Most weeks, I try my hand at the
New York Times
Sunday crossword puzzle. (Will Shortz, the long-time editor, has said that it is about as hard as the regular Thursday puzzle). I do okay at it, though I am ever humbled by my late mother-in-law who won the
London Financial Times cryptic
crossword contest so many times they stopped giving her awards. Usually I can get most every square filled in, though I’m often left with a tangle in one corner where I’ve put in a wrong word that fits. But sometimes, I can hardly get going at all, with vast acreage of white staring back at me. This has been a mystery to me for a while, but I think I have finally figured it out. There are some crossword setters with whom my mind seems in sync -- even leaps of pure intuition lead to a good result. But there are others, who I call devilish at the time, that I cannot connect with at all. Our thought processes apparently are vastly different, either because of background or education or upbringing or wiring.
I have been thinking of this in terms of what I will call God’s crossword, that is, ability of human beings to think like God. This does not happen by itself as the book of Psalms and Proverbs, if nowhere else, testify (Proverbs 4:12ff, for example. “Keep hold of instruction, do not let go. Do not enter the path of the wicked and do not walk in the way of evil men. For they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble, for they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence.”) But we are called to eat the body of Christ, given for us, and to drink the blood of the new covenant of grace and faith.
So how do we connect with the mind of God and apply it to the crossword of life? I think the answer is to develop a macro reading of the Bible, which is the account of God’s interaction with human creatures whom he loves, redeems and instructs. For example, Zechariah 7 says. “This is what the Lord Almighty says. Administer true justice, show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the immigrant or the poor.” This is repeated so often in the Scriptures (Deuteronomy, Psalms, Proverbs, Jeremiah, the Gospels, the Pauline letters) that you can’t get away from it if you tried. But if you’re unfamiliar with these insights into the mind of God, you might respond to the clue, “Right response to some humans (10)” and you have, (Co_ _ _ _ _ion) you might put down “Collection” instead of “Compassion.”
Of course, if you didn’t know about the point of the Gospel of Mark, say, you might even think the word crossword has to do with a puzzle (which it does in Mark, to a certain extent -- it’s called the Messianic Secret). But more simply, connecting with how God’s mind and heart works, you need to get the keyword right. It’s not crossword. It’s the word “cross.”
-Daniel
