The Gospel According to Winnie the Pooh

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Chapter Seven
In Which We Go On Being Faithful

(without being told things)

I was never very good at math. Not that I didn't try. I just didn't get it. I am... numerically challenged. When my biological genes were being stitched together I got a double strand of history and literature and a back pocket of math and science. It was enough to get me through the multiplication tables, which is really just memory and not math at all. Division was a little more difficult because it's like multiplying backwards and my brain only had forward gears. But as long as there were no decimal points and the remainders were allowed to remain I could cope. In fact it really wasn't until I was introduced to fractions that I realized my mathematical pocket was empty.
To my math teachers I was a challenge. Math teachers enjoy challenges, that's why they go into math. They also believe that saving a child from a future degree in liberal arts contributes to the orderliness of society. So they told me fractions were easy, that they were logical, and followed concrete and precise rules and if I would learn those rules I would be rewarded with answers which eventually might unlock the mysteries of the universe. I found fractions mysterious enough, thank you very much, and said so.
But math teachers don't give up that easily. To help unlock the mystery of fractions they gave us a big box of colored wooden blocks of different sizes, each color representing a different portion of a whole. These blocks were supposed to make fractions easy for visual types like me by giving us something physical to manipulate. Of course, while everyone else was busy constructing complex equations I was building castles and thinking about King Arthur and Sir Lancelot and the knights of the multi-colored rectangle table. (There are no curves in fractions) The blocks didn't help me understand fractions, but the teacher was right about one thing. Math could be fun. I loved those blocks.
The rest of my math memory is pretty much an empty set, if you know what I mean. I was worried about it for a while, but in the end none of the bad things my math teachers said came true. I did not become a violent criminal. I can balance a checkbook. I know which size can of Baked Beans is a better bargain. And a 10% discount on a ten dollar item is no big deal. Of course I haven't unlocked the mysteries of the universe, but then what would life be without mystery? Wait a minute. I know. A balanced equation.
Christopher Robin has just knighted Winnie-the-Pooh, Sir Pooh-de-Bear, after telling him about all the grand things he is learning in that mysterious place he goes everyday, things like Kings and Queens and Brazil and factors. Pooh began to think of all the things that Christopher Robin would want to tell him... and how muddling it would be for a Bear of Very Little Brain to try and get them right in his mind. "So perhaps," he thought sadly to himself, "Christopher Robin won't tell me anymore," and he wondered if being a Faithful Knight meant you just went on being faithful without being told things."
(The House At Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne; E.P. Dutton & Co., New York; 1928, p.178)
Sometimes life is like an equation that refuses to be balanced. You work it out over and over again. You look at it from every angle. You list all the variables. You recheck your figures. You change the battery in your calculator. But it doesn't matter because the answer always escapes your grasp until you despair of any answer at all. That is a terrifying moment for it calls into question the very heart of our faith. We believe that God loves. How then could this loving God allow such pain and misery to exist? - and especially in my life!
It is to that answer-less question that faith speaks the loudest, for faith does not need a solution to hope in an answer. Faith knows only one thing, that in the cross all the questions have been answered. For in the end this one answer has created a new reality where the questions and the struggles of this present age will fade into the glory of new eternal dawn.
"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Hebrews 11:1
In the meantime we play with blocks trying to make sense of fractions as we wait patiently for the bell ring.

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