Living in Mystery

 

Living in Mystery

June 7, 2021

 

The other day as I lay in bed sort of half awake and half asleep I found myself sort of half thinking and half dreaming about mystery. I saw God as mystery. I saw the universe as mystery. I saw our place in and relationship to the universe as mystery, I thought, or dreamt, that we live unavoidably in mystery, in mysteries actually, that either we can’t solve now or never will solve because there are mysteries we aren’t even meant to solve. I want to expand some here on those half-sleeping thoughts and dreams about mystery that I had that morning.

I start by asking: What is mystery? What do we mean when we call something a mystery? All mysteries involve an unknown, and there are I think various kinds of mystery. The simplest sort of mystery is the mystery of a whodunit novel. In a well-crafted murder mystery novel we know that someone has been killed and that one of several available suspects dun it. As the heroine or hero of the story works to discover who the killer actually is, we try to figure it out ourselves. The author scatters both real and false clues through the tale, but in a good murder mystery we don’t know whodunit until the end of the book when the author has her hero pull all the clues together and reveal who the murderer actually is. At that point we may well think we should have figured it out ourselves, but in any event the mystery is solved. We know whodunit. That’s one kind of mystery, one that is meant to be solved and that eventually is solved.

Then there’s the kind of mystery that we think we can solve and that perhaps scientists think they have solved but we really haven’t solved and probably never will. The mystery I think of in this regard is the mystery of animal perception and consciousness including human perception and consciousness. I recently saw a PBS program in which some neurologists were explaining the wonders of the human neurological system, especially the brain. They talked about neurologic structures and electrical impulses traveling along a complex system of nerves and triggering responses in the brain. They spoke of different thoughts and emotions being stored in different parts of the brain. They seemed to believe that they had explained human perception and consciousness. In fact they hadn’t. They didn’t even try to explain what perception and consciousness are. They didn’t even raise the question of what it is that is conscious or that perceives. How do electrical impulses from the eye transmitted along the optic nerve become sight? What is it that sees? We don’t, after all, see electrical impulses. We see visual images. How does that happen? Who is the “we” who sees those images? Scientists don’t even ask those questions much less try to answer them. Perception and consciousness are mysteries some think they’ve solved but we haven’t solved and probably never will. That’s another kind of mystery.

Then there are mysteries that are in some sense solvable and even solved but that we just can’t get our heads around—or at least I can’t get my head around them. Here’s a prime example. Scientists measure the size of the universe in light years. A light year is the distance light travels in one of the earth’s years. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. Not per hour or even per minute. Per second! Light travels so fast that to us its effect seems to be instantaneous. If light travels at 186,000 miles per second, the length of a light year is beyond our ability accurately to conceptualize it. Scientists can express it mathematically, but that doesn’t mean we can really get our heads around it. Yet scientists measure the distance to the other star closest the sun, Alpha Centauri, as 4.246 light years. They say the universe is about 13 billion years old. That means that the background radiation from the Big Bang that we can detect comes from 13 billion light years away. I can’t conceptualize one light year. 13 billion light years is just an abstract concept not something I can really claim to understand.

As I lay in bed the other morning half asleep I thought: What are we humans in the vast scheme of a universe so big that we can’t even begin to conceptualize its size? We are so small in that vase universe. Compared to the size of the universe we are less then submicroscopic particles, so much less than a speck of dust that once again we can hardly conceptualize our size relationship to the universe. That we have any existence at all in the vastness of space and time is a mystery beyond my comprehension, at least in secular terms.

Then there’s God. God, we say, created that universe that is so big we can’t begin to understand it. God put us in that universe and made us so infinitesimally small in a seemingly meaningless, random spot within it. If God created the universe as we say God did, then God must be even bigger than the universe and more powerful than all the power in the universe. But how can that be? We can’t really comprehend the size of the universe, and now we’re supposed to comprehend some reality even bigger than that? Impossible! It can’t be done!

In that realization we have finally come to the mystery of all mysteries, the mystery of God. In some circles it is a commonplace to call God a mystery. I once heard the Jesuit president of Seattle University refer to God as mystery. He said that our spirituality is how we relate to mystery. I’m sure he meant how we relate to God. Yet God is a different sort of mystery from all of the other mysteries we have considered. All of those other mysteries can be resolved. Or at least people can come up with answers that they think resolve them. The mystery of God cannot be solved. It’s not meant to be solved. Sure. People think all the time that they’ve solved the mystery of God. They think they’ve got God all locked up in the Bible. Or in some ecclesial institution. Or in some religious doctrine. They think they’ve gotten their heads around the reality of God. That they truly understand God. That God is no kind of mystery at all.

They’re wrong. They’re just flat wrong. They cannot not be wrong. They cannot not be wrong because anything you think of God may in some sense be true but is also necessarily false. If God is truly God then God is utterly beyond our finite comprehension. Anything we can truly understand cannot be God. Our understanding of anything is necessarily limited because our minds are unavoidably limited. They are limited because they are finite. God is unlimited. God is infinite. Anything that is not unlimited, that is not infinite, is not and cannot be God. We simply cannot fully understand God. We live with, worship, and love the God we can know, but if we’re aware of what we’re doing and honest about it we know that while we can trust that what we know of God does not mislead us, we cannot know that it doesn’t.

Because we know that we cannot fully know God, we know that God is one of the mysteries with and in which we live, though not the only one. I mentioned some of the others above. We always so want to know the answers. We don’t like living with unknowns, with unanswered questions. We like even less living with unanswerable questions. I once heard the Russian/British historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that western culture is characterized by three foundational beliefs, namely, that every question has an answer, that every question has only one correct answer, and it is possible for us to know that answer. God simply does not fit within that scheme. Ultimately we cannot know the answer, any answer really, to the question of God. We really have no choice but to live with an unknown and unknowable God. Mystery surrounds us every day. We live with things we can’t really comprehend, like the size of the universe. We live with mysteries we never think about, like how electrical impulses become consciousness and perception. We people of faith live with and in a God we can never fully comprehend. That’s just how it is with us humans. That’s how it ever will be.

How can we respond to the unavoidable reality of mystery? A few different responses are possible. We can get irritated. We can chafe at our not knowing. Or we can get cynical, give up on mystery, and persistently ignore it. Yet neither of those ways of living with mystery is really healthy. Neither getting mad at the reality of mystery nor ignoring it brings us to terms with mystery. There must be a better way.

Happily there is. There is a way of living with mystery through which we can live peacefully and even joyfully with it. It is the way of wonder. We can live in wonder at the mysterious yet supportive, sustaining nature of reality. We can gaze at the stars and stand in awe before the vastness of the universe. We can give thanks for the miracle of consciousness and perception though we may never grasp how they really come to be. Best of all we can live with, worship, and love the God we will never fully know, not in this life at least. We can confess God as love and trust that God’s love for us and for all of creation is incomprehensibly vaster and deeper than any other love we know. We can let go of our rationalistic need to know all the answers and live in the joy of unknowing. Living, that is, in wonder at the mystery of life. That way lies joy. That way lies fullness of life. May we all learn to embrace and give thanks for mystery and for the gifts living in awe before it brings us.