Religion

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"But the Fool Walks in Darkness"

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SEVERAL summers ago, moviegoers of all ages were enchanted by the story of E.T., the extraterrestrial. Telling the story of a creature from a more advanced civilization who was accidentally stranded on earth, it rapidly became one of the best loved and most profitable films of all time. Much of the movie pits the children, who simply want to Jove E.T. and be loved by him, against the scientists, who want to capture him and study him. Now, the conflict between free-spirited youngsters and authority-minded adults is as basic to movies as the conflict between cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians. But E.T. added something new to the story. The villains in E.T. are not simply grown-ups trying to enforce rules. They are scien- tists who are out to make love disappear in the name of scie ntific progress.

(A year later, the movie Splash told essentially the same story. A mermaid comes to dry land looking to love and be loved, and scientists want to capture and dissect her.)

On the one hand, human beings' ability to reason has been our crowning glory. Philosophers from the time of Aristotle have identified it as th e quality that makes us

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH l "But tht Fool Wal ks in Darknu:" different from animals. When the opening pages of th Bible describe Adam as naming the animals, tribut _c being paid to his unique ability to reason, to sort tht is into categories. Man alone can use his mind to make to:fs to build machines, to change his environment, as well s, to write books and symphonies. as

But on the other hand, our reason tells us that rcaso itself has its limits. If you dissect a fro g, you will haven lot of information about how frogs arc _put together, bu: you won't have a frog anymore. If you dissect and analyze a mermaid or an extraterrestrial visitor, you may well Sain a scientific breakthrough and maybe even win a Nobel Prize, but you will no longer have a friend who loves you and for a lot of people, the gain in information is just no; worth it. The biblical Hebrew verb yada, "to know " somewhat like the English word " understand," can m~n either to have information about someone or something, or to be intimate with someone. But it seems that we have to choose between analyzing someone at a distance and getting so close that we experience the other person rather than intellectually understanding him or her.

Ecclesiastes, grown too old and too cynical for a life of pleasure, turned to philosophy in an effort to discover the meaning of life, and found himself "understanding" life instead of living it. He read all the books, heard all the learned lectures, and what he learned was that the mean- ing of life is not to be found in philosophy. Having a lot of information about how to live is like having a lot of information about swimming or music but never going in the water or picki ng up a violin.

In June of I 985, I was invited to address the graduating class of Cornell University. I said to them th at if the

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e graduati ng senior was twenty-one or tw avcragold most of the Vietnam War had happe endty-th~o ,ears ' . . ne w 1le ) •"ere children, too young to understand wh t thcP • fh a was . on So the irony o t e phrase "the best d h going· h., ante brightest" was lost o~ t em. The best and the brightest" . the way we described the government officials wh ~as be . . h o got

us into Vietnam to gm wit and then kept getting in deeper and deeper. They were un~eniably brilliant men, honor gradual~ of th? finest universities, armed with

ountains of mformation from the most sophisticated :mputers, and ~till ~hey kept making the wrong deci- ·ons. They had mtelhgence. They had information. But

:~ey tacked ~isdom, the instinctive sense of how to apply the information they had.

And the _csscnce of wi~do~, I suggested, was a respect for the limits of human mtelhgence and a sense of rever- enct for the vast dark reaches of reality where reason cannot penetrate,

If their Ivy League education had developed their minds but had let their sense of humility and reverence atrophy, I told them, they would run the risk of being "the best and the brightest" of their generation, smart enough to lead but not wise enough to know where they should be going. Some of them would be going on to medical school, and I expressed the hope that they had learned not only chemistry and biology, but also a sense of reverence for the miracle of life and the wondrous complexity of the human body. I hoped that they had learned that some ailments cannot be cured by brilliant diagnosis and elabo- rate machinery, but only by loving and caring. Without that humility and reverence, they might end up practicing lhe equivalent of auto mechanics on human beings, but they would never cure .

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r WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

Some of them would become successful in busi I warned them of the day when intelligence un:~:• and sensitivity, the mind without the heart, compute ed. by

d · · k' r Pnnt outs and rational ecmon ma mg, would lead th · make decisions that would unnecessarily hurt Peop~m to a time like that, I told them, reverence for the humane. At should be more important to them than attention t sohul bottom line.

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As a result of seeing where intellectually gifted leaders had taken us,. as a result of other lar~e and small calamities of the twentieth century (from scemg the most cultured nation in Europe launch the Hol?Caust t~ seeing the most creative scientists among us spo1lmg our au and our drink- ing water), we have learned to mistrust intelligence as a guide to life. The teachings of Sigmund Freud color the thinking of all of us in the twentieth century, reminding us that we may think we are acting out of logical reasons but we probably do the things we do for reasons we cannot understand.

