Cracking the Door Open

The Reverend Rebecca Justice Schunior, Assistant Rector

            How to put this scene we’ve just witnessed in context? How to sum up in as few words as possible the play Arcadia? It’s impossible. It’s doomed. Summarizing the plot quickly is like trying to explain the laws of quantum physics before you’ve had your morning coffee. Not that I could summarize the laws of physics for you, but I definitely couldn’t without a strong cup of coffee.

            But because I’m tasked with this doomed undertaking, I will do my best. Arcadia, which our Players will perform this coming week, is an English country-house comic story that’s also about the death of the universe. It’s Tom Stoppard at his witty and wordy best. There will be some of you who have seen it and hate it because all those words and witticisms leave you feeling cold; there will be those of you who see it and will be frustrated with its self aware cleverness.

But I know some of you will love this play like I do, because in spite of, and obviously because, of all the words, it is, at its heart, about the unquenchable human urge to know. And, despite all the words, all the ideas, and all the cleverness, there is heart to this play. This is because the urge to know, to discover, and learn is not just an objective of the mind but also a desire of the human heart.

To put this particular scene in some kind of context for you, I will also say that Arcadia is the story of a nineteenth century young genius who begins to discover a truth beyond her reach while also a story about twentieth century figures who try to figure out the truth of what happened in the past with the scraps of evidence that somehow survived. To put all these pieces together requires the contributions of a historian, a Lord Byron scholar, a mathematician, and mysterious luck.

The mathematics part is vital to the story. In mathematics there is order and chaos. As Valentine says, “the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is…a door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.” And this mirrors life – the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. Mystery and certainty meet and make for wonder and delight.

But the wonder and delight is leavened with tragedy in Arcadia. The nineteenth century genius cannot see clearly into the future of chaos theory because she does not have the time or the tools to complete the picture. She has the vision but sadly lacks the means to fully realize it. Her twentieth century investigators lack the ability to see into the past, to really know what took place before them. They grasp at clues, but can never know what truly took place. But in both centuries characters see one truth:  this enterprise is doomed – not just the enterprise of knowing things, but the human enterprise of existence. All of us will one day die; but more than that. Everything will finally and inevitably grow cold and cease to exist. The sun will not always burn brightly; our planet will not always harbor the conditions necessary for life.

Perhaps it seems like the Genesis account of creation that we read during this service is entirely separate and unrelated to mathematics and a scientific discovery of the universe – the old science vs. faith debate right here on Sunday morning.

But I think Genesis is right in line with Arcadia. Though Genesis is the first book of the Bible, it was not written first. In fact, it might properly belong in the genre of biblical writing called Wisdom literature. Those books include Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The writers of these books were all interested in patterns – what is the pattern of existence? What can we know about life? What meaning is there in our lives? The Book of Proverbs contains age old wisdom that has helped groups of people navigate life for centuries – Do your homework; don’t stay out late; don’t marry the foreign woman kind of stuff. Its foils – the book of Job and the book of Ecclesiastes claim that the pattern might be there, but the knowledge of this pattern is beyond us. Genesis is squarely in this tradition. There is a pattern – God created the world; it is good; the wind of God once swept over the face of the waters in a lovely and loving triumph over chaos. But we cannot discern this pattern. We are exiled from the garden of this pattern, left to a wandering wilderness of uncertainty. We are gifted with the ability to discern that there is a pattern, but lack the equipment to see it. This is the tragedy at the heart of human existence.

And this is also our mathematical reality. We can write an equation for the leaf or the little girl. We can map the course of atoms and the population of birds. A computer could be built that could predict all human action. But the unpredictable keeps popping up in all kinds of ways. That may be the weather forecast or the action of cream in a cup of coffee OR it might be the action of God to send God’s own self to earth, to live and walk with us. To be with creation in some unpredictable new way.

Arcadia’s Valentine proclaims that a door has cracked open for us – a door that only opens every once and a while and behind it is mystery and wonder. We read today of the baptism of Jesus, important because the heavens cracked open and the voice of God called a human being beloved and God’s own child. For an instant, God, spirit, and human being came together for a flash of what we still name epiphany.

In the aspect of eternity all of us are doomed. We are here a little while. As we see in Arcadia, we are dancing on the eve of our death. But also our entire species is doomed. How then do we live? Hannah makes an important speech near the end of the play, “Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”

We struggle on because what lights the fire of humanity is the urge to know. The desire of both heart and head to speak truth. And I passionately say that the language of metaphor and meaning – the story of God tearing apart the heavens to speak to one individual, the story of God moving over waters and separating night and day is not a coping mechanism. It is not a shield from the pain of extinction. It is a bold statement of faith in unpredictability. Our course is not yet set. There is order and there is chaos – we are doomed and yet still possibly saved. Jesus fled his baptism to an uncertain wilderness. Yet he went armed with the kind of certainty that comes with conviction. We matter; our quest for knowing matters. The pattern may be beyond us; we may never write the equation that defines our life, but sometimes the door cracks open. Sometimes the heavens tear apart and we glimpse a new truth. And like Valentine, that makes me so very happy.