Plato's Bedtime Story

I took a vacation day today (Friday), and we went "up north" to "The Lake," and spent some time with relatives.  We got back very late, and Madeleine was carried to bed almost without waking up at all, Daniel was carried to bed with a few minutes' hiatus of waking, long enough to gather up his bubble gum, and then he had me carry him up to bed, and the two of them were out for the night.  

Ian, however, had his own program for the night.  After waking up when we got home, he asked me for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and told me he'd be waiting in bed for it.  Usually this is a good sign; by the time I get upstairs with the food, he's asleep, which is what he needs to be, very badly.  However, tonight, when I got upstairs with the sandwich, he was awake enough to eat it, ask for a small glass of water, and ask for a refill on the water.  But that was not all.

Just as I was about to tuck him into bed, he embarked on some theological musings.  He talked about how hard it is to think of where God is, within the universe.  He said something like the following:

"It's like we live on a ball of dirt, and we're surrounded by other balls of dirt that go around a spark of fire and gas.  And there are many more..."  

Contemplating the vastness of the cosmos, he was daunted by the prospect of imagining how God relates to all these solar systems/galaxies, in physical terms.   I tried, in a few ways, to convey that time and space could be somewhat illusory when we think about the ultimate reality of God - that rather than God being "in" a particular place the way that we are, probably both time and space are "in" God's realm, which is how He can be everywhere even though He is not in a place the way that we are precisely "in" the U.S., North America, the Earth etc.

Ian indicated that he was confused, so I tried to convey this thought another way.  Still confused; but he asked me to try one more time to explain it to him.

At that point, I realized that Plato  was far better than me at conveying the limits of our capacity to think about the spiritual dimension of the universe that we inhabit.  This is especially the case because Plato, in spite of his pagan. ancient Greek background, made some statements about God that indicate that he had some inkling about the Holy Trinity and the coming of Christ.  So I told Ian about Plato's cave:  the prisoners are chained to the wall, looking at the light projected onto it by a fire burning behind them.  Suddenly, they see the shadow of a vase, and it gives them a very real experience of something entirely beyond the world that they know, even though their impressions of the vase are two-dimensional and quite minimal.  Ian's bedroom was an especially apt place to think about this cave, as his night-light made its own shadows on the wall across from his bed as I sat, and he lay, in the dark thinking about dimensions beyond our world.   I proposed to Ian that this really is how spiritual realities are for us:  we experience them, through Providence's historic and personal revelations, yet we don't have the categories to grasp these truths in their entirety, by any means.

With this uncanny "third" try, and with a perspective that comes from Plato rather than Daddy, something struck a chord for Ian, as he responded:

"That kind-of sums it up."

And with that, the Philosopher Prince, finally satisfied, nodded off to sleep.  

(July 26/27, 2013)