Thankful for a Mystery

In the afterglow of Thanksgiving Day, I always find myself reflecting more on the things I'm grateful for.  I suppose that's what the holiday is supposed to do for us--to make us more attuned to daily thankfulness, and to refresh our sense of it by gathering with those we love and enjoying some particularly tasty blessings and remembering how good life is.  This morning, as I reflect, I am reminded of a blessing I am particularly thankful for:  the mystery of God.

Now, let me say that by nature I am not a person who enjoys the unknown.  Any of my close friends or family will quickly tell you that I am the kind of fellow who finds it necessary to get out of a warm bed in the middle of the night and go searching for a reference book to answer some sort of nagging question that has arisen in my mind as I was falling asleep.  The very fact that I have shelf after shelf of books, many of them reference volumes, in my home is probably testament to the fact that I like knowing things, enjoy informing myself and learning new facts and skills, and that I prefer the known to the unknown.  Since I was a very young child, I have always wanted to know about everything around me--to know the name of every creature, the workings of every machine, the minute details of even very mundane things.  Long before I would reach the age for kindergarten, my older brother and his friends found it amusing to pull out the World Book Encyclopedia and quiz me by pointing out pictures of various birds, reptiles and mammals, which I could name from memory and often knew a few details about, despite not being able to read at all.  My patient parents would explain everything I asked, read the encyclopedia and dictionary and every other book under the sun to me, and help me try to find out the things I wanted to know.  I went through phases of keen interest in certain things, like the period when I was utterly fascinated with bats.  I think my interest stemmed from a brief discussion of them in an elementary school class.  At any rate, I remember the wonderful librarians who oversaw the local public library at the time sending off for loaner books for me--not picture books, but large, thick scientific tomes dedicated to the study of chiropterans (the fancy, scientific family-name for bats.)  It came as no surprise to anyone that my undergraduate college major switched from journalism to science after the first semester, because it seemed to be born into me to be inquisitive.

In my graduate seminary studies, I found that I loved the historical details of people's lives, the understanding of culture and its impact on spirituality and faith.

And yet, one of my favorite aspects of God's nature is the sheer mystery, the abundance of the unknown in the personality of Him Who Was and Is and Is To Come.  It seems to be part and parcel of God's nature that He is both known and unknown, knowable and unknowable, certain and mysterious.  From the initial "Bereshit berah elohim..." of the book of Genesis, there is both revelation and mystery.
In the creation narrative, we see God as disembodied Spirit, moving across the face of utter void, creating earth and sky and sea and all the miraculous, mysterious, complex lifeforms that inhabit them just by speaking them into existence.  From mud and the breath of His nostrils, El Elyon makes man and then, inexplicably, uses Adam's rib to create the second, fairer sex.  The Word speaks of giants who once inhabited the land, of angels and men in intimate relation, of Leviathan which inhabited the deep and of the subsequent destruction of all that God had made, save Noah and his kin.  The history of God's people--of His nurture and protection and preservation of those who love Him throughout the ages, is a mystery in itself.  The fulfillment of age-old prophecies about the coming Messiah--of His lineage and birthplace and minute details of His life and ministry and death, defy all attempts at explanation.  Jesus' life itself, from its proclamation to Elizabeth and Zacharias, to the angel's visitation of Mary, to the Savior's birth in a lowly backwater town--the list goes on and on of the incredible, mysterious, miraculous details of His life.  In the gospels, we read again and again of the mystery of life, and of the mysterious process that will one day transform us into the image of glory for which we were always made.  In John's vision, another mysterious and promising creation is revealed: a day when the toils and struggles of this world will have passed away and we will stand justified despite our failings, to live eternally in heaven--a mystery in itself.  The Bible names no location, nor does it give more than symbolic detail of heaven itself.  It's promise is alluring, yet we are told little about what will happen there.  And in-between, we find ourselves in a perpetual state of mystery:  plagued by the sinful limitations of our earthly selves, yet vaguely aware that we are spiritual beings only temporarily limited to the physical domain.

