It is such a joy to finally figure out something my son has been trying to say. Just so, it is a joy when a particular passage of Scripture finally breaks open.
"I feel like I'm running a cipher all day long!" That's how I've described caring for a young toddler whose urge to communicate is rapidly outpacing his emerging language skills. Our days are a constant stream of chatter, his one-word utterances alternating with my educated guesses or confident elaborations. Many of our topics of conversation are so consistent from day to day and even hour to hour that my replies require no guesswork at all:
But as his articulation struggles to keep up with his constantly expanding vocabulary, I more and more have to stop and think or try several guesses before his excited response confirms I've landed on the right one. The idiosyncrasies of one-year-old speech make this guessing game feel a lot like looking up correspondences in a mental code book. For example, if I didn't translate for you, how long would it take you to figure out that "oof-oof" means fence and "yaya" means letters or numbers?
Like many first-time parents, I have made a list of all my son's words, both as a record for myself and to share with other caregivers. A reasonable project it seemed, since at the time his vocabulary was growing by only about one new word every day or two. However, again like countless parents before me, I abandoned the list almost as soon as I started it. Now he takes in new words like he eats cheerios: whole handfuls at a time, and also sneakily when I'm not looking. So my mental code book has had to become more sophisticated. Instead of just relying on context clues and a word list of manageable length, I now have to draw on other decoding tools too. For example, consistent mispronunciations: if I know that "foop" is soup and "foo" is spoon and "foap" is soap, then I can reasonably guess that "fash" is splash and "fee," when arriving at the playground, just might be swing.
If this sounds exhausting, that's because it is. I'm as drained mentally at the end of each day as I ever was during my eleven years of advanced schooling. Silence, too, has never been so sweet: it feels like a chance for my mind to exhale rather than a roar I need to drown out with music or conversation. But I also love the constant mental challenge; toddler life is certainly much less boring than baby life. Even more so, I love the feeling of triumph we share when I finally get it right. I've always loved language games and logic puzzles; I never expected to get to share them with my son quite this early.
The idea of a cipher came up recently in the other half of my life. At work, I recently taught a seminary course on the Pensées of Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century Christian philosopher and apologist who is the namesake of the Christian study center that I lead at the University of Illinois. In this work, Pascal -- one of the first truly modern thinkers in the West -- spends a great deal of time pondering why God keeps Himself hidden, why He does not reveal Himself plainly but allows people to continue living in ignorance of Him.
Pascal concludes that God hides Himself intentionally in order to make us choose to search for Him: there is just enough light for those who truly seek the truth to be able to find it, but not so much as to force those who would rather remain distant from God to believe in Him (L149). In fact, Pascal says, the hiddenness of God is itself evidence that Christianity is true: "God being thus hidden, any religion that does not say that God is hidden is not true, and any religion which does not explain why does not instruct. Ours does all this." (L242)
Where, you might wonder, does Christianity -- known, in all its variations, for its open invitation to all to come and know God, and be known by Him -- explicitly say that God is hidden? Pascal frequently references Isaiah 45:15: "Verily thou art a God who hidest thyself." He adds that the Old Testament prophecies themselves plainly state that their meaning is obscure. And what metaphor does Pascal use for such passages? The double meaning of a cipher (L260, L265).
According to Pascal, the key to understanding the prophecies in the Old Testament is recognizing that they are fulfilled not literally but spiritually, in Jesus Christ. Taken literally, many of the prophecies are obviously false: for example, the Jewish kingdom and sacrifices have not continued without ceasing (as Pascal was aware in his day, even though he does not seem to have interacted with any practicing Jews or rabbinical scholarship). Taken spiritually, however, these prophecies are plainly fulfilled in Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and reign (L260). Pascal argues that both Testaments thus prove each other simultaneously (L274).
Returning to the idea of the hiddenness of God, Pascal finds yet a further reason, one that reveals God's love for us in His very hiddenness from us. At this point we must remember that Pascal invented the first working adding machine, performed unprecedented experiments to demonstrate the existence of the vacuum, and took great pleasure in mathematical puzzles throughout his life. In writing about divine hiddenness, then, Pascal first observes that human beings naturally love a diversity of stimulants. Yet this is the same Pascal whose spirituality was shaped by the stringent Jansenist sect at Port-Royal and whose personal devotion to Jesus Christ grew continually deeper right up to the point of his early death at age thirty nine. So he further observes that despite our love for diverse experiences, only one thing is best for us: namely, to love God with our whole selves. For this reason, Pascal suggests, God hid the proofs of who He is so that we would not grow bored with the search for Him, even as those diverse proofs all lead to the one end of love for God.
Thus God diversified this single precept of charity [that is, love for God] to satisfy our curiosity, which seeks diversity, through a diversity which always leads us to the one thing that is necessary for us. For, while one thing only is necessary, we like diversity, and God meets both needs by this diversity which leads to the one thing necessary. (L270)
What a startling thought -- that God knows and loves us enough to make us work for knowledge of Him!
It is such a joy to finally begin to know my son's voice, after all the long months of infancy. Just so, it is a joy when the Word of God first begins to make sense. It is such a joy to finally figure out something my son has been trying to say. Just so, it is a joy when a particular passage of Scripture finally breaks open. And it will be such a joy when I can talk freely with my son, without needing to consult my mental code book every other word. Just so, it will be the greatest joy of all when we converse freely with the Lord, when we no longer see dimly, as in a mirror, but face to face. The challenge and the waiting complete the sweetness of arriving.
Image Credit: Jessie Willcox Smith, "A Mother's Days - In the Garden" (1902) via Getarchive. Cropped.