How About CROSSwords?
Last weekend, we attended a wool festival in the general vicinity of Washington, D.C. Because I can no longer travel for hours on end without a pit stop, we pulled into one of those highway rest stops along the way. It offered the usual selection of grossly overpriced fast food--$2.69 for a single, plain hot dog—and emergency entertainment in the form of magazines and paperbacks. I suspect the newsstand owner was a bit of a prude; even Maxim was considered too racy to go without a plastic sheath, and the paperbacks were heavily dominated by religious reading.
Rest stop paperbacks are already pretty low-grade in general; when even Danielle Steele is culled to make room for “Heavenly Humor—inspiring humor from women writers” you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Just before I turned away, I spotted the puzzle offering: Christian word-find. Word-finds occupy the lowest rung of the puzzle ladder: they require no particular reasoning, knowledge, or creativity, just patience. Any damn fool can, given time, find all the words, possibly moving his lips as he spells to himself. These word-finds qualified as “Christian” because the words in every puzzle were taken directly from biblical verse, including words like “of,” “to,” and “the.” (It must have taken some work to avoid including two instances of two-letter words.)
Or rather, I thought word-finds were the bottom of the barrel. A few seconds later, I spotted “Biblical Sudoku.” Now, pause a minute before reading on to try to guess how Sudoku puzzles could qualify as biblical, since they consist of nothing but a 9x9 grid to be filled with the numbers one to nine in such a way that no numeral is repeated in row, column, or 3x3 sub-grid. The numbers from one to nine are hardly exclusively biblical material, so I confess I was stumped.
Looking inside the book, I had a second surprise: the grids were all empty. This confused me for a moment, since an empty grid gives you nowhere to start the process of filling in the rest of the squares. In fact, it doesn’t even require a unique solution; any of the frajillions of Sudoku puzzles ever printed could legally fill an empty grid. My confusion lasted only a moment, however, because on the facing page were the answers. Not printed directly, but concealed in biblical references: for every square was a “hint,” telling you were to find the answer: How many months should fields lie fallow before planting oats (Leviticus 13:6)? Or something in that vein.
Effectively, there was no Sudoku at all to biblical Sudoku; the characteristic grid played no part in the puzzle, which could as easily have been eighty-one unrelated blanks at the end of the “clues.” All the logic, the whole purpose of a Sudoku puzzle, was removed and replaced by that ancient puzzle challenge known as “looking up the answers.” Small children would find their intelligence insulted by such a puzzle.
I know Christianity has produced some great thinkers. Medieval scholars, many of them from largely illiterate cultures, struggled to make sense of some very heady ideas, and nearly managed to do so, their efforts at logic foundering on experimental knowledge. Scholars of the Renaissance and the age of reason continued to praise Christian teaching even as they challenged its foundations. Sadly, such titans are not the norm. At the other, larger end of the scale lie the credulous and dim-witted, not much given to literacy or critical thinking, but eager to embrace any book as long as the word “Christian” is printed on the cover and the words aren’t too big. For them, and their desire for intellectual challenge, we have not-really-puzzles-at-all. It seems “Christian puzzles” aren’t profound questions like how a perfect god can co-exist with a manifestly imperfect world, or how free will can exist in the presence of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. No, they’re just imitation puzzles for very stupid people.