Don't Ask, It's A Miracle

 

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, we have this urge to do our best to try to explain that which defies explanation. Children never need to question mystery; they accept it and move on.

Somehow, the mistrust of all that has been handed down to us has stifled the imagination’s inability to take flight. 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 just two weeks from the beginning of Advent which begins with the Annunciation, a beautiful mystery of epic proportions that defies rational explanation. It stuns us to hear that some will 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 mere explanation on a deep personal level to those of us who are willing to open our hearts and just know? After All, we are talking about the Incarnation of God in man and the Word becomes flesh in us.

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 free 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)