It’s All About Understanding

In yesterday’s Lowestoft Journal an article was headed ‘Rare Lowestoft Porcelain Items to Go Under the Hammer’. I smiled.

Apparently, Lowestoft Porcelain was first established in 1757… Household pieces such as teapots, tea bowls were produced… Specially commissioned pieces were inscribed with names and dates… The Crown Street factory closed in 1802… The auction’s on Wednesday, October 21, at the Victoria Hotel… Estimated prices range from £30 to £14,000…

You have to understand… ‘Under the Hammer’ doesn’t mean that valuable, rare antiques will be smashed…

Percy, on his first day at school, learnt, ‘two times two equals four’. He repeated it at home that night. His parents were amazed. After one day at school, he was already multiplying. What they’d always suspected was true. Their son was a genius. The proud parents congratulated their son.

Percy looked puzzled. ‘What’s a two?’ he asked… He could say the words, but didn’t understand what they meant.

I’ve had conversations this week with folks trying to understand why things happen… The teenaged-girl on life support, who may not survive… The complicated pregnancy with an uncertain outcome… The child being bullied… Failed attempts at mending broken family relationships.

Understanding is at best limited, at worst non-existent. The ‘why?’ question remains unanswered

This morning I came across ‘Flower in the Crannied Wall’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1863):

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Tennyson is writing at a time of technological progress, scientific advancement and evolutionary understanding. Great questions are being answered; it seems that all is there to be understood.

In a little wild flower, growing uninvited, in a Hampshire wishing-well, where there’s no conflict between God and science, between beauty and reason, between the ‘what’ and the ‘why?’, Tennyson is content to admit that he doesn’t understand.