We just finished the TV series of Sherlock Holmes on Netflix, and its metaphorical meaning keeps perking like a slow Mr. Coffee, drip, drip, drip comes the surprises.Sherlock knowing everything is bored to death. He longs for the challenging case that will surprise him. Why does he want a surprise? We all want a surprise. We are buried in the Known, in the recycled knowledge, in the ritual behaviors..so we long for the surprise that break us out of the known into the unknown. Every case in the series Sherlock goes through the dialectic of knowing everything, and then being surprise—eyes wide open in the wonder of it—and then he transcends but creating a new Known that includes the opposite knowns that was his prison of boredom.
It is through surprise that we transcend the known and create ourselves again and again. The ultimate surprise id death, the the series encounters death time and again as a surprise. Death is the unknown. The Known when we invest in it, fears the unknown because the unknown is a surprise, a death of the known.
We therefore love and hate death. We love death as the ultimate surprise for without this surprise life would not be worth living. The loss of the known is the surprise of death. Ironically, it is only through death, the surprise of the unknown that we can realize our human consciousness, of the spirit of God that dwells within as us. God is transcendence. God is a surprise. God is the death of the known…and only the Sherlock within us dare to invite the game, dares to match wits with God as the ultimate known.
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