Puzzling together
News
My dear sisters and brothers in Christ. Recently, after a confirmation, I meet a lady who loved doing jigsaw puzzles. She proudly called herself a “dissectologist”; that is one for the quiz-night. I asked her what was the largest one she had completed: 5,000 pieces. The average size is 1,000!
There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over a table where a jigsaw puzzle is spread out. A thousand fragments of colour and line lie scattered, seemingly unrelated, each one meaningless on its own. Yet within that chaos lies a hidden order, a complete picture waiting to be revealed. It is not a stretch to see in this quiet domestic ritual a fitting image for the life of faith, and a surprisingly timely one for the Church here in Adelaide as we find ourselves in the middle of 2026.
Anyone who has tackled a jigsaw knows that success depends on strategy, not just patience. You do not simply tip the box out and start jamming pieces together at random. You begin with the straight edges, sorting out the border first, because it gives the whole enterprise its shape and its limits. Only once that frame is secure do you turn to the interior, and there a different strategy takes over: sorting by colour, grouping the blues of the sky, the greens of a paddock, the browns of a roof, because similarity of shade is often the only clue available before the picture itself starts to emerge.
This two-stage strategy, edges first, then colour, mirrors the shape of a life of faith well lived. The fixed and unchanging truths of our Creed, the sacraments, the moral law revealed in Scripture and safeguarded by the Church, form the straight-edged border within which everything else must be fitted. Once that frame is trusted and in place, the more textured work begins: discerning vocation, forming conscience, learning to recognise which experiences, sufferings, and relationships belong together by a kind of family resemblance, even before we can see exactly how they interlock.
A good strategy, though, does not stop at sorting. Skilled puzzlers rarely try to complete the whole image at once, working outward from a single point across the entire table. They build small, coherent sections first, the church steeple, the cluster of trees, the corner of a barn, and only later slide those completed sections into their place within the larger whole. This protects against the despair of staring at nine hundred unplaced pieces and concluding that nothing can be done; it turns an overwhelming task into an achievable one. None of us is asked, in the Christian life, to become holy all at once, in every area of life, in a single afternoon. We are asked to complete one section faithfully, a habit of daily prayer, a particular sin finally surrendered, a strained relationship slowly repaired, the regular pattern of Sunday Eucharist, and to trust that these smaller, finished sections will in time be gathered into a life that holds together as a whole. Sanctification, like a puzzle, is worked section by section, and every Pastoral Council, every family, every person, is permitted to start with whatever section is nearest to hand rather than the whole picture at once.
None of this section-work happens well without constant reference back to the picture on the side of the box, propped up beside the table and consulted again and again, not because the puzzler, the dissectologist, has forgotten what the image looks like, but because each small decision needs to be re-orientated against the whole as it goes.
And there is, too, a strategy of trial without shame that belongs to every good puzzler: a piece is offered to a space, found not to fit, and set aside without a second thought, tried again later, sometimes much later, once the surrounding context has changed. The Scriptures do not ask us to be right on the first attempt at holiness, prayer, or reconciliation; they ask us to keep offering the piece, trusting that persistence, not perfection, is what eventually completes the picture.
Here a curious feature of puzzles becomes theologically suggestive. The border pieces are straight, orderly, easily categorised. But almost every other piece has an irregular, rounded, asymmetrical edge, no two alike, each one bulging out here and tucking in there in a shape that seems, in isolation, almost arbitrary.
This, it seems to me, is a fair description of most of our lives. Apart from the clear moral and doctrinal edges of our faith, the actual shape of a single day, a single relationship, a single sorrow or joy, rarely looks tidy or self-explanatory. It has odd protrusions and unexpected notches. And yet, and this is the whole point of a jigsaw, every one of those irregular shapes was cut precisely so that it would fit into exactly one other piece, and ultimately into the whole. Nothing about the puzzle is random, even when it looks that way in your hand. This is close to what Paul means when he writes that “We know that by turning everything to their good God co-operates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). The irregular, un-shareable shape of our particular trials, is not evidence of meaninglessness. It is evidence of a specific fit still waiting to be found.
What steadies the puzzler through the tedious middle hours, when half the table is still scattered fragments, is a settled certainty that a solution does exist. Nobody buys a jigsaw suspecting the manufacturer forgot to cut a matching piece somewhere, or that the picture on the box is a lie. The confidence that everything will interlock is what makes the frustration of an unplaced piece bearable rather than despairing.
The life of faith offers an analogous, and far weightier, certainty. The Church does not proceed as though the meaning of suffering, the reconciliation of justice and mercy, or the destiny of a single person is left to chance. There is a solution, definitively secured by the life, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The Church’s whole sacramental and doctrinal life exists to help us locate our own scattered pieces within it. Patience, then, is not passive waiting; it is confident labour, the same quality of patience James commends when he writes that “patience too is to have its practical results so that you will become fully-developed, complete, with nothing missing” (James 1:4).
Why does this image matter specifically for us in Adelaide in mid-2026? Our Archdiocese, is presently in the midst of its own deliberate strategy-building, the “Together on the Way” Synodal process, an effort to sort the Church’s many scattered pieces, Parishes and pastoral arenas, ministries, the voices of the young and the elderly, the wounds of recent decades, into some coherent sense of the whole picture God is forming locally.
A Synod, rightly understood, is exactly this kind of edge-and-colour, section-by-section work: establishing again the non-negotiable borders of doctrine and communion, while patiently sorting and grouping the more ambiguous, irregularly shaped realities of Parish life by prayerful discernment rather than assumption, checking each small decision constantly against the picture held up in Scripture and Tradition, and trying again without shame when a first attempt at renewal does not fit.
For us Catholics in Adelaide we are: navigating declining Mass attendance in some parishes, alongside real growth in others; ageing infrastructure; assessing the pastoral needs of new migrant communities, and the ordinary daily struggle to hold faith and family and work together and struggling to find how best to hand on the the gift of faith in a increasingly secularised world, the jigsaw offers something genuinely useful: permission to work with strategy rather than either frantic improvisation or despair, and confidence that the oddly shaped piece in your hand today, a difficult parish closure, a season of doubt, a child who has drifted from the faith, is not an orphaned fragment but a piece cut for a fit not yet visible.
In the end, the jigsaw puzzle reminds the us, as much as any Christian anywhere, that incompleteness is not the same as meaninglessness. A half-finished puzzle, its pieces scattered and its picture only partly visible, is still moving toward something whole, provided the workers keep their strategy, keep their patience, and keep their trust that the One who designed the picture has guaranteed there is a solution. For we know that God is Good, Good indeed.
