I just finished a fascinating book, "Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters -- and How to Talk About It" by Krista Tippett. I found some incredibly thought-provoking passages in the final chapter, "Confessing Mystery." I thought I'd share them and invite your thoughts.I appreciated her embrace of mystery. For that is something I've been grappling with lately in my own faith -- what do I do with all my questions? I am coming to understand that not all questions have answers. But being able to ask them and honestly search for answers is a valuable and critical stage of a person's journey.
As she writes, "In my early life, I longed for solutions and systems and overarching themes that would bring meaning into focus and apply to all people and all places. The people with whom I spend my life of conversation now are eloquent, but with an infinite variety of emphasis and description." (emphasis mine)
Later, she grapples with the concept of mystery, of the unknowable.
"Mystery is the crux of religion that is almost always missing in our public expressions of religion. It eludes and evaporates beneath the demeaning glibness of debates and sound bites. Mystery resists absolutes. It can hold truth, compassion, and open possibility in relationship. This relationship could redeem our otherwise hopelessly literalistic, triumphalist civic and religious debates. We could disagree passionately with each other and also better remember the limits of our own knowledge. If mystery is real, even more real than what we can touch with our five senses, uncertainty and ambiguity are blessed. We have to live with that, and struggle with its implications together. Mystery acknowledged is, paradoxically, humanizing."
"Introduce mystery into any conversation and the conversation gentles; reality doesn't lose its sharp edges but the sharp edges are not all, not the end."
"Mystery is at the heart of all ritual -- layers and layers of idea, liturgy, postures, lifted prayer, constructed to capture and express something that cannot be contained. Mystery is apprehended fleetingly, but it leaves its mark."
"To believe is not to have all the answers; to discern truth is not to be able to carry it all the way to the end."
She writes that those who are willing to acknowledge that they do not and cannot have all the answers, but resolve to continue searching, reading, and listening for answers -- those people possess "spiritual humility."
"The geneticist Lyndon Eaves tells me that the spirituality of a scientist is akin to that of a mystic: it's a constant endeavor to discern truth while staying open to everything you do not yet, cannot yet, know. It is to live boldly and assertively with the discoveries you have made, all the while anticipating better discoveries to come. It is a life, in that sense, marked by an enlivening, creative humility."
"Deep spiritual humility defies the connotations of self-ebasement, of ineffective meekness, that our culture assigns to the word humility. I was frankly puzzled by the teachings of Jesus that his disciples should become humble like a little child. And then I became a mother of little children.
"I know of no richer source of theological enlightenment than parenting. ...The real experience of parenting is more often one of excruciating vulnerability. Our love for our children is often defined by the fact that we cannot spare them pain and save them; that we give them their freedom as necessary steps to creativity, wisdom, and love; that we raise them for the world they go on to create.
"And as I watched my children move through the world, I began to imagine what Jesus meant by humility. The humility of a child, moving through the world discovering everything anew, is closely linked with delight. This original spiritual humility is not about debasing oneself; it is about approaching everything new and other with a sense of curiosity and wonder. It has a quality of fearlessness too.
"...Spiritual humility intensifies one's sense of the limits of words about God, of words about mystery, their narrowing possibilities and their vulnerability to distortion by the human frailties even of the institutions created to preserve them. Nevertheless, we keep speaking, St. Augustine said, in order not to remain altogether silent."
What do you do with your questions? Do you believe we can answer everything? Do you acknowledge paradox and mystery? How do you respond to those who understand and believe differently from you?
