Familiarly Unfortunately

“We can’t know what we don’t know, what we may never think to ask.”

From "What are We Doing Here?" collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson

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Dear Alex,

On this upcoming road trip with my daughter for college campus touring, I feel the need to look forward in retreating steps and breakthrough pain which have carried me to this season of the new and familiar.

Pathway

to there from where you bear
leg wheel hem cane spit
sunbeam on your asphalt torso
daubed with dew-drunk grit
resin gleaming on shadow
flung as flawed as whole -
a pathway are you like others
away from ways of home

by noon your blanched bench
under the carmine maple
hold old bones buckled in tales
so fine of a time upon once
among monologues missed
between glances over limbs
on pathway too tender to know

unwinding unloading unrelenting
traffic cargo badge rain
rolling on pathway in ink
crossing margin of track
to ends through grease to start
off grid off net offscreen

nowhere can the grime slough off
pathway unnamed untold
unearthed to mold for the invisible
palm collar voice stone
stuck in throng of longing

You stretch low to reach
muck on melon and sole -
a pathway are you like no other,
bent cracked fired to weave hope

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

This is the opening line of the paragraph which contains the quote you picked today:

"Scientific method does not, at any given moment, provide an all-sufficient test for the reality of everything.  It knows what it has the means to know."

Yesterday I had a conversation with a man, and he again stated his denial of God's existence in the same rather unfortunate way since he first started stating it, that he couldn't believe in anything that he can't see or prove.

He claims to be a scientist.

I suggested to him that if he is right, no one could or should have ever conclusively called any woman his/her mother before the invention of DNA testing, which means every human being before the early 1980s.

And I say that's only a small half of the human problem.

The other big half, the much bigger, more fundamental problem is that even if I can state most decisively who my mother is, I would still find no scientifically compelling reason to respect this "mother," let alone to love her, to care for her in truth and with devotion, to consider my past present and future within the context of my sonship to her motherhood.

The true human problem is not that none can prove if God exists (frankly I wouldn't believe in any "god" that I can examine under a microscope), but that we don't really care if He does or particularly want Him to.

What if God is to ask us to stick a finger into His flesh?  Would that make Him a beggar for our assent or a bugger of our dissent?  What difference does it make any way, getting our finger all gooey and smelly?

“We can’t know what we don’t know, what we may never think to ask.”  I would add to that and say: “We couldn't know what we wouldn't care to know, what we may never thirst to seek.”

Yours, Alex