I’m rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, first published in 1963 (I read it probably in the late 1970s or early 1980s). Here is a conversation where the narrator asks Miss Faust, a secretary at the General Forge and Foundry Company, about a memorable conversation she might have had with Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the late Nobel-Prize winning physicist and creator of ice-nine.
“Do any conversations stick in your mind?”
“There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.’”
“And what did he say?”
“He said, ‘What is God? What is love?’” 1
Vonnegut’s narrator doesn’t have much to say about this. But I sure find it interesting. And probably because I’m sympathetic to both Miss Faust and Dr. Hoenikker’s perspectives. Like the secretary, I’m willing to say “God is love” is absolutely true. And like the physicist, I’m endlessly curious as to what words like God and love mean, after all.
None of us knows for sure.
From the perspective of contemplative or mystical spirituality, I think questions like “What is God?” or “What is love?” (and we can add to them a third, a question Pontius Pilate posed to Jesus of Nazareth: “What is truth?”) are beautiful doorways into the plenitude of the unnameable infinite.
Ultimately, God, truth, and love are simply three faces of mystery: words that open up into vast unknowing, unilluminable darkness, and certain uncertainty. They are not puzzles for us to crack open or enigmas for us to solve. These are wonders in the purely ineffable sense: invitations into an interior passage where the reality of language’s limitations is an entryway into freedom, not a punishment, not a claustration.
These mysteries never ask us to submit to a confinement of our will and our intellect, but rather always to embrace the infinite possibilities that only life in the Spirit can give us.
For if we could define words and concepts like God or truth or love, that would mean they are small enough for mortals to comprehend or control. The only way for God to be fully divine, for Love to be eternal compassion, for truth to be universal reality, is for these words to point not to a grounded finality, but to a boundless openness. What might seem fearful to those who requires dogmatic certainty is endlessly beautiful to all who accept mystical possibility.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle: A Novel (Kindle Edition), pp. 54-55.