Transcription
If you carry out technology to its final fulfillment and you have technological means of supplying you with every need or wish that you could imagine so that you have instead of just the plain little telephone with its dial on it, you have a somewhat more elaborate machine on which you can dial for anything you need at any time, it'll be supplied instantly. Imagine yourself in that omnipotent position. And what you will wish for in that final ultimate push button world will be a button labeled surprise. Even God needs a surprise.
And of course for that very reason endowed angels and men with the mystery of free will so that they would do things that uh would be surprising and that could not be foretold. This is why Calvinists are so dreary that they believe that everything is predestined. And uh that's why of course the Episcopal Church is always uh more interesting than the Presbyterian church in that uh they're not Calvinists. There's something always rather depressing about Calvinists, although there are many interesting things about them that I won't go into.
But uh the Chesterton's idea was that the universe is so arranged that it is a basically the Lord's own way of surprising himself because that's what you would do if you were God. If you really think it through, uh a lot of people never think this through. They think about um I remember a story about a conversation at a dinner party where all it was in England and all the people were discussing what they thought was going to happen after death, whether they would uh simply be extinguished or whether they had been reincarnated or whatever kind of thing. And present at the dinner there was a very respectable country squire who was uh on the vest of the local church very pious and finally the hostess said to him sir Roger you haven't said anything in the conversation this evening what do you think is going to happen to you when you die he said I'm perfectly sure that I shall go to heaven and enjoy everlasting bliss but I wish you wouldn't raise such a depressing subject it. [Music]
So you see people that people just don't think it through. Uh it's very fascinating to ask people deeply about their theological ideas, what they really do think God is and what heaven would be like. and uh not only what it would be like as based in based on the symbolism of the Bible, but what sort of a heaven they would really want to go to. I mean, do you want to be stuck with the rest of your family forever? Saying God gives us our relations, but let us thank him, we can choose our friends. At what age would you like your resurrected body to be? Uh there are all sorts of fascinating questions of this kind which bring out the great marvelous problem of what we would really like to happen.
And uh when we follow that through and through and through and through we must admit in the end that we don't want a situation in which everything is completely controlled. In other words, if everything is rationalized, if everything is perfectly logical and clear, it all works and there's no possibility of anybody making a mistake and uh we know exactly what's going to happen forever and ever and ever. We'd be bored to death. Nobody wants that kind of heaven. So what kind of heaven would you like?
Supposing for example you had the privilege and power to dream any dream you wanted every night and have it real vivid and of course you would be able to dream any amount of clock time in one night that you desired. You would be able to say have a 100 years of experience in one night. And when you think that through what dreams would you dream? It's almost like the question, if you were going to have half an hour's interview with God and you had the privilege of asking one question, what question would you ask? And you've got a little while to think that one over. See, before you go in for the interview? So then the same thing is what would you dream?
You would dream of course at first I suppose all possible fulfillments of wishes. uh whatever your wishes were, whatever your desires were, you would fulfill them all. And when you'd done that for about a month of nights of a 100red years long, each night of dreams, you would say, "Well, let's vary things a bit. Let's get a let's let things get out of control. Let's have an adventure." And uh then you would, you know, you would rescue a princess from a dragon or something of that kind. And then you would arrange it so that you would forget that you were dreaming. And so the thing would seem as real as real could be. And you would dare yourself, like kids dare themselves to do all sorts of dangerous exploits. And finally, you would dare yourself to experience awful situations because you knew it would be wonderful when you woke up because the contrast would be so fascinating. And finally, in the course of your dreaming, you would dream a dream in which you were sitting in Campbell Hall at Christ Church Salelito listening to me give a lecture with all your personal lives and your problems and whatever it is that's going on. See, cuz that would be the nature of surprise. [Music]
Now in the in this when you fully realize that to be surprised at everything is high wisdom you get a new point of view towards the world which gives you almost what could be called a child's vision of life when Jesus said that uh unless you be converted and become as a child you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. This is the thing that Chesterton understood in a very profound way because to a child the world is entirely new and therefore all of it is extraordinary and I hope most of you can remember how you saw things when you were about 2 years old as the whole world being quite weird. And uh when you get used to things, you see a tree and you say, "Oh, well that's a tree. We're used to trees. We know what trees are." But if you can go back to your childhood and remember how it was when you first looked at a tree and you saw the earth itself reaching up into the sky, extending itself in many branches and waving all these little flags at heaven. or when you looked at the sun as a child, you stared at the sun, it was marvelous and the sun turned blue and there was a feeling about everything of being essentially magical.
So there is a most extraordinary passage which um occurs in one of the rarer books of Chesterton called the colored lands where he makes this extraordinary remark. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he doesn't. And this is the key to this man's wisdom, that he could see all kinds of everyday things and events as if they were completely improbable and magical. and that he could describe the world uh as an extremely improbable object, this great globe of rock floating in space around a vast fire covered with green hair that the ordinary people call grass and containing all the extraordinarily odd odd objects on it.
And when he thought about this, he realized two things that are not ordinarily realized by religious people. And the two things are this. He realized that the world created by God is a form of nonsense. And that one of the most important features of uh the divine mind is human. In one of his essays, he says, "So often when I have written the word cosmic, the printer makes a misprint and prints it comic." But he said, "There's a certain unconscious wisdom in that. The cosmic is the comic." Dante wrote the divine comedy, an account of earth, heaven, purgatory, and hell. the divine comedy and uh one finds you see that in ordinary people's religious attitudes there is a lack of both these things of nonsense and of humor.