One of the problems that people who make encyclopedias face is the enormous growth of human knowledge. It's becoming increasingly difficult to make an attempt at any all-over survey of what is known. And yet with the growth of knowledge has come also an ability to accumulate it, store it, and retrieve it. And that in unbelievably small space and in an unbelievably short time. So encyclopedias need no longer be books.

For all that, our competence remains impressively limited. And knowledge, thin. Particularly about simple things. Things like time, space, life, the soul, immortality. Science is great. Greater is philosophy. Greater still theology. But beyond them all, wisdom. And the wise are few. And wisdom hard come by. Because wisdom deals with mystery. And life is full of mystery that a scientific age is grossly ignorant of.

See your dictionary:

"TIME is a non-spatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future." Yet, the question remains: What is time?
"SPACE is the intuition of a 3-dimensional field of everyday experience?"  But what is space?
"LIFE is the property or the quality manifested in functions by which living organisms are distinguished from dead organisms and from inanimate matter." That says little more than if you're not dead, you're probably alive.
"ETERNITY is the totality of time without beginning or end."

The words, the notions, the ideas: they're clear enough. We know what they mean. But who can understand any of them? They remain what Catholics call mysteries: truths which are beyond our comprehension. And life is full of them. We forget that because of our familiarity with them. And without knowing much about them, we can make use of them. We know nothing about the ultimate nature of electricity, but that poses no problem. You can turn a light on. Or off.

It is children who reveal the quest for wisdom in asking exasperating questions that nobody can answer. "Why is light, light? Where is my soul? Why is a dog not something else?"  "Go ask your father!"

It seems to be the point of the parables Jesus schools us in today. There are so many mysteries that surround you in daily life, and yet you balk and play stupid when I speak to you of heavenly mysteries. You know nothing at all about what life is in the seed that sprouts, that grows, that matures, that bears fruit. And yet when I talk of eternal life, the life to come, the Kingdom of God and entering it, your minds cloud over with doubt. The parables are wasted on you. Your ears do not hear. Your eyes do not see. Your hearts do not believe because you do not make the leap of faith.

It's as true today as it was in Christ's day. People don't change much from one generation to the next. The human heart is still hard. We are still deaf, still blind.

Were it no so, the world, the whole world, would long since have gone after Christ and become His. --It hasn't done so.

And yet the Kingdom is here, it's begun, its life pulses in the human scene in the same mysterious way the life of the seed shares, the tiny mustard seed which contains within it the great shrub it will become. The small kernel of corn that from within emerges as a growing plant, growing every day larger by way of  the soil nurtured by sun and rain.

Our skeptical hearts question. We need more evidence. We're not impressed. It is, they tell us, Christianity itself which is making Christ unacceptable. And Christ Himself wasn't accepted. He came on His own terms, not theirs, not His people's. He wasn't quite what they were looking for. So today. The Church is not quite what they're looking for. Those looking can't see. They can't hear. Can anything good come from Nazareth, from Poland?

So we who know so little about the simplest things, skirt God because He speaks of mysteries, preaches an unworkable gospel, makes unconscionable demands, advances a program too poetic and romantic to be taken seriously.

But not by all. A few listen. A few look. A few take heart because they ponder in silent wonder. They are blessed indeed. The Kingdom is theirs. And of course will not stop there. Seeds grow.