Mystery

I teach at St. Mary’s Catholic high school in Colorado Springs. Many of my students have gone to Catholic schools for all or most of their school life. I think that, for some of them, the ‘mystery card’ has been played too often: it can be easy for a teacher of religion to avoid hard questions about the Trinity, the Incarnation, or grace by stating that it is a mystery, and then moving on. The word ‘mystery’ becomes a hard stop, a place where intellectual and spiritual inquiry can go no further.

This is the opposite of what mystery is. Mystery is that into which you can always go deeper, like an infinite sea whose bottom cannot be reached and which is unbounded by shores. A mystery is certainly too big for us to get it into our minds. So, the key is to get our minds into it. One cannot swallow the sea, but one can swim in it. And the more time we spend swimming, the stronger and wiser about its ways we become, so that we can go deeper and further on each new approach.

St. Augustine is a prime example of an experienced swimmer of the seas of mystery. He wrote extensively on the Trinity, the Incarnation, grace, and many of the other great mysteries of the Church. And yet, he did not make the mistake of trying to fit God into his mind. In the Office of Readings for today, Thomas Aquinas quotes Augustine, who had commented on Christ’s words from the parable, “Enter into the joy of your Lord.” Augustine’s comment was: “The fullness of joy will not enter into those who rejoice, but those who rejoice will enter into joy.” Here, he speaks of the joy of those who share the life of God eternally. Even in Heaven, they cannot contain the joy of the Lord, for that joy extends to the ‘unlimits’ of God himself. But they are immersed in joy, immersed in the mystery of God, filled with that joy and surrounded by it, as in a sea of glory.

When we swim into the ocean of the mystery of God, we are no longer in control. It is, though, worth the risk, for it is in infinite mystery that our minds and spirits find the joy for which they were made.