Ecclesiastes set out to test the truth of the proverb he had heard all his life, "The wise man has eyes in his head but the fool walks in darkness." He hoped he would learn that it was true. He needed the reassurance that it is better to be wise than to be foolish, better to be learned than to be ignorant. He needed the conviction that in much learn- ing, he would find the key to living, and that the unedu• catcd person would be left to drift through life without a compass. After all, he was a wise, thoughtful person, a cultured man , a good student. Would that be enough to keep .his life from slipping inevitably toward death and oblivion? Would being wise rather than foolish really make a difference?

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"But th e Fool Walks in Darkrieu"

8 t he learned only that if the wise man has eyes t u . h 1· . ed o sec,

what he secs 1s t e 1m1t usefulness of being wise. Per- haps Ecclesiastes. saw, we hav~ seen so often, smart people doing :ooh~h ~~mgs. <:onst~er the implication of the word "rauonahze .. To rationalize means to do some- hing wrong, and then invent reasons to justify it. we use

:ur intelligence not to figure ou.t the right thing to do, but

10 make clever c~cuses for ha."1ng done the wrong thing. Perhaps Ecclesiastes saw brtght people using their intel- rgencc as a way of avoiding emotional commitment :nalyzing rather than caring, like the scientists who would rather "understand" E.T. than let themselves love him. If the wise man walks in daylight and the fool in darkness are there some things which arc spoiled by exposure to th; light? Arc some of life's pleasures meant to be experienced without being analyzed and understood? A classic cartoon shows an exasperated teenager telling her mother, "For Pete's sake, will you stop understanding me!"

Perhaps the fool docs walk in darkness, but half of our lives are spent in darkness, in the nighttime hours , and it may be that we have to learn to spend part of our lives as "fools," giving ourselves over to emotions we do not en- tirely understand and cannot control, so that we can live comfortably in that darkness. I know people who are as afraid of being openly emotional as many people are afraid of the dark. Love, joy, rage frighten them because they feel out of control. They cannot let themselves get angry, they cannot lose themselves in love, because that would mean losing control of their emotions, and that frightens them. They have trouble handling emotions which do not make sense. (The ancient fable of Pandora's Box tells of a woman, Pandora, who is given a scaled box by the gods and is told never to open it. Of course, Pandora is curious

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f WHEN ALL YOU'V E EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH d pe

ns the box and all sorts of demons esca ano ' d be JlC,lt urs to me that the story nee not an account or h :men brought trouble into the world. Might it not ra~.,, be 8

parable of bow men try to keep the emotional .dcr " I ked beca SI Cs of their personal1ues oc up use they cons·d

them dangerous, while women arc less fri ghtened of th I

er d " 'lits ") ern1 In Greek, Pan ora means many gt .

There is a tradition in both Judaism and Christianit the "holy fool," the simple, uneducated, unsophistiC:~ person who serves ~od spo?tancously and cnthusiasti. cally, without stopping to thmk about what he is doin His serving is especially beloved because no intellectut barriers come between him and his God. One of the most beloved stories of medieval Christianity is the story of the Lady's Juggler. Every one of the faithful was coming to bring his or her gift to honor the Virgin on her holiday. They were fine, expensive gifts, handwoven tapestries, jewel-encrusted crowns. One poor, simple young man had no present to bring and no money with which to buy one. But he could juggle. So he danced and juggled before the statue of the Virgin, to the horror of all the very proper spectators, and because his juggling was from the heart, it was the most acceptable gift of all.

If we are going to spend part of our lives walking in darkness, shall we do it conscious of all the dangers that may be lurking there, or shall we walk as "fools," realizing that we do not have all the answers and that it is not always up to us to find the way? There have been two world wars in this century, and countless other smaller wars, and tens of millions of people have been killed in them. Most of those wars were planned and executed by reasonable, intelligent men. Small wonder then that after every war, we become disillusioned with reason and intel•

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"Bu1 the Fool Walks In Darkne,s"

ce and where they lead us. In recent years we ha Jigena resurgence of fundamentalism and extrer:iism a:de seen h . . I . . ' a celebration of t e trrattona , m Chnstianity, Judaism

d Islam, We have seen the appearance of yarmulkes on heads of Jewish students on college campuses and veils

t \he faces of female students in the Middle East. Though 0; ir symbolism is very different, they are both ways of t ~ecting the modem world and its values, including its reJ . d 'd claim that the human mm , una1 ed by G~, can discover the truth. We have ~e~n the emergence of fwth healers and evangelists on telev1s1on to an unprecedented degree, and millions of people seem to be receptive to their message that it is the "best and the brightest" who walk in dark- ness, and only the irrational, the "fools for God," who have eyes to see.

Was Ecclesiastes disappointed by what he learned about the ability of the mind to plot his course through life? He never seems to give up his faith in reason. He never becomes mystical nor does he trade his skepticism for a religiously fundamentalist outlook. And after all, he does end up writing a book on the subject. But he seems to be saying, "I have learned it all. I have gone as far as reason can carry me, and it is just not enough. l need more. I need the kind of truth that reason cannot lead me to, but I am a logical, reasonable person and I don't know where to find it. Physicians and philosophers talk to me about life and death, and when I listen to them, it all makes so much se~se. But if it makes sense, why am I still so afraid of dying and disappearing?" One suspects that if he ever finds an answer to that question, the answer will be one which does not make sense, at least not on a rational level.

