the parable of the puzzle

21Mar09

There lived on the outskirts of a city, in a quaint cottage, an old, retired professor. This professor’s life’s work had been an attempt to disprove the existence of God–especially the existence of the Christian God. His library, in which he took great pride, was full of the works of well-known atheistic philosophers, biologists, psychologists, physicists, sociologists, textual critics, and theorists.

In his zeal, the professor took every advantage he was given to disprove the existence of the Christian God to his students and fellow faculty. In short, the professor simply believed that the world was devoid of the numinous and supernatural, and that human life was an ironic cosmic accident, and that at the end of life one was greeted with nothingness. The world, as the professor saw it, was a black one, void of hope and meaning beyond what we conspired to make up for ourselves. And he reveled in his certainty that it was so.

One day a rapping of three times came at the professor’s cottage door. He set down his pipe and slowly arose from his reading to answer. Upon opening the door, he was surprised to see no one. He walked down the steps, looked around, and still, no one was to be seen. But strangely there at his feet lay a box wrapped in black, tied with a black bow. Curious, the professor picked up the box, feeling its light weight. Guessing its contents, he shook the box, took it inside, and began to unwrap it.

It was what he thought it to be—a large puzzle. And as he took the blank lid off the box, he began to heartily chuckle to himself that there was no picture on the lid, and all the puzzle pieces were black—every last one of them. This delighted the professor of course, for he saw in this puzzle a metaphor of reality as he believed it to be. Beyond this life, nothing would greet us but a great dark void. Indeed, as he saw it, covering up this reality was the aim of religion—to construct a myth that proclaimed that the vast emptiness of our world was not so—that there was light, there was meaning, there was hope, all of which was fabricated to help us cope with our meaningless existence.

Giddy with satisfaction, the professor rubbed his palms together and took to solving the puzzle. With each piece he put into place, he chuckled to himself, as each puzzle piece symbolically confirmed the certainty of his view of life. And so the professor worked on the large puzzle late into the night, slowly putting it together.

As the puzzle slowly took over the desk table in his library, he worked his way down to the last pieces. Laughing aloud more and more, his delight came to a triumphant crescendo. The fifth to last piece… The fourth to last piece… The third to last piece…

And suddenly, his joy began to subside, his laughter began to dissipate.

The second to last piece… And finally, the last piece.

There, on his desk, seemingly staring at him, was a hole in the puzzle, which appeared to be 3 missing pieces, or perhaps one large piece—he couldn’t be sure. But it was in the very middle of the puzzle, incomplete, void and undone.

The professor frantically began to search under the lid, beneath the box, under the desk, in the box wrapper, in the cuff of his pants, under his rug, everywhere. He began to curse at he knew not what, out of frustration of the missing piece(s). He systematically, and yet desperately, began to turn his house over, in search of that which was missing. This unfinished puzzle began to laugh at him, calling out his name, snickering at his vain pursuit. In a sudden sweep of emotion, this void in the puzzle began to drive him insane. He gave up on finding the pieces in his cottage, and went outside with a lantern, looking at the bottom of the steps, in the hedge and flowerbeds, through the grass. In what was utter madness he began pulling up grass, flowers and shrubs in his crazed state. His entire property lay overturned in a wake of his own undoing.

That night, the professor’s raving search then took him out into the streets with his lantern. And he never returned home.

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Tags: atheism, mystery, parable, Trinity