Mistaking the Ocean for a Pool: A Surrender to Critical Rationalism

I was thinking the other day…

When I was a boy and I went to the pool, I would find myself participating in what could be considered an unusual practice. I do not know if anyone else has done this, did this, or still does. My family or those who may have witnessed me in my young age have never asked me about this and probably never noticed. This probably shouldn’t be too surprising, as it was not a practice of a highly flamboyant nature. It might be that I was fulfilling some sub-conscious male role as hunter/explorer in my prepubescent years. It may be that I was simply a loner and did not care to play another rousing game of Marco polo. Perhaps it was some strange form of obsessive compulsiveness. Questions aside, I would find myself mysteriously drawn to the middle of the pool like a moth hovering towards a cabin light, wading there for a bit. As I waded I would look around to all sides and all corners, gauging the layout and population of what surrounded me within the confines of the pool. I would then suddenly get the urge to swim to all corners, wanting to search all points of the pool - every nook. Of particular enjoyment was going to those areas in the deep end that were unoccupied. Once I had successfully swam to these unexplored areas I simply waded for a bit, splashed around, hovered. Once my mission was accomplished and I had thoroughly been to all areas of the pool, I would be free to play and do what I wanted. In retrospect this whole ritual seems entirely odd. I suppose that a sufficient explanation of this was a need to conquer the great water-filled concrete dune. But what I want whoever is reading this to notice is not so much the peculiar nature of this practice, but the geography of the practice. In a defined pool, with clear markers of depth, I was able to explore every part of the pool. I was able to go as deep as the pool went, as wide as the pool went.

When I was a boy, I also went to the ocean two or three times. But it never crossed my mind to perform this ritual in the ocean. It would be quite ludicrous to attempt it. The ocean is enormous, almost infinite to a young lad. There are depths that no human has ever been able to achieve. There are caves holding creatures that no human has ever laid eyes on. There are no smooth concrete floors; no paved stairways leading out of it, no neatly defined measurements. The ocean is wild and untamed, full of ferocity and beauty.

The climax of my thought is this: I have often mistaken oceanic truth for pool truth. By truth I mean Truth: faith truth, Christianity truth, God truth, life truth, universe truth, reality truth – however you want to refer to it. I have the tendency to want to know all of truth, particularly what is revealed in scripture. I want to swim into all of its nooks and corners. I want to know it, to memorize it, to package it neatly and creatively, and teach it. But the more I study, the more I discover that the truth of my faith is not like the pool. There are certainly places I can swim to quite contently and confidently, but there are other places to which I cannot. The truth of my faith is fierce and wild. It is rowdy and stormy. It cannot be fully contained or grasped, and will never be.

So what is the moral of this aquatic lesson for me? Quite clearly, the moral is to be humble about what I can know and what I can master and to be aware of my need for God’s infinite grace. I’m constantly a student of the great mysterious God of Israel and will never be an expert. But there is a comforting, almost warm thought in this intellectual surrender. It seems quite a bit more appealing to base my life on oceanic truth rather than some chlorine-filled YMCA truth. It seems quite appropriate that the truth surrounding the God of the Universe is wild, unbounded, rowdy, and…holy. This is the type of truth I could never tire of swimming in.