While browsing in the religion sections of chain bookstores, I often find pop-spirituality books with titles like The Gospel According to Peanuts or The Gospel According to Harry Potter; even, I kid you not, The Gospel According to Oprah. I’ve never even scanned through these titles, so I can’t tell you much about them, but I assume they talk about the Christian values you can expect to find in these sources. The Amazon.com ad for the Oprah book says the author, for example, "praises Oprah for using her entertainment pulpit to promote such positive spiritual values as gratitude, empathy, forgiveness and self-examination."
Uh huh.
Well, anyway, in light of these contributions to "gospel values," it occurs to me that what the world now needs is a Gospel According to Su Doku.
Perhaps you are unaware of Su Doku? Sometime last year, I started noticing books on the subject popping up in bookstores, but ignored them. Then at a Christmas party this past year, I was given a book of Su Doku puzzles and started learning. Basically, it’s a number-placement logic game popular in Japan that recently became fantastically popular in the West when the London Times began running puzzles alongside the crossword puzzles.
In Su Doku (Japanese, "single number"), there is a grid of nine blocks, with each block sectioned off into nine squares. The object is to place numbers from one to nine horizontally, vertically, and within each block without repeating a number. Never a numbers person, I didn’t think I’d like the game very much, but I was wrong. It’s a fascinating process and a lot of fun.
So, what’s my Gospel According to Su Doku? Well, it’s more an Apologetics Lessons Learned while playing Su Doku.
- Work in small sections, blocking off extraneous information until it is needed. But remember that there is a bigger picture. The information you insert into the puzzle in one block must agree with the rest of the puzzle. If you put the wrong number in even one square, you’ll ruin the whole puzzle. Sweat the small stuff.
- As you add more numbers to your puzzle, you will be able to solve other sections of the puzzle that you previously were unable to solve. Information in one area increases the information you have to be able to solve the rest of the puzzle.
- As the numbers increasingly fall into place, you eventually reach a "tipping point" and soon the whole puzzle falls into place. Where once you could spend ten minutes trying to find a single number to fit, now you are plugging in the numbers in seconds flat.
What does this have to do with apologetics?
- You should be wary of giving people more information than they request at any one time because they may not yet be ready to accept it. But keep in mind that there is a larger picture and that the information you give now is not a self-sustaining construct but a piece of a larger puzzle.
- As you receive answers to questions about the faith in one area, you soon find yourself able to resolve other apologetics difficulties either you or someone else may have. For example, an answer about the proper understanding of the Incarnation here may lead to a better understanding of Mary somewhere down the line.
- In the conversion process, there is eventually a "tipping point," after which you are no longer struggling to place the information you’ve received into its proper place but are merely "filling in the blanks."
Now, I just have to find time to puff these pearls of wisdom into a 80,000-word manuscript and I’ll have the next Gospel According To… book ready to market!
Not to mention that both apologetics and SoDoku can consume *massive* amounts of time 🙂
Wow, you’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of this?
I actually really like The Gospel According to Peanuts. There’s some nice reflection both on original sin and on the relationship of the arts to evangelization. It was written long before most of those other books and it’s not “Chicken Soup for the Soul”-ish at all, although not all of the theology in it is compatible with Catholicism.
You forgot one.
Sudoku was invented by an American, and first appeared in an American puzzle magazine decades ago, but sank like a stone. It was Japanese puzzle magazines who took to the concept, nursed it along, and eventually sold it back to the English-speaking world (helped by the cool name they gave it).
So we see again that a prophet is without honor in his own country. You have to evangelize. 🙂
This Sudoku site eats up enough of my time, so those wishing to play it online… http://www.websudoku.com/?level=1
The Gospel According to Peanuts is a really good book. It’s a set of essays. The Christianity is very Kierkegaard-like. Some of the foci of the book include the relation of artists to the Church, and the reality of Original Sin. There is also a great reflection on the phrase “good grief”… how only in Christianity can grief be good.
It’s also a great book because it uses truly class Peanuts cartoons from the 60s to illustrate it. Back when Peanuts was actually funny and moral.
Some time ago while I was playing sudoku I also started thinking about apologetics, but along a completely different line.
It reminded me of the way the Catholic Church develops doctrine.
In Sudoku, there is one and only one true answer in the end. You must use the limited true information that you have to start with to fill in all the rest of the empty blocks.
In Sudoku, there is one rule to remember if you want to stay out of trouble. Never guess. You might have to leave a square empty for a long time if you don’t have enough clues to tell you what should go there.
As you apply the rules along with the known information, you can say with certainty that a particular square must have a particular number. Likewise, you can also say that other blocks absolutely can not contain a particular number – certain things must be true, and other things can not possibly be true. As more and more certain true information is added, it is possible to build upon the known truth to eventually come up with the final complete truth.
You can call this the summa sodoku.
That’s pretty cool, Dan P.