Learning Journal #26 (4/2)

I've been thinking a lot about the "why" behind my project. As more and more people have been asking me about my plans for the summer, and I've concisely explained that I'm studying how the perception of God changed as a result of the Copernican Revolution, and watched blank stares come up on their faces, I've found myself thinking, "Why am I really doing this?" Sure, there's the fact that it's something study-able that I'm interested in, something that doesn't really seem to have a book written about it, something that is intensely personal and that I, nosy as I am, want to delve into and explore. 

But what does it really matter? Who really cares about changing definitions of God? It's in the past, it's not going to change the future, so why do it? 

I've recently permitted myself to take up reading for pleasure again, and found the following quote in John Green's Looking for Alaska: 

With a sigh, he ... wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? ... [And then said, "E]verybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget ... I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that questions and the questions each of you posed...—how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip ... called 'people's rotten lots in life.'"

I guess the real reason that I want to know, that I care at all about how these people understood God, is because it matters to me. Because when I am lost in the labyrinth of suffering, there's only one way I know to get out, and that is to rely on God. And if I don't know who God is, if I have no functioning way to define His existence and understand how that definition relates to me, then the labyrinth has won, and I have no way to come to terms with those rotten lots in life that I get.

Ultimately, I know how heavily I rely on my understanding of God and my relationship to Him, and so it's nigh unto impossible for me to comprehend the magnitude of something like Copernicus coming along and bringing that understanding into question. I just can't fathom what that would be like, or how I would cope with it because it would be such an intense test of my faith. I think it's the incomprehensibility of the situation that draws me to it, knowing that I would just shatter on the inside if I found out that suddenly that something I had constantly counted on, which showed me just how much I matter to God, wasn't true anymore. My mind and heart just hurt thinking about it, and maybe that's just because it's fairly early in the a.m. and I'm in the middle of reading a really dramatic emotional-roller-coaster of a book, and therefore am prone to my own dramatizations of situations ... but I still think my point is valid. I know that I would care if my cosmological paradigm shifted, and so I can't imagine that they didn't; I just want to know how they coped, how they tried to reassemble their definition of God, which is so vital to the relationship between God and man.