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Morning Reflection
August 15, 2026
Every attempt to return to [the Garden of] Eden suffers its own reenactment of the Fall… when human beings arrogate the position of divinity for themselves, they become not God, but Satan.
[Hope] does not lie in any scheme for social reform or program of education. Instead… it is possible to live happily in a resolutely imperfect world, not only by coming to appreciate the beauty of ordinary life… but by looking forward to the coming of a kingdom that escapes all human formulation, that will never be fully realized here – or be lost in the multiple disasters of [our] century.
Peter Hawkins: getting nowhere: christian hope and utopian dream
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
I had the opportunity this week to stop in at one of my favorite bookstores, aptly named the Labyrinth, in Princeton. It’s one of the few remaining bookstores designed for extensive browsing, which, in the context of thousands of books, is a deeply humane activity.
One could spend the day wandering among the shelves, and it’s hard, when there, not to be impressed by the variety of subjects that we as human beings have explored, and found intriguing, and have studied to the point of advancing with new writings that then have been approved and curated by publishers and booksellers. Bookstores are not just a repository of knowledge; this is far too limited and brittle a category. They provide a greater sense of how fascinated we are with the world, not only in its complexity but also in its offering up inexhaustible resources that sustain and inspire our imaginations and creativity.
Browsing, taking the time to bear witness to this richness, is something of a moral responsibility. And the joy of browsing is discovering things unlooked for, things merely happened upon. It moves us out of our own head space and intentionality into a far wider world that is waiting on the shelves just around the corner or on the next table. I don’t look for answers in a bookstore. Or solutions. Or definitive ways to get things done or bring them under control. I delight, rather, in the quiet conversations that begin between texts and thoughts. And watching others browse expands on this.
A major conceit of modernity is that knowledge will save us – or that we will save ourselves by means of knowledge. And the corresponding promise we so want from technology – its utopian dream – is that it will provide us, almost instantaneously, with all the knowledge we will need. But we’re fast approaching what may be a curious inflexion point: for all the breathless claims being made about Artificial Intelligence, we can’t tell whether it will lead us back to a new Eden or whether it will impose on us a fresh hell.
One of the most important and refreshing contentions of the Church is that it declares, straight up, that none of us can be gods, and no amount of knowledge will get us there. God alone is God, and there is no solution to our lives. Instead of answers, we have hope. And hope is marvelously pliable. It allows us to take great pleasure in what is good, so that we never fall into despair. And it extends the promise that, by the work of God alone, there will come a future when the true dimensions of Eden will be restored.
Christian faith isn’t claiming a knowledge that others don’t have; it’s more like the practice of browsing, choosing to be fascinated by what can be happened upon in the many aisles of Christian tradition, that draw us into conversation with God.
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