

Borges understood something unnerving about us: we don’t simply live in the world. We live inside what we’ve decided the world means. We name things. Sort them. Draw borders around them. We build theories, institutions, political systems, theologies, diagnoses, stories. We make maps because the world is too large to hold in the mind all at once. We need the maps. The trouble begins when we forget we’re holding one. St. Paul puts the whole problem into a few words: “For now we see in a mirror dimly . . . Now I know in part.” I know in part. There’s humility in that sentence, but no surrender of truth. Paul doesn’t say we know nothing. He doesn’t say the mirror lies. He says it’s dim. We see something real. We just don’t see all of it. And nearly every human way of understanding carries the same temptation. We discover something true and, because it’s true, begin asking it to explain too much. Economics reveals something about us, and soon everything has a price. Psychology discovers wo...

2 Corinthians 12:7-9 St. Paul asked for something to be taken away. Whatever the thorn was, he wanted relief. He prayed for change. Instead, Christ gave him a sentence. “My grace is sufficient for you.” Not: I’ll remove it. Not: You’ll understand it. Not even: This will turn out the way you hope. Only this: My grace is enough. There’s something difficult about that answer because we’d rather have evidence. We like things we can count. Progress. Results. A repaired relationship. A prayer answered in the form we recognize as an answer. A ministry growing. A child coming home. A temptation disappearing. A wound finally closing. We want to know the thing is working. And beneath a great deal of Christian obedience there can hide a quiet bargain with God: I’ll be faithful, Lord, but eventually I need you to show me that all this faithfulness is accomplishing something. So we pray, and then we look. We forgive, and watch to see whether the other person changes. We sacrifice, and wait for grat...

There’s a comforting idea that most of us carry around, especially those of us who like arguments. If people only knew. If they could see the evidence. If the facts were undeniable. If God would tear open the sky for five minutes, settle the matter, and then let everybody get on with things. Surely then we’d believe. Bertrand Russell once imagined the question being put to him from the other side of death: Why hadn’t he believed? His reported answer was essentially a complaint to God: Why didn’t you give me better evidence? It’s a formidable question, and not a foolish one. If God wants to be known, why remain hidden enough to be doubted? Laurence Cosse’s A Corner of the Veil doesn’t so much answer Russell as disturb the assumption beneath the question. What if better evidence came? What if God’s existence ceased to be a matter of probability or argument? What if the veil were pulled aside just far enough that disbelief became intellectually impossible? Would we actually become differ...