Don't ask...It's a Mystery

We celebrate those events in the life of Christ in the Gospel as stories that are meant to be lived as we are inspired to live them. I’ve come to the realization that it’s not a mystery when I really understand a concept and feel that I can explain it. Yet, there is an undeniable urge to let our egos run rampant and do our best to try to explain that which defies explanation

Somehow, the mistrust of all that has been handed down to us has led to the failure of the imagination, evidenced by language that is thoroughly comfortable and unchallenging. How many times do we quickly turn the page because something we read in scripture challenges our ability to fully comprehend its meaning… instead of just letting it rest long enough in our hearts for it to speak to us without words?

So here we are in the fourth week in Advent as we focus on the Annunciation according to Matthew (Matthew 1:18-24), a mystery of epic proportions that defies rational explanation. It stuns us to hear some attempt to reduce the virgin birth to a mere story of an unwed pregnant teenager. Have we come to a time when anything that did not stand up to reason or that we couldn’t explain, should be characterized as primitive and infantile? Why do we think that an Almighty Spiritual Being would be confined to man’s limited intellect and his feeble language to communicate His message? Do we not see how metaphor and poetry reveal meaning, not explanation on a deep personal level, unique to each of us who are willing to open our hearts and just listen?

I remember visiting the Church of my youth at Christmas and found myself being drawn to the Crèche. I stared at the statue of the Baby Jesus and was moved by the scene. Of course I knew that this charming bucolic setting was not really the way it was, yet the Divine Incarnation could not be contained as it spoke the beautiful reason for the Blessed season.

When we allow God’s love to break though into our consciousness and contemplate the Mysteries of the Annunciation and Virgin birth, do we run from it? Do we ask it to explain what it cannot? Or are we “virgin” enough to surrender to our deepest self and allow it to fill our being?

For many of us mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming ‘little children’ again in which we first make friends with mystery and finally fall in love again with it. And in that love we find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are…Confusion happens when mystery is an enemy and we feel we must solve it to master our destinies. And ignorance is not knowing that we do not know. In the liberation of the night, we are freed from having to figure things out and we find delight in knowing that we do not know. (Mystery & Freedom, May, Dark Night p.133)