Again, I’m blown away how amazingly similar alot of what I am discovering through reading Pope Francis’ Dilexit Nos ¹ is thematically, to much of what I have so far discovered about Paul Tournier’s beautiful masterpiece The Gift of Feeling. ²
Just take a look at this, in paragraph 20, the Holy Father states:
“In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, the flower that we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.”
Mathematics, as amazing as it is and how integral it is, i.e. in many ways philosophically fundamental to deepening our understanding about the mystery of the universe and more specifically how it was created; as to the nature and composition of all its elements including unravelling the truth about matter and non-matter, will still be unable to impart to our hearts the intrinsic meaning of inalienable worth that lies behind other more intimately knowable complementary realities of everyday life, realities which serve to reveal in their own unique manner and fullness the love of God that eminates from our experience of these realities and touches the inner most recesses of our hearts’ interior like nothing else can. Computational mathematical equations or algorithms can never probe the depths of our hearts nor will they ever be able to explain to us their mysteries. Only our intrinsic God-given make-up can do that but in order that we properly unpack these, reconnect and make ultimate sense of them, we must journey to these answers in and through our hearts, and not our heads alone. That said, even both Einstein and Blaise Pascal would agree that these two seemingly irreconcilable things concerning the mystery of life itself – i.e. how mathematical logic can help us understand the beginnings of the universe and its make-up vis-a-vis the small everyday wonders of life as concrete experiences of God’s love – are in actual fact not so irreconcilable after all but are instead amazing complementary aspects of the way in which God fashioned the created order of things.
From another and equally profound angle, this kind of explains why, unlike my dad, as a child, I had no ability to comprehend or understand mathematics. It’s not that it was ‘too mysterious’ for me to comprehend. Rather, it was more that the way it was presented and taught at school was intellectually confusing as it was conveyed as though it was something devoid of all mystery, and certainly without any link to that of the wonders of God’s handiwork. Hence because it was not presented like it is in The Universe and Dr Einstein,³ I could not see any connecting link between these two seemingly irreconcilable but nonetheless complementary things, even if there was one, which of course as I was to find out later, there indeed was or is, but at that time in my childhood, I just could not see it. So because of such a disconnect between the way we learnt maths at school to even the way my dad taught it at home when he attempted to assist me with my homework AND the larger reality of the Creative mystery of God, I failed to develop a keen interest in it and so because of that disconnect, it became one of my most dreaded subjects.
And I would have to agree that Blaise Pascal can probably appreciate this notion that Pope Francis is trying to ellucidate herein while at the same time, he would probably understand, like Albert Einstein, that the problem that this current time in history, this current generation has with itself is not so much a preoccupation with the mathematical per se but an addiction to logic and rationality and along with that, the negation of mystery, the latter being annunciated by the heart. According to both Blaise Pascal and Albert Einstein, mathematics can offer its own mystery, can provide us with a glimpse into the nature of our created universe, matter, time, space, and how these things converge. However, most people in this time have forgotten even how to relate to the mathematical with the gaze of mystery and as such logic for efficiency and utility’s sake alone tends to rule the roost. It must be said too that Pope Francis is on the same plane of reference as Paul Tournier when it comes to acknowledging that by and large society has lost the ability to feel and relate from the heart as God meant for us to feel and relate in and through it. Too many fall prey to using their hearts in overtly superficial and fickle ways that do not leave room for authentic encounters with either themselves or others, let alone God. Alongside, too many prefer to live in and out of their heads, reducing the rhythm of life to only that which cold rational logic can explain.
This is also why I decry the ultra-rationslistic neo-materialism behind both the clique of Spanish bishops ⁴ who recently dared to criticize the necessity of spiritual healing and deliverance when it comes to family issues AND that bad shepherd of a pastor on a fake Catholic YouTube channel called The Amour of God who callously denies the truth about the restoration promised to ALL creation as evidenced by Romans chapter 8! And it is worth remembering too, that it has been prophesied many times before by the at-one-and-the-same-time convergently ecclectic wisdom of so many of the Saints, that a major battleground to embroil the forces of evil against those of God and of all that is good at the End of the Age will be that of the family. This can be interpreted from a number of interrelated angles – ranging from challenges of life engulfing the immediate family hearth of close and extended blood relations to the complex, often-times divergent and divisive issues that threaten the family orientation of the Church’s structure, i.e. Christ-centred personal bonding and interrelational dynamics between its members, to the conflicts engulfing the family of nations and the wider creation. Irrespective of the specifics and nature of this battleground, the lines were drawn long ago and the Enemy, as warned by Pope Paul VI is not retreating but advancing. Hence the urgent need for our call to Action on this front of defending the faith and bearing the Standard of Christ, has perhaps from all so many of these interrelated angles all at once, never been so dire and so very much needed.
Other References:
(1.) Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos by Pope Francis, 2024, full text can be found here: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html
(2.) Tournier, P., The Gift of Feeling, 1981, SCM Press Ltd, London.
(3.) Barnett, L., The Universe and Dr Einstein, 2005, Dover Publications, New York.
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