Two Types of Mystery

“Religion tells you what to think. Philosophy tells you how to think,” my friend said at night in the skate park near my college. The spaced apart street lamps made everything half visible and half invisible. Concrete writhed in and out of existence around us. Dancing without moving.

I sipped wine from my traveling coffee mug. “I don’t know about that.” I am not an apologist. I cannot have arguments with people where they bring bullet points and I bring bullet points and one wins and one loses. It feels stifling if everything can be cleanly argued. If everything is clear, then where is the passion or mystery? “You know I’m not a fundamentalist. I believe in evolution and people having rights.”

“Yes, but that is in spite of your religion. If you took religion too seriously, you’d be a totally different person.”

I have read a lot of theology and philosophy, before this conversation and afterwards. But my primary way of understanding religion and experiencing life is poetic. I do not win arguments if they are just principles and facts disconnected from life. To me apologetics is helpful for saying that Christianity and supernatural claims, like the resurrection, are credible, but bullet points do not change your heart.

Knowing facts does not make you a lover of truth. I think our hearts either desire for there to be a God or not, and then we build logical constructs on that foundation. I think someone who desires God to exist but struggles to understand how that makes sense is closer to Biblical theism than someone who accepts God’s existence in the abstract, but does not think about Him or wrestle with what that means.

“Did you get your new samurai sword out of an interest in Confucian or Buddhist intellectual traditions?” I asked. I had laughed when I first saw it hanging on his otherwise bare wall. Later that night he would take it down and show me how you swung it, and I would giggle so hard that I cried.

“No, I just think swords are cool.”

“Okay, so like, there is something underneath you thinking it’s cool. Maybe you associate it with tradition or Samurai honor codes. At a conscious level it’s not a logical decision, but there is a logic to why you think that way. Feelings do not come from nowhere. There is more to making decisions than pure logic, but there is still logic.”

I was trying to articulate the classic tension between head and heart, as a biased heart person. At the time, I did not see why people needed certainty. In my mind, we were the only sentient life forms in an infinite universe hostile to all life, just our sheer human existence was beyond explanation, so to me, logical explanations were unimportant. As I grew older, however, I would be challenged to see that logical apologetics bullet points are important. Flailing in the middle of the ocean without a raft is not freedom, people need something concrete to hold onto.

I think right now, people are saying they see a number of young people drawn to traditional, more conservative forms of religion for this reason. They are looking for direction and structure and are winding up in OCIA. Which I now empathize with. As someone who is very emotional, I would not feel confident being vulnerable and open with others if I did not have the concrete railings of Catholic tradition keeping me stable.

But I do worry about young people who enter into the Church because they listened to podcasts which made it clear that Catholicism is plausible and logical, but who have not been challenged or changed emotionally. Will they find the motivation to continue coming to Mass years down the road if only their heads have been converted? What happens when life gets hard, or they get bored? What plausible arguments against Catholicism will they find if their hearts are not humble enough to want there to be a God over them?

God as Mystery, Jesus as Answer

My spiritual director once remarked that I have a very Old Testament spirituality. Which could be because I got hooked on Walter Brueggemann in high school. But it is also my personality. As someone who lives with trauma, and depression and anxiety symptoms, and who is more comfortable with the ambiguity of existentialist philosophy than the algebraic certainty of Greek metaphysics, passages from the Old Testament tend to capture my imagination more vividly than the New Testament, with its Greek influences. “All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full” (Ecc. 1: 7 NRSVCE) gives voice to my constant sense of gentle unease. When I feel guilty for not feeling happy the way I think I should, passages like this from Habakkuk comfort me; “I tremble within; my lips quiver at the sound. Rottenness enters into my bones, and my steps tremble within me” (Hab. 3:16.) To read about what sounds like someone shaking from a panic attack and experiencing alienation from his own body is to read experiences I feel shame about in God’s Word, which makes me feel seen and heard by God Himself at an incredibly intimate level.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel says in his book The Prophets, “The prophet trembles… the depth of his experience lies deeper than trust and faith. What the prophet faces is not his own faith. He faces God.” I do not feel that I have faith, I feel that my doubt has led me into dialogue with God that goes beyond the limits of doubt and faith as mental categories. Which I guess is still faith, but that word is used so much it no longer communicates exactly what I mean. My prayer life was shaped by times where I needed to approach wounds and contemplate the mystery they represented and how they connect me to others with similar wounds. I do not know what a calm, neutral, painless acceptance of God’s reality looks like.

