On Making Sense of Things

I’ve recently discovered that there is such a thing as thinking about too many ideas at once. More specifically, that I can be simply deluged with opinions to the point of absolute exhaustion.

It’s one of those possibilities that has occurred to me before, but which I never really appreciated experientially until lately. Maybe it was thoughts accrued from different classes over the years now compounding and conflicting, or appreciating for the first time how conflicting and even irreconcilable different friends’ and acquaintances’ views are, and all amplified by an election cycle rife with opinions and no apparent and real knowledge of anything at all from any quarter.

It’s all just too loud, like the sheer volume of a mob making it too hard to even think. I wish it would quiet down, but that’s not a wish in my power to fulfill. Even professing ignorance isn’t much of a consolation. How did Socrates find anything comforting in knowing only that he knew nothing at all? I find it rather disturbing.

What do you fall back on when everything is too confusing to even try to make sense of a topic and take a position? What should you do when there’s just so much noise that you can’t think clearly about any of it?

It hasn’t been great for my prayer life to be troubled in this way; the problem of such a sheer volume of thoughts is that they often creep up in prayer and distract me, and it’s really just not the time for that. 

Nonetheless, when I haven’t been utterly distracted, I’ve had the valuable insight that prayer, whether that be Mass or Liturgy of the Hours or meditation, is a bedrock that I had never yet fully appreciated. Even when my mind is in turmoil, I still go back to them and find a kind of comfort. The words I say in prayer I still affirm as unconditionally true and valuable in a way I never could of any opinion I hold (or more likely, no longer really hold).

Even if I no longer know quite what to think about the economy, or immigration, or tradition, or theology, or the Vatican’s new mascot, or really most topics, at the very least I still know that the psalm in front of me expresses some fundamental spiritual truth worth focusing and meditating on.

That alone isn’t enough, though. It seems that our Lord loves truth and requires that we all live in it to the fullest extent. Consequently, it isn’t sufficient to just flee from all the opinions and debates of the world for the mere sake of escaping them. Maybe that works for a Carthusian drawn to contemplation, but I suppose it would be a crooked breed of quietism for anyone who still lives in the hustle and bustle of the modern era like I do. I don’t get to run away from important topics just because I don’t believe I understand them anymore.

Prayer must be the starting ground from which we form positions even on secular topics and debates. Relationship with God is what puts all things in their proper perspective, and therefore allows for a coherent integration of the maelstrom of thoughts and opinions swirling about us. Know and profess nothing but Christ, and Him crucified, and maybe the rest will follow.

What else could you really build on, in the end? The Christian sense of orientation toward God seems like the only thing that can confidently rule out some stances and provide criteria for trying to construct an intelligible position out of raw data and preexisting and competing interpretations of them. The truth of Christian religion does not seem to remain only within the bounds of its own theologies and systems (or is it that they are all-encompassing?), and for that I will be eternally grateful.

Christianity entails fidelity not to ideas, but first and foremost to Persons, three of them in One. This is a more reliable foundation than anything else I can think of upon which to construct a consistent and ethical view on all the kinds of current issues I’m still too afraid and foolish to judge. But at least there is a starting point with God.

I don’t pretend to know anything new and unique because of this (really embarrassingly simple) insight about prayer. I remain a fool, and almost certainly will be for the rest of time. I mean only to express the hope that prayer is the way out of the absolute mental maelstrom I find myself in more and more nowadays. Perhaps it may be of service to you, if you find yourself in the same sort of place.