During graduation weekend, I gave a talk encouraging the students to never cease asking the important questions in life. Questions like: Does your life have a purpose? What is a Good life?
A student stopped by the next day to talk about it. She was worried. How could she possibly ever find a definitive answer to hard questions like that?
My student’s question is an interesting one, but not for the reason she imagined.
In the final chapter of Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker, she makes a distinction between problems of the sort found in detective novels (of which she wrote some truly great ones, e.g., Gaudy Night) and “life-problems.”
She notes there are four characteristics of a detective mystery. People want to find these same characteristics in real life. But, “because we are accustomed to find them in the one, we look for them in the other, and experience a sense of frustration and resentment when we do not find them.”
The four characteristics:
1. The detective problem is always soluble.
2. The detective problem is completely soluble.
3. The detective problem is solved in the same terms in which it is set.
4. The detective problem is finite.
Sayers is entirely correct about detective problems. A mystery novel is completely unsatisfying if there is no solution, if there are loose, unexplained ends, if there is some deus ex machina needed to wrap the thing up, or if there is no finality. We like mystery novels exactly because they give this sense of completeness.
But, then when we turn to the problems of life, none of these things exist.
The answer to my student is quite simply that she may indeed never find a definitive answer to the important questions of life.
That does not mean, however, that she should not constantly strive to find those answers. The quest to find the answers matters.
Why should we spend our lives wrestling with overwhelming questions for which we may never find a satisfactory answer?
First of all, we don’t have a choice. Our minds seem to be built to be constantly peering into the unknown to learn just a little bit more. Our minds seem to be built to stare at the world in wonder. Our minds seem to be built in a way the leaves us asking, “Why am I here?”
But, perhaps more importantly, we need to think about the unanswerable questions because it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that is it perfectly OK if we don’t have it all figured out.
You see people all the time who try to wrap up all of life in a neat little ball, who have an answer to everything, who never want to say, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”
Such people, without really realizing what they have done, have set themselves up as a local deity, all knowing and all wise.
Sooner or later, however, the person who has it all figured out meets a question for which they do not and then what happens? The walls go up. The question is ruled out of bounds or trivialized or corrupted into something answerable.
Theology is far too often like that. When we contemplate God, should we ever expect to figure Him out?
You will never have all the answers. Acknowledge the existence of mystery. And then. never cease exploring that mystery even knowing you will never find all the answers.
Glad you mentioned Gaudy Night. I read it in 1977, I think, not long after a research trip to the UK which included a a few days at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Reading Sayers’ novel at bedtime kept me up late (it was that good) and also allowed me to live awhile longer in the golden haze of that trip.
Cheerio!