Is It Madness?

Is it madness to believe in God at all, let alone in a God who speaks to us through such obscure and fleeting moments as these and then asks us to believe that these moments are windows into the truest meaning and mystery of the cosmos itself? It is a kind of madness indeed. A famous scientist recently gave a definitive answer as to what the cosmos is. "The cosmos," he said, "is all there is or ever was or ever will be." Which means that if you want to understand the cosmos, there is nothing other than the cosmos itself that you can look to for your answer.

For a human being to say that the cosmos is all there is strikes me as like worm in an apple saying that the apple is all there is. Even if we could solve all the problems of the cosmos and stood here healthy, solvent, adjusted, and proud in our knowledge at last, we would still stand here like Moses with the muck of our less-than-humanness on our shoes and the feeling in the pits of our stomachs that the cosmos can never entirely be home because we know as surely as we know anything that, though we have never seen it except in dreams, our true home lies somewhere else. Those dreams are the ultimate madness the church is built upon or, because those who call them madness are themselves madder still, the ultimate sanity.

• from Secrets in the Dark