Many years ago, when I was young, a business associate

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGI{

f father's died under particularly tragic ci o my 'ed . ( th t h rcurn stances, and I acco~paru my a er odt e funeral, 1'h~

, widow and children were surroun ed by clerg mans h ' ' f d Yand psychiatrists trying to case_ t cir gne an make thern fee better. They knew all the nght words, but nothing he! I They were beyond being comfort~d. 1:he widow kept~- . g "You're right, I know you re right, but it dn.. Y· m' " l . ~n't make any difference. Then a man w~ ked m, a big burl man in his eighties who was a legend m the toy and 8 Y ped f R • Bille industry. He had esca rom uss1a as a youth after having been arrested an~ torture~ ~y the czar's secret police. He had come to this country 1lhterate and penniless and had built up an 1mmens~ly successful company, lie was known as a hard bargainer, a ruthless competitor, Despite his success, he had never learned to read or writ He hired people to read his ma!l to him. The joke in industry was that he could wnte a check for a million dollars, and the hardest part would be signing his nlllllc at the bottom. He had been sick recently, and his face and his walking showed it. But he walked over to the widow and started to cry, and she cried with him, and you could feel the atmosphere in the room change. This man who had never read a book in his life spoke the language of the heart and held the key that opened the gates of solace where learned doctors and clergy could not.

The human mind is a great thing, perhaps the most indisputable proof of God's hand in the evolutionary pro- cess. When you realize that human beings arc born weaker, slower, more naked, and more vulnerable than so many other creatures, you come to understand that it is only by applying our intelligence to the world that we are able to survive. Where other animals have fur and fcath· crs, we have learned how to weave clothes and heat our

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"Bu t the Fool Walks In Da rkness"

es Where other animals have developed m • }lorn · . . ass1ve mus. we have built machines. The human mind h c!CS, . ed 'fi . as created

di. cines and invent art! c1al hearts to prolo 1., me . h . . ng 1te. It h

written books wh1c can inspire us and make us as B . h . 1. . more rnpassionate. ut it as its 1m1ts. There are que 1-co . s ions, including s~me of the most 1m~ortant questions, which it . probably incapable of answenng. As Pascal put it "Th 1s . h' h , e heart has its reasons _w 1c reason cannot know."

When I was a seminary stud~nt, the student body was divided i~to tw~ cam~s: t~e rationalists, who approached the tradition with their mmds, as something to be under- stood and explained; and the mystics, who approached the sarne tradition with their sou ls, as something that could never be understood or explained but only experienced. I was strongly in the rationalist camp in those days . We looked down on the others as medieval mystifiers who would never be taken seriously by a congregation of col- lege graduates. They dismissed us as bearers of a dry, arid legalism which would never reach beyond the top three inches of a person, enlightening the mind but never engag- ing the soul. We rationalists believed back then that if we could explain religion to people and show them how it made sense, they would be persuaded. After all, we would be dealing with intelligent, reasonable people. Why shouldn't they listen to reason? We failed to understand that faith, like love, loyalty, hope, and many of the most important dimensions of our lives, is rooted in that vast, dark, irrational area where reason cannot reach and man's intellect cannot venture.

Adlai Stevenson once wrote:

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. All the

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WHEN ALL YOU 'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUQI{

observations about life which can be communicated handily are as well known to a man at twenty Wh has been attentive as to a man at fifty , He has bee~ told them all, he bas read them all, but he has not lived them all. What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is not the knowledge of formu las or forms of words but of people, places, actions, a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, lov; -the human experiences and emotions of this earth and oneself and other people; and perhaps too a little faith and a little reverence for things you cannot sec" (quoted in William Attwood, Making It Through Middle Age, Atheneum, 1972, p. 107).

Today, I am twenty-five years older and wiser, and in fulfillment of Jung's prediction that in mid-life we go back and fill in the spaces we left blank when we were growing up, I find myself quoting Judaism's mystical tradition as much as its rational one. Time and again, I turn to books I had no patience for during my student days. I have come to appreciate the value of customs and rituals that "don't make sense." There is a cycle of daylight and darkness, of mind and emotion in my inner world even as there is in the world around me. Sometimes our life's task is to shed light where there is darkness, to make sense of the things that happen around us, to find connections and explain them. But sometimes our life's task is to accept the dark· ness, the things which cannot and perhaps should not be explained, as part of the world we live in.

At the end of the movie, E. T. escapes from the high priests of science and reason who arc chasing him and heads into the darkness to go home. At the end of Splash,

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·•Bu t the Foo/ Walk, In Darkn,..,"

mermaid and her earthling lover si milarly out h 1hc h 'ft d . runte p01ice and t _e sc1en 1s s an esca~ mto the dark undersea world, And m _the end, we too will one day go off into the darkness, and 1f we have learned how to live, we will face ii neither wisely nor foolishly, but bravely and unafraid.

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