Not too much, now

I’ve written a little on the Charybdis of anti-intellectualism; now let’s maneuver to avoid the Scylla of encyclopedism.

Water poisoning is a thing. God alone merits worship. It’s incredibly easy to confuse that with worshiping ideas (even about God), the Church itself, emotional well-being, love, family, or happiness. Water—like those things I’ve just listed—is healthy in the right doses; take the wrong dose and it becomes poison.

With the advent of our mass information age we’re discovering man’s vulnerability to having too much knowledge itself. That’s not in the sense that an informant might know too much, but in the sense that we can’t handle the sheer volume of the stuff. The good news is that we can find a sort of Archimedean point from which to see our own insufficiency in a way not dissimilar to the way the promptings of our conscience both (1) demonstrate our failure to choose the good we see and often even want the most and (2) illuminate our Creator in whose image we were made and from which we’ve fallen.

Two thoughts to at least dilute the poison of too much of a good thing: First, I’m finding more often that prayer—not thought about the possibility of prayer—is the best response to feeling overwhelmed at information overload. Secondly, I am running through Scripture sans biblical commentaries more often now and I’m beginning to see the wisdom of its somewhat narrow focus. It isn’t a book about everything. And thank God for that.