I’ve been thinking beyond reason.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
Many years ago, I wrote down this sentence from a source I no longer remember: We’ve scrubbed the world clean of magic.
Reading it again, my first response is, of course we have, because magic isn’t real. In this high-tech era, who could believe that a magician is sawing his assistant in half? But the longer I’ve thought about it the sadder I feel, because who wants to live in a world void of magic?
Magic is more than illusions and card tricks and rabbits in hats; it is also a password into mysteries and powers that we cannot yet explain.
I like to imagine myself a very rational person, devoted to the academic certainties of equations and evidence and critical thinking. But the more carefully I think about it, the more I’m not sure what makes something reasonable.
There are still moments even this late in my life when I want to crawl up onto someone’s comforting lap, or lie on my back in the grass with my grandchildren and find the sheep and the monsters in the drifting clouds.
For most of my life, I’ve received communion in church from a priest who tells me this tasteless wafer and cheap wine are the body and blood of Christ that provide strength for your journey.
Are these experiences reasonable? Perhaps not, but they are real.
In a way I increasingly realize is foolish, I’ve occasionally and unwittingly limited my understanding of what is real to those things that can be validated by empirical evidence. From this rigid perspective, I could dismiss the inexplicable on the grounds that it is beyond reason.
But what if the inexplicable is just something we, with all of our intelligence, have yet to imagine, or even if we can imagine it, have yet to find a way to make happen? What if the inexplicable stretches our rational thinking as far as it can go, and then demands we go further?
It’s not rocket science. That’s how we’re prodded when faced with intellectual challenges any of us should be able to master. Well, in this case, it was rocket science, and it was far beyond the mental capacities of most of us.
On March 5th, 2021, streaming from 300 million miles away, we watched a space craft lower the Perseverance rover onto the surface of Mars, its jet pack kicking up reddish dust. We were left marveling not only at the science involved, but at the wonder of it all.
I’m stupefied, literally made to feel stupid, by the capacity of these scientists to reason out the overall strategies and millions of details it takes to get to Mars and land in a designated parking space. Watching the landing, we were witnessing not just a triumph of science but something more, something that seemed almost, well, magical.
To write the word magical makes me uneasy. It’s easier and emotionally safer to live in a world I can explain.
Without recognizing it, I sometimes operate with the delusional notion that if I intellectually master my circumstances, I can control them; if I reduce the world to what is reasonable, I will protect myself from those uneasy mysteries that are beyond reason.
Yet mystery pleads with us: Don’t ask another question, rather let what you don’t understand question you. Don’t exhaust yourself mentally by trying to solve every problem, rather let the problem you cannot solve interrogate you. Don’t continue restlessly trying to explain what’s happening, just take it in and let it have its way with you. Don’t search for the certainty that keeps you calm and safe, rather live with the uncertainty that keeps you on edge.
In this more reflective mood, I learn again that reason and magic are not opposites, any more than thinking and feeling are. And thank God, we haven’t scrubbed the world clean of magic, though we’ve convinced ourselves that we no longer need it. In fact, we do.
Call it magic or mystery, call it whatever you like; the capacity to reach into the unknown and with the tips of our imagination’s fingers explore the inexplicable is as real as solving any equation.
On that March 5th morning, when the announcement came over the speakers in the crowded command headquarters, Touchdown confirmed, the brilliant scientists rose as one from their computers – from their calculations and projections – raised their arms in victory like Rocky Balboa on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and cheered and cried and hugged each other.
For all of us, it was magical.
That's just what I've been thinking - do you believe in magic?
Blessings,
– Rick