Written by Malachi Brown
At least twice a year, my mother brings up my ACT test scores and my math class grades, lamenting that I didn’t become an engineer or something that pays better than writing and ministry. I was very good at math and science throughout my entire primary and secondary schooling, creating hypotheses and using data to come to conclusions. This served me very well academically, and people usually knew that when I said something, I had the evidence to back it up.
As I entered high school, I began to see facts or common senses in discordance with my beliefs. Like how people ought to, when the facts didn’t support my conclusion, I had to change my conclusion. I looked at how many events my parents showed up to and how many times my friends asked me to hang out and came to the conclusion that I was not as loved as I wanted to be. I saw my excitement for upcoming movies, or my pride when I won awards, and decided that I was not as happy as I ought to be. Luckily, I grew out of this, but I didn’t realize what was happening until very recently.
I spent most of my Thanksgiving reading books, articles and dissertations on a kind of character called the Holy Fool who shows up in a lot of Christian Existentialist novels. The paper I was writing talks about how the Holy Fool does not need to rationalize everything out. They are not foolish because they are bad decision makers or they are more ignorant than other people, but because they are humble enough to recognize that they cannot answer every question. Once you have found a way to measure joy by an applause-meter, or love by a dinky machine at an amusement park, they are no longer joy or love.
Humans cannot possibly define “joy” or “love” with words any more than we can describe God, and anyone who says otherwise, by trying to be more intelligent, becomes more foolish.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so how many words is an experience? I cannot describe the love my mother has for me, but I experience her kiss on my forehead every time I finish the trip home for breaks. Nor can I describe the love my father has for me, but I can see the look on his face as he watches me doing the things I love. Once I realized how foolish it is to approach eternity with a yardstick, love and joy and God no longer seemed so small. I stopped scouring the data for signs of joy and suddenly found it everywhere.
Weights and measures have their merit. I have abounding gratitude for people in engineering or chemistry who work with precise numbers, but in some fields, they have serious limitations. The Holy Fool teaches us that love is not meant to be measured but experienced. To not have all the facts but to experience it anyway: that sounds a lot like faith to me.