For the longest time I could not connect my experience of God with the person of Jesus.

I was once in a Bible study with a mother, a convert from Islam, who felt the same way. The non-human aspects of God were easier for us to understand and relate to than the humanity of Christ. For her, it was because she grew up without the belief of Christ being God, or God being the Trinity, so the infrastructure for understanding the incarnation was still underway in her. For me, it was because I had watched cartoons in Catholic elementary school depicting the gospels and miracles of Jesus, and when I read the gospels, I would imagine jolly two-dimensional cartoons who never cried. The strangeness of God becoming human and allowing Himself to suffer, and the fact that He did cry and experience pain, were not in my mind.

When I returned and accepted the beliefs of the Catholic Church, Jesus as an individual was still absent from much of my prayer life because I did not know how to relate to Him. To me, God was an infinite series of captivating questions. Jesus was a series of answers. It was hard to see the strangeness in those answers.

Different people have different personalities. My personality grasps ambiguity and mystery more easily than clarity. So, I appreciate the formal teaching of the Church, because it provides solidity and guardrails alien to my brain. But, just because my natural disposition is not perfect on its own does not mean that it is all wrong. God cannot be totally defined or captured within even the most sophisticated of theological nets. Creeds and dogma have limits because our brains are limited. Creeds ensure that the mystery we accept is God’s mystery, and not tohu va bohu, the formless chaos in opposition to creation described in the first Genesis creation narrative.

I reject neither mystery or dogma, I instead seek to integrate them, and working on that helped me encounter Jesus more tangibly in prayer.

Two Kinds of Mystery

And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them (Mark 9: 2-3).

The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified (John 6: 18-19).

I remember rereading the gospels, paying special attention to the big stories that had been sanitized for me by cartoons and looking at them afresh, and being excited by the reflection of the creation account in Jesus calming the storm. The water was like the tohu va bohu that had to be contained for creation to be ordered. Jesus was not controlling the weather like a comic book superhero, He was demonstrating God’s control over chaos.

This gave me a framework for recognizing two types of mysteries. One good, one bad. There is tohu va bohu, which is like freefall or drowning in the ocean, the bad kind of mystery. This is relativism. If no religion or worldview is true, if there are infinitely valid truth claims, then there is no true truth and no real reality. This is the kind of mystery that needs to be answered, and is why we need the apologists with their bullet points and mathematical Thomistic theorems.

But, truth is a relationship with a person, Christ, and relationships are open ended and change over time. If you think you have solved everything, then you become settled and complacent and stop moving forward. Dogmatic theology taught properly, I think, helps us climb out of tohu va bohu so we can relate to the person of Christ, while leaving enough mystery to lure us further and further into the Trinity over time. It is the happy middle ground of a house; bigger than a suffocating cage, but still a structure that shelters from storms.

I have no idea how to ensure awareness of these two types of mystery get communicated. Folks who are reacting against the bad mystery of relativism are zealous for certainty, and any talk of any ambiguity can set off alarm bells. There are also larger social problems, like how many of us are less connected to communities where we would interact with older, more mature people who could temper the all-or-nothing tendencies of youth. We all have predispositions, and we become centered by talking to people with different predispositions. Algorithms and media consumption silo us into little niches where we only talk to people who already agree with us on important topics, which harms our ability to listen and learn from others. The art of conversation is on the decline, and if we cannot converse with a human who thinks differently than us, how can we converse with God Whose thoughts are not our thoughts and Whose ways are not our ways?

That is a mystery I hope can be solved.