Several months had passed without event since Thomas had left the old curiosity shop. As he thought back upon it he realized it hadn’t come to make any more sense to him now than it did then. After the woman had told him to take the letter opener he didn’t really know what to say, so he had just said “Thank you” and then walked very awkwardly out of the shop. He had felt like the eyes of both of them were boring into the back of his head as he had moved toward the door. Somehow the shop had seemed to stretch to three times the length it had been as he tried to make his way to the front door (not that it really had, but it seemed to take forever to get out from under their gaze).
He couldn’t believe he had actually taken it. He hadn’t even tried to refuse. Normally he would have tried to humbly refuse. You know how it is, like when someone says, “Hey, put your money away, dinner is on me tonight” and you say, “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly let you do that” and then they say, “No, I insist.” All propriety would be done, even if you were hoping and expecting them to make good on their original offer, you go through the motions. But this time he didn’t. He hadn’t dared to refuse, even politely and insincerely, in case she would change her mind. He had to have it and she had offered it and he had said, “thank you.”
After leaving the shop he had went straight to his uncle’s house. He still didn’t call it home. It wasn’t home. Would he ever feel at home again? He doubted it. But he had gone to where he was staying, with his uncle. He had forgotten all about the ice cream he had intended to get. He walked at a quick pace all the way until he got there as if he held some sort of fear that someone would come running after him demanding his new possession be returned.
He walked in the side door of the house, waved and said hello to Samantha who was just getting something out of the oven, and then marched up the stairs to his room, the third door on the left. He took the letter opener out of the front pocket of his backpack, where he had stored it, and he examined it again. His initial observations matched his second impression just fine but now having more time to look at the letter opener he realized something else. The two rings upon the handle could be turned to the left or the right. They could move and click into a new place with a feeling similar to that of a combination padlock. The arrow shape which was engraved on each ring would settle to point upon a different figure on the handle with each click.
There were eight figures of each kind of writing, the rune kind and the sort that looked more like the book that had been on the desk, and Thomas had twisted the rings to point at every possible combination. He did this with a very particular hope, namely, that the music would begin again. It did not. No matter how badly he longed to hear that music again, nothing he did had any effect upon it. He wondered what was the point of the symbols and why the rings could be moved into position to point at different ones. He could think of no obvious reason for it but he wondered if maybe it was some sort of cipher or code cracking tool. It was, after all, in a shop full of old war memorabilia and he had read about how they used to make ciphers to send coded messages to each other in an attempt to keep important information out of enemy hands. Well, that was his prevailing theory for now.
But what made absolutely no sense, aside from the mysterious and soul crushingly beautiful music which he had heard coming from what was ultimately a piece of carved and polished wood, was what the woman had said about it. What had she called it… her “salvation.” What in the world was that supposed to mean? Why had she insisted he take it when it obviously was very dear to her? Was she just crazy? Was he crazy? This was all crazy.
Months later and he had come no further in his understanding of any of it. He was sitting in the little coffee house on Main Street, only a couple of blocks North of the antique shop, and brooding on the matter again. It was about 5 minutes until 7:00 a.m. and he was waiting for his Biology professor and a couple of his classmates. Professor Williams had broken up their class into four sections and had scheduled a different time with each of them to take them on a guided quest to find…wait for it…insects. That’s right, they were going, first thing this morning, to hike about two miles away from the college and try to find some local bugs in a field.
Professor Williams was very excited about it. All the professors at Sayers College were excitable sort of people. They really loved what they taught and they seemed to genuinely care about their students. Despite himself, Thomas was starting to like some things about this college. He didn’t even mind getting up earlier than usual to go look for bugs (Normally his first class of the day started at 9:00 a.m.). But he especially didn’t mind this little excursion because Sarah Taylor was in his group.
Sarah was also a Freshmen at Sayers and she was… well…let’s just say Thomas was fond of her. She was very pretty, which was the first thing Thomas had noticed, but that wasn’t even what he liked most about her. Or perhaps, maybe it is better to say that it was just one of the many contributing factors as to what Thomas liked about Sarah. The second week of school he had observed Sarah, in the large open courtyard between the three main buildings of Sayers, playing ultimate frisbee with some friends. The guys in the game had made it a habit to do that dumb thing which guys sometimes do in sports and they were patting each other on the backside whenever someone scored. One of them was foolish enough to try that on Sarah (he later insisted that he was just playing and wasn’t even going to make contact) but before he had even gotten close Sarah intercepted his hand, twisted his arm over her shoulder and gave him a very impressive Judo throw in the grassy field. Yes…it was that exact moment that Thomas thought he might be in love.
She had also, since that time, distinguished herself in the two classes they shared together, Biology and Philosophy, as a very bright individual too. Smart, pretty, dangerous… he let out a sigh just thinking about it. But there was one problem. She was religious too. It was very clear that the philosophy professor and she were very much on the same page when it came to the existence of God. Sarah had presented a paper last week on Alvin Plantinga’s so-called “Modal Ontological Argument.” Throughout the semester Professor O’Callen had been surveying the history of Philosophy, starting with the “pre-Socratics” and they had now made it to the 12th Cent. A.D. and were learning about a guy named Anselm. The professor had assigned the class to write a paper on Anselm’s ontological argument or on an argument that could be counted as a successor to it.
Thomas hadn’t been very impressed by Anselm’s argument. Basically the argument states that to properly understand what is meant by the term “God” is to be forced to acknowledge that God exists. God, according to Anselm, is a being “of which none greater can be thought.” He argued further that one can conceive the difference between a being who exists in thought only and one that exists in actuality. Finally he argued that to exist in actuality is greater than to exist only in thought and therefore God must exist necessarily. Thomas thought this was just a kind of game with words though he admitted he had a hard time sorting it out and rebutting it (though he had tried in his own paper). But when Sarah presented her paper in class he had to admit that he found this other version more compelling and harder to refute.
Plantinga said, in a nutshell, that the idea of God as a maximally great being is a logically coherent notion. Using modal logic, which considers what is possible versus what is actual, he went on to note that since this idea is logically coherent then such a God would exist in at least one possible world. Further, as Sarah had explained, if he is maximally great then he would exist not in just one possible world but in every possible world, including the actual world. Therefore God necessarily exists in reality. This argument struck a chord with Thomas. He was trying to decide whether it was Plantinga’s logic or Sarah’s mesmerizing effect which had had the more profound effect upon him, but try as he may this argument had gotten under his skin.
Thomas wasn’t a believer, mind you. Not by a long shot. But he was at least starting to think that those who were might not be as dumb as he thought. He was also more open to the idea that there might be a God. But the thing that was still completely unacceptable to him was not just the idea that there might be a God, but that the God who might be there…might be the Christian God. That was one place he could not and would not go. If that God were real…if the Christian religion were true…what would that mean for his dead parents who died not believing? He knew what it would mean. No, if there were a God it wouldn’t be that one. It would be Plato’s God maybe…a kind of ill defined ultimate goodness which surely would be more forgiving than the God of the Bible. But Sarah… she thought Jesus was God. A man who was God? He hadn’t gotten very far with that idea yet.
But there she was now, waving at him through the coffee shop window! Well, okay, she was more gesturing at him to join the group outside than she was waving at him, but Thomas would take what he could get. He got up and ran out to meet the group.