I love mysteries.
Let me clarify that. I love reading mystery stories in detective fiction. I will happily while away the hours watching Inspector Morse, or Inspector Lewis, or Inspector Linley or any of the other fictional British detectives that stream on my TV.
I’ve read all of the Sherlock Holmes novels and the Nero Wolfe stories as well.
I love mysteries… that get resolved.
Mysteries that stay mysterious and unresolved make me nuts, which is too bad, because so many important things in life fall into this category. Why do fools [and the rest of us] fall in love? It’s a mystery. What makes us tick? Why are we the way we are? It’s a mystery. Why are we here? What’s our purpose in life? Why is there a universe in the first place? Why is there something instead of nothing? It’s a mystery.
Now, we can know something about all of these questions. We can know enough to free us from worrying about the parts we don’t know. But even when we have a partial answer to the mysteries of life, we have to confess, we don’t know it all.
God is also a mystery. Augustine wrote, si enim comprehendis, non est Deus*, which means roughly, “If you can comprehend it, it isn’t God.” That doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything about God. It means we can’t understand the totality of God. To comprehend something means that we have perspective to see it in its entirety. Those of us of a certain age remember how powerful it was to see the photographs of the earth taken from the Apollo space missions. For the first time we could see the whole of the earth suspended in space. It allowed a degree of comprehension that a globe or a map couldn’t approximate.
That’s just the kind of picture we cannot have of God. We can catch genuine glimpses and have real encounters, but we cannot see the whole picture.
God is not un-knowable, but infinitely knowable. We can always know more, go deeper, get closer. No matter how much we know, there is more that is beyond our grasp and outside our understanding.
God is not a mystery to be solved, but a relationship to be explored.
Prayer: Mighty and mysterious God, our minds cannot encompass you, but we trust your infinite love to encompass us. Amen.
*From Augustine’s Sermon 117 in Patrologia Latina (PL), Volume 38, p. 661-671.