There is a lot of not-knowing in all of that--a lot of wishing and hoping and longing to know more, to better understand, to be less mystified.  Yet, at the same time even I can see the incredible value of God's mystery.  What if God had revealed to me all the details of times past, of the creation and the flood and the wonders of the first testament?  What if it were given to me to understand the miraculous fulfillment of prophecy, the means of Christ's coming and sacrifice and transfiguration?  What if I could know the inner workings of the soul and of how my physical body is connected to it?  What if God had chosen to give me not just images and symbols and promises, but the exact details of this heavenly dwelling-place my soul seems to long for so much?

I suspect that in many things, not-knowing is better than full comprehension; that for me to rely in faith on the goodness and right intention of the Creator is better than for me to catalog facts and record observations and analyze facts and details.  The truth is, a great many people have tried to reduce God's nature, even His very existence, to a set of verifiable observations.  Many years of training in biology, graduate and undergraduate, have taught me that to take any being and reduce it to its statistical measurements and factual data is to drain it not only of mystery, but of much of its actual existence.  Take, for example, a blue jay:  from a very young age, I knew one when I saw it at the windowsill where we put out bird food.  At a later age, I learned about its habits, its diet and its relationship to other birds.  In college, I had a wonderful Ornithology professor who always kept the windows open while teaching.  As we sat at our lab tables, taking notes, he would occasionally stop in mid-sentence during his lecture, cock his head to one side, and name the bird currently singing outside the window.  From this, I will always remember that the blue jay's scientific name is Cyanocitta cristata (literally, "blue, chattering, crested bird") and if I took the trouble to walk a few steps to my bookshelf of field guides, I could no doubt retrieve its average length and weight, its home and migratory ranges, its primary diet and a litany of other factual details about it.  Yet, if you had never seen a blue jay, to give you all of those details would do precious little justice to this noble, bossy, transcendently beautiful creature.  For me to tell you every detail of what a blue jay is would, in fact, do very little in comparison to even a fleeting glimpse of the bird itself, because every living being is far more than the sum of its component parts; more than the cumulative sum of its statistical values.  It has been my observation over the years that even quite young children are able to discern that the dead body of an animal or a person is missing something quite important--that it is no more the person or creature that it once represented, but that what remains is merely a shell, a husk of what once was.

And so it would doubtless be with me, if I were able to know all the mysteries embodied in the personhood of God.  Like man who was made in His eternal image, God exists as spirit, quite apart from the limitations of the physical and temporal world.  In Jesus Christ, God took on the cloak of humanity, so that we could see His divine nature more nearly, but the man, Jesus, was only a limited representation of the fullness of God--fully divine, but also only a bit of God's totality.  If I knew more--if there were nothing left to my imagination--if I had no questions, only knowledge, I suspect that I would be much less enamored of God and less likely to seek after Him.  Just as in romantic love, there is an element of discovery--the promise of learning more (or at the least the hope of it) that keeps us wanting more and deeper relationship.  In some ways, my relationship with God bears good comparison to courtship--yet the mystery of the ages is that is the Divine Who courts the mundane--God who pursues my heart, and not vice-versa.

Yes, I am thankful for the mystery, glad that I do not understand nor hope to comprehend in this life all that is God.  To know even a bit of Who He is gives me comfort and peace, because what has been revealed is so amazing, so powerful, so perfect that I can have abiding faith that the unknown aspects of my Creator can only be better.  I long for the day when, in the words of Paul writing to the church at Corinth, "I will know, even as I am known."  In the meantime, for the span of my days here, I choose to rejoice in the mystery, to celebrate the unknown and worship the Unseen and Almighty.

My prayer for you, my fellow-traveler, is that not too much will be revealed to you, and that you will continue in faith, content to rejoice in the mystery that is God, until that day when we discover together all that He has in store for us.  May God Himself bless your journey today!