In the final episode of the third season of the NBC comedy, “The Good Place,” the lead character Eleanor asks her super-humanly smart friend, Janet, for advice. Eleanor has been abruptly confronted with a heart-breaking and unavoidable situation, and with the enormity of her emotions just barely suppressed, she says to her friend, “Can you just, you know, like, tell me the answer?” She elaborates, “You know, the answer to everything. You know all there is to know in the universe. Crunch the numbers. Tell me the answer. What’s the point of love if it’s just gonna disappear? And how is it worse to not love anybody? There has to be meaning to existence, otherwise the universe is just made of pain, and I don’t like the thought of that, so tell me the answer.”
I find this scene to be really beautiful, and I think it speaks to something deep and human. As Catholics, we might hear Eleanor’s question and jump immediately to the reality that we do know the answer and accidentally skip over the profundity of the question. Perhaps a part of this need for the answer comes from our modern expectation that our truest knowledge is that which comes from math or science and can be neatly quantified. But I think there’s more to it than that. There are times when we come up against the thick, heavy twistedness of life and we respond with a deep ache for someone to tell us why. Someone to walk us through all this pain and complexity and to tell us how it can all be sorted into something that makes it possible to carry on with hope. And although that might be an instinct more of control than of receptivity, it’s a deeply human and understandable one.
Catholic teaching does offer the truth. But when the question is something as visceral as the problem of pain, offering a simple philosophical answer for why pain exists won’t really help the person who is suffering. The intellectual equation of “free will allows for suffering but also for real love” does not meet the suffering person in the place where their question is coming from. When we try to present Catholicism as simply the equation for living well, we are doing a disservice to our faith and to those we are teaching. We are slipping into the realm of influencers or even cult leaders, who propose a formula by which you will succeed and be happy. Those equations never work. The influencers and the cult leaders might make a lot of money off of their failed endeavor because they are speaking to this human desire for someone to tell us the answer. The content of Catholic social teaching is better than the content offered by a cult leader, but if it’s not centered on the person of Jesus Christ, and offered in the context of the real, human love he commanded us to have for one another, it will still fall short.
Mystery is uncomfortable. In America we have shifted our common use of the word “mystery” to mean a puzzle that we solve. But the theological understanding of mystery is different. In Catholic teaching, a mystery is a thing that is too big for our brains to wrap around, something we can always learn more about and will never completely comprehend.
Catholic teaching is rampant with mystery. There is a lot of truth we can grasp onto, but it always comes with the understanding that we don’t completely understand it. Of course, God himself is a mystery, but every human being is also a mystery — even to themselves. You can learn real things about a person, but there will always be more to learn.
“The Good Place” is not a Christian TV show and it is not intending to tell its viewers that Jesus is the answer. But there’s a moment near the end of a show that I think accidentally points in the right direction.
Chidi, Eleanor’s love interest, is a moral philosophy professor always determined to mathematically assess the exact right answer to absolutely every question. Near the end of the show and after a lot of personal growth, he writes himself a note: “There is no answer, but Eleanor is the answer.”
Of course, there are all kinds of problems with proposing any non-God person as your answer to life. And yet, I think this proposal is about the same amount right as trying to offer any formulaic kind of answer.
Because what we are actually longing for is someone who is both. He is the Word made flesh.
In C.S. Lewis’s novel, “Til We Have Faces,” he offers another version of the “tell me the answer” conundrum, from a character who has been wrestling with the problem of pain throughout the story. She says, “